this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Finding an instance that blocks least and is least blocked (lemmy.one)
submitted 2 years ago by Kurt@lemmy.one to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Is there a way to shop around for a Lemmy instance based on how many instances are blocking it and how many instances it's blocking? For example, I noticed that the lemmygrad.ml instance is relatively popular, but it seems like a lot of other instances block it. It also blocks a bunch of other instances. So, if there are any communities on there that might be relevant to me then I would be missing out. I guess I could just create an account on a walled instance, but I would prefer not to keep creating accounts. I'd like to just find one instance that maximizes my access. Is the answer to just run my own instance?

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[โ€“] salarua@sopuli.xyz 43 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Some folks think that defederation is a bad thing. OK.

Here's a little experiment you can try at home.

  1. Stop using GMail, Hey, or whatever email service you're currently using.
  2. Set up your own mail server (there's instructions on the internet).
  3. When the instructions say to use a Remote Black List just ignore them.
  4. When the instructions say to validate domains, ignore those too.
  5. When the instructions say to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just let those slide.
  6. Try to send / receive email
  7. Also try to read your inbox. For added benefit turn on all notifications for received mail.

Voila. Now you have an unfettered email experience.

And this, class, is why defederation is useful.

Please send your comments to the overworked TA in the back of the room.

โ€” Craig Maloney

[โ€“] Kurt@lemmy.one 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is running your own Lemmy instance as difficult as an email server?

[โ€“] salarua@sopuli.xyz 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

probably not, but you'd get the same amount of horrible stuff as you'd get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i'm making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn't block anyone, you're exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don't block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you'd see

[โ€“] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Edit: apparently lemmygrad is much worse than I realized

The only caveat I have to this is that being communist shouldn't be an automatic block. Lemmy.ml doesn't block lemmygrad and I see no reason why it should, the posts I see are like "wow capitalism is fucking us up" not like "Tiananmen did nothing wrong and let's repeat it x1000" so it really doesn't seem comparable to proactively blocking Nazis. If you block "both sides" of a violent conflict like, say, the war in Ukraine, you've suddenly blocked everyone with a useful opinion.

[โ€“] scoobford@lemmy.ml 30 points 2 years ago

I saw a lot of tianamen didn't happen, CCP worship, etc on there for the first few days after I registered, which is a bit problematic.

I wound up blocking them after a couple days, more because I don't care about a tiny fringe movement (in my country), and don't have any interest in their content.

[โ€“] Kichae@kbin.social 28 points 2 years ago

lemmy.ml is also run by communists, as are quite a few other instances, I imagine. No one's really saying that communists should be blocked.

But lemmygrad is specifically a vanguard edgelord site. Even those of us who are communists don't necessarily want to deal witih /c/GenZedong.

Plus, I left the instance I host for me and my friends open to lemmygrad, and I had people from the server create accounts and just bulk subscribe to communities there.

It's not the communism people are blocking it for.

[โ€“] salarua@sopuli.xyz 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Lemmygrad isn't blocked because of their views, it's blocked because it's a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don't include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out

[โ€“] RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And that doesn't apply to liberals and every other ideology on this site? Every person has a political view which affects their opinions

[โ€“] salarua@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they'd get mass-defederated too. like i said, it's not their views they got defederated for, it's their behavior

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[โ€“] sarsaparilyptus@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Have you read Lemmygrad's sidebar at all? They describe themselves as Tienanmen Square truthers, are openly pro-DPRK, and fully support genocide in the name of Communism. They exemplify everything bad people say about tankies and they take great pride in it.

Wanting to cut out tankies and Nazis is NOT being a radical centrist who wants to "both sides" every issue, it's just being a normal human being who doesn't have bees in their head.

[โ€“] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Ahh no I access Lemmy via the mobile app. Thanks for the information, I'll be blocking them.

[โ€“] jarfil@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Agreed that blocking is a security precaution... but this is not just an anti-spam feature, defederation in user communities can come from any motives, including political, religious, or whatever other views the instance owners find undesirable.

I think each user should be able to pick what kind of blocking experience they wish for themselves. There should be as a bare minimum a way to set either an instance, or a client app, that can interact with instances that are defederated among themselves (without acting as a bridge, obviously).

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[โ€“] darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party 8 points 2 years ago

It's a fraction of the work of an email server, if you're not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work

[โ€“] hburb3ri@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Now I want to see what the results of that are lol

[โ€“] thomas@lemmy.douwes.co.uk 7 points 2 years ago

depends, If you ignore all the outgoing things, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Your outgoing emails will always go into spam or disappear completely.
If you follow all the outgoing things but ignore the inbound mail checking, you will get quite a bit of spam. I run my own email server and instead of blocking bad incoming emails I just send then to the spam folder. I usually receive about 2-4 spam email a day, usually it's just marketing crap or it's a single link with some cutout of a wikipedia article to avoid spam detectors, and sometimes it's trying to extort you. I find it fun to read them sometimes, one time I got an email saying I missed a payment for my domain name but they got the amount of VAT wrong AND the maths on the subtotal. Some of them are comicality bad. but not quite the flood you might expect. If more people where on my email server or if I signed up to any shitty website I came across I'm sure it would be a lot worse though.

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[โ€“] Ada@kbin.social 39 points 2 years ago (1 children)

tbh, there is no such instance. Not blocking any other instances is often a reason to be blocked by other instances.

An instance that blocks no one is in effect a "free" speech instance that prioritises the right to be bigoted over the need to provide safe spaces for folk. And that means that instances that value the need for safe spaces over "free" speech are going to block the instances that don't block anyone else as a means of creating and maintaining that safe space.

[โ€“] bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hmm? Do instances automatically block other instances if they don't block certain other ones?

