Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it’s unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.
It’s like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don’t think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.
I’m not really well versed in software, so I can’t offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I’m glad that someone is worrying about it though.
And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don’t think it would work. It’d be similar to what’s happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.
The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They’re outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I’m really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I’m more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.
I am not worried about propaganda. I am worried about a state actor performing pattern analysis on my user, trying it to a specific IP address, and then serving me targeted malware. The fediverse is unique in that sense because of the nature of federation exposes a significant amount of user telemetry to a huge number of different internet hosts.
At this point I am 100% convinced that if hexbears could perform cyber attacks at the behest of China, they would do it enthusiastically. And .ml Admins protect hexbears. To me, that’s motive and opportunity, and it would be naive and foolish to trust them given the adversarial nature of the way they interact with the broader fediverse.
What problems does defederation even cause? Do we have sympathy for this tumor? The very fact that they are openly willing to engage in information warfare, and are being marginalized for it only makes the threat bigger in my mind. If they feel like they are losing this war, their behavior will only grow more extreme. I would again like to reiterate that “Dessalines” is literally the historical poster child for “extreme ends justify any means.”
What problems does defederation even cause?
We certainly lose a ton of active communities and users. Potentially, we continue to exacerbate an ideological divide that ultimately results in the complete disintegration of Lemmy, forcing us to start over on another platform and lose many of our gains from the past year.
Do we have sympathy for this tumor?
Yes. It’s not a tumor, it’s an internet community with a large number of communists who want to take down Western capitalism. It’s a couple of developers who had a vision of a link aggregation platform for the people, by the people. I have plenty of sympathy for them, even though I understand they could potentially be dangerous due to their political extremism.
It seems like you’re aggressively trying to eliminate a hypothetical problem, while discounting the very real consequences of defederation. Even if we go through with it and it goes relatively well, it would cause a significant dip in growth and activity, which we desperately need.
It’s a couple of developers who had a vision of a link aggregation platform for the people, by the people.
I would be much more sympathetic to this idea if they had not shown time and time again that it simply isn’t true.
They have shown absolutely no interest in small-d democratic ideals, and instead continuously double down on small-a authoritarian ideals.
They literally just got kicked off reddit and built a platform that they could control without any interest in higher causes, as far as I can tell. If this was not the case they would not do things like mass ban users for mild dissent, over comments made in other instances. Their interest is entirely self preservation. There is no evidence of service to any higher ideal. They are dead weight, and it’s only a matter of time before they do something which is going to harm the fediverse far more than slow growth will, if they haven’t already.
