Even on public instances, I don’t understand why people think defederating hurts the fediverse. Just join a different instance, how hard can it be?
I’m on 3 different instances right now
Do we have a way to combine feeds yet? I don’t know of one. So it’s kinda annoying to jump from account to account to make sure your seeing everything.
I’m not sure there is. Personally, I wish there were a way for an individual to block entire instances since I’m a terminally online individual with 3 accounts who sorts by all -> new for content :P
I get what you’re saying, and hopefully it’s a feature that gets added. I’m sure eventually it will, or maybe someone will make an app or an add-on
I definitely can block inetances, I did with one click. Maybe it’s the app I use? (Connect)
I still see comments from it’s users but they’re behind a (comment from blocked instance) button.
The “block instance” feature is apparently in the pipeline for Lemmy.
Kbin currently allows you to block entire instances, so that’s nice.
Yes, actually! Liftoff for Lemmy is still in early development, but you can get it on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, and it provides precisely this feature. There are a lot of features that Liftoff is yet to incorporate, probably most notably moderator tools and support for adding Kbin accounts – but give it a try regardless, and do what you can to contribute to its further development. Liftoff is an app with a lot of promise and a surprising amount of functionality already this early in its development.
It’s worth noting that Liftoff is a fork of the now abandoned project Lemmur, which I believe was the first Lemmy client to support combining feeds.
It’s why I’ve found myself gravitating to the less defederation-happy instances. But a new user wouldn’t know to do that.
I’m building this into an app right now, I’ve got an android beta open if you’re interested in helping decide the course of it.
Right now it just does the normal stuff with some extra features and lots of filters, but the goal has always been to build custom feeds on your device from a lot of individual sources. I’m redesigning stuff under the hood with that and support for other fediverse integration, I’m looking at kbin and mastodon in the near term, but I think I want pixelfed and maybe friendica down the road
The name is Luna, let me know if you want a link
Summit for Lemmy supports multi-communities however it still doesn’t support multi-communities from multiple instances at the moment unfortunately.
Sure, but keep in mind the comparison to any non-federated site has to be that you had no other instances to jump to in the first place.
Social media needs to be as easy as possible if you’re going to reach the masses. Most people do not give a shit enough to create 3 accounts; they’ll just leave.
That’s just fine with me. Quality > quantity
Some of the best forums I use have just a handful of active users
But quantity and quality are linked. If only, say, 0.1% of people will post high quality content, that means you need to attract a thousand people to get a high quality poster. You can’t just put up a sign that says “high quality posters only”. Plenty of quality posters also want an audience, so they’ll go where the people are and leave if that audience isn’t there.
Cutting out huge swaths of users at once just stifles the content including the small percentage of actually quality content. You can’t pick out and keep the good stuff when you cut off whole instances. It also brings down the engagement in your own content.
Take your favorite small forum and now split it according to political opinion, now split it again according to if users pirate movies(lol). Your forum is now dead since no one likes speaking into the void.
We should be treasuring the connections, not putting up walls because it makes the circle jerk easier.
Counterpoint: new users who don’t know the ins and outs of the fediverse might join an instance at random and see significantly less content.
Fair, but a lot of new users might also get discouraged if the first thing they see is content from exploding-heads or hexbear, and the instances that strive to be safe, inclusive spaces and thus do a significant amount of defederating are usually quite forthright about this when you sign up. For example, I knew just what to expect when I joined beehaw.
The instance I’m posting from now tries to keep things inclusive more via moderation vs. defederation. There are pros and cons to each approach. I can see both perspective.
I just don’t think either approach harms the fediverse. I think that’s a bit melodramatic.
Funny enough, Hexbear actually defederated from my main instance first, due to it not being inclusive enough for their standards. My own experiences with Hexbear as an autistic enby are that Hexbear is actually the most inclusive Lemmy instance out there, by no small margin. The issue with Hexbear is that its users like to “punch up” at non-leftists, pointing out how people propagate or benefit from exploitative systems, and justify these systems to themselves.
Being “dunked on” may annoy and wound the pride of non-leftists, but this is also very much not the same as the actually evil Nazi shit posted to EH, which “punches down”. I have for many years understood the difference between being annoyed and having my pride wounded for having a bad opinion, and being actively terrorized and marginalized for being a member of a marginalized group. The world would be better off if more people understood that difference.
Counter counterpoint: the other option is to give your unique identifiable butthole print to zuck
Too many people never used forums and think every site needs to talk to every site.
Forums died for a reason. Reddit took over that space for me because it was one place to see everything. Federation is a better version of that. Decentralized and connected is how the Internet should be
Reddit took over because threading on forums was awful. The centralization was just a nice bonus imo.
I don’t get it either. Defederation is a tool just like banning or spam prevention. If it’s unused it’s pointless to have.
But you don’t ban everyone for a single offense just like to don’t defederate lightly. If you do then people will move elsewhere and the problem resolves itself
I would say that a big part of the issue is the difficulty in transferring one’s account. Ignoring the fact that one simply can’t transfer their posts, trying to manually copy all previously subscribed communities to a new account is a rather tedious task. I am aware that there exists scripts that can automate that process, but I don’t think that it’s fair to expect that the userbase should run 3rd party scripts. Until account transfer is properly implemented, defederation will continue to be a major issue.