I self host an instance. I haven't blocked anyone yet as I just sub to communities that aren't bigoted.

[โ€“] Andreas@feddit.dk 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Some decently sized Mastodon instances introduced a policy like this. "Unless you use my blacklist, you are defederated by default". In practice, it means that those few instances are an isolated clique that only talk to each other. In my experience, those cliques are toxic, so it's no big loss if you're not able to contact them. But of course I hope this behavior doesn't come to Lemmy.

[โ€“] AnagrammadiCodeina@feddit.it 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can see the issue but at the same time is scary. In the future this thing could be bad. Like who is drawing the line and where?

[โ€“] Andreas@feddit.dk 15 points 2 years ago

No one draws the line unfortunately, because no one controls the entire federated network. This is why it's important to have many medium-sized instances on the Fediverse and not one massive instance and a bunch of other tiny ones, so one instance won't get too much control and impose their rules on the entire network. But it's difficult to convince non-tech users of this concept since they are used to centralized social media and will just sign up on the biggest instance.

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[โ€“] alex@agora.nop.chat 13 points 2 years ago

Nah, if you're using your instance as an essentially private one, you're not about to be blocked. If you're running communities on it that run counter to the basic ideals of other communities, you'll probably find yourself losing some federation however.

I run my own, and I'm not blocking anything yet because, honestly, I just won't be vising ones I'm not interested in. I'll probably block a few if I see things coming out of them that I really don't want to see, but at this point it doesn't affect anyone else.

[โ€“] 7eter@feddit.de 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

U might want to take a look at the federation map. It might be a bit overwhelming but in the settings on the bottom left you may chose blocked and allowed in order to get some insights on who federates with whom.

[โ€“] Kurt@lemmy.one 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Oh wow what did lemmygrad.ml do?

[โ€“] rrpeak@feddit.de 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I hate linking you to reddit but this post came to mind Choosing an instance; and my issues with lemmygrad

[โ€“] jarfil@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 years ago

Why can't a user choose to block an instance? That sounds like it should be a feature request, at least for the app.

[โ€“] Kurt@lemmy.one 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Okay, thanks for filling me in. I myself am skeptical about US-centric, mainstream criticism of China and DPRK et al., but I can see how that gets annoying when people get carried away with it. If there's a way to mute instances rather than completely sever the connection for all the members of an instance with a block, I think that would have been more appropriate in this case. I think Mastodon has that functionality, but maybe not.

[โ€“] rrpeak@feddit.de 8 points 2 years ago

It seems like Lemmy does not have this functionality yet https://feddit.de/post/753220

[โ€“] Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They're just generally annoying. They're tankies, constantly praising Putin and the CCP.

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[โ€“] CrimsonOnoscopy 7 points 2 years ago

Deny and or support genocide, for one thing

[โ€“] fluffman86@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

@rrpeak@feddit.de linked one reddit post while I was searching for this one, so here it is anyway:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/13zl7s1/fediversetips_i_do_not_recommend_lemmy_i_have/

And here's the OG mastodon post from fedi.tips:

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

Make sure to "Show More" on each post in the thread, including the replies. I thought it was all spamming the same post for a minute, lol.

[โ€“] trollblox_@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

what's the difference between 'open' and 'allowed'?

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[โ€“] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm on https://lemmy.world. Apparently the people running it also run a mastodon server with 160k I think? users, so this might be good.

So, something like that works for a "normal" acct I think. I doubt there's a way to avoid making alt accts if you also wanna explore alternative topics and lifestyles.

[โ€“] pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

AFAIK, yes, the answer to have control on which instances are blocked is to run your own instance, that's actually what I did.

For a way to search the number of instances that block certain instance, I don't think there's something like that yet.

[โ€“] DudePluto@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If you turn your server off does that make your communities and account history invisible until you turn it back on?

[โ€“] pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev 10 points 2 years ago

I think each instance has a copy of the posts and comments.
For example this post in my instance is https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/post/834
But the original one is https://lemmy.one/post/22814
And then in the instance the community is hosted is https://lemmy.ml/post/1159362

You can see the ids are different, so if lemmy.one goes down each instance already has a copy (except the images).
What will probably fail are the interactions, the original instance won't have the new comments and votes. I'm not sure how it works after it comes back online.

[โ€“] Kurt@lemmy.one 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm assuming that what you've got is a small personal instance. Does it have any trouble getting content from other instances?

[โ€“] pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, it's a small instance I'm only intending to use it myself, maybe some other friends later.
I'm doing it in a VPS with 1 core, 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD (it's the smallest one).

The only problem I had was because the documentation is a bit outdated, after fixing a single configuration everything has been smooth, I can easily subscribe to any community from any other instance and I can interact no problem.

[โ€“] bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You still have the issue that you only get comments made or updated after initially subscribing? Like the first time you go to a community all the posts have no comments, and you only get new ones after that point.

I'm thinking about maybe making a bot user that automatically subscribes to every community it can find just so I can have everything synced.

[โ€“] alex@agora.nop.chat 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is expected behaviour. The feed that grabs the last 20 posts doesn't include comments, so you'll only get comments from that moment on.

[โ€“] bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com 4 points 2 years ago

I understand you can't just go asking servers to send you every comment ever in its history all at once, but it would be nice if it could request like, one post's comments.

Like my server could remember the date that it "discovered" a community, and if I open a post that was made before that, then request the comments. There might need to be rate limits for such requests. But it would be nice

[โ€“] knighthawk0811@lemmy.one 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

can an instance have only 1 community for support and then have no content of its own? I believe that many already do (or near to it). This would likely be the recipe for blocking the least and being blocked the least.

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