So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
Their own way. If they don’t control their shit, they get defederated. Such is the way. Keep your nose clean and you’ll be right as rain.
But I do wonder about the possibility of two Lemmy communities, one right-wing and one left, with the right created in protest of being defederated…
Well, we can’t think about that all the time, can we?
we already see that in action with the american right wing communities, don’t we? I just hope the biggest fediverse manages to stay diverse, monocultures are no bueno
We’re already seeing a fracturing between communist and non-communists on Lemmy.
Yeah, I’m a bit worried because there was recently talk in my home instance of defederating lemmy.ml because the owners are apparently far-left… thankfully I think there was consensus against it but you do start to worry that the whole thing might descend into tribalism with rivalling echo chambers…
Administrators need to be very careful about who they degenerate because being too trigger happy could be disastrous as you said.
Since people like to use the geographic analogy of countries/cities, communities should be gathering areas like a town hall where people discuss similar topics but instances would be like a city/country/state or whatever.
You don’t never speak to your neighbor again just because he’s a leftist or a capitalist. You never speak to them again if he and his family all start throwing their dog’s poop at your windows. We’re forgetting how to converse with people and it’s a big problem online and in real life.
We should absolutely be defederating instances dedicated to child porn and other illegal activities, and if there’s an instance that’s responsible for brigading or attacks then sure. But opposing viewpoints should not be a valid reason to defederate, IMO. If we go down that slope of not being able to tolerate someone else’s different views then we are doomed.
Yeah, i agree with you, defederating should be the last resort, rather than a tool to create echo chambers
we need a vanguard party of non-partisans
Sooooo like an anti-fediverse then? Is it possible for multiple defederated instances to federate only with each other?
A forked fediverse?
Do not want!
It’s not really a question of whether they can or not. They already do. Sometimes, though, they have opinions that conflict with each other and they defederate each other.
But extreme right-wing communities are already a thing in Mastodon and the most extreme ones tend to get defederated (the worst offender being poa.st), and among the most defederated, they often federate with each other (you will notice that poa.st still has a “vibrant community” of instances that are ok with being offensive).
Re: the “vibrant community”
Yeah, it’s like the Nazi bar idea: that if you have a bar and there’s one Nazi, you need to kick them out and show zero tolerance, otherwise they’ll bring their Nazi friends and your regular patrons will leave and before long, you’ll be running a Nazi bar.
The thing is, kicking the Nazi out protects your space and your community, but it doesn’t stop them from finding another bar. There’s always a Nazi bar somewhere.
I myself occasionally browse the “nazi bars” of the fediverse to get an idea of what the hell they’re complaining about now. Similarly I go to the tankie places to get acquainted with which genocide they’re denying today hahah, it’s a fun hobby to do occasionally, too much and it gets irritating though.
I’ve been bothered by Communists before. At least in real life they help homeless people and trans kids. It’s at least better than being mass shooters like Nazis.
There have been a lot of situations where I’ve had communists helping me with my social work giving out narcan to addicts. I never turn down their help and they’re less preachy than the Christians, which I also let help me.
At least there haven’t been any Lenin brigades where they paste the full content of the Communist Manifesto in every thread. Then I’d have a problem with them lol.
Commies over Nazis every time.
Yeah 100%
the Negaverse! in the most 90’s cartoon villain way possible
With so many goatees
Instances can choose to federate specifically with a group of other instances already. If I wanted to turn mine into a right-wing circlejerk or off the rails conspiracy group, all I have to do is find some other Lemmy instances and add them to the Allowlist, which tells my instance to only connect to those I’ve listed.
An instance can both make a black list and an allow list. If there are any instances on the allow list, only those instances are federated. So yeah, that is possible.
Email servers work the same way. So far there’s still one big email “community”, while spamserver.ng is just pretty universally blocked. I think that’s strong evidence the strategy works.
Now, a much more relevant question is how do you run your instance.
Well, a huge caveat to that is that there are world class Researchers who create constantly adapting intelligent spam filters to keep spam out of inboxes. Maybe the fediverse will have something like that someday! Who knows!
I imagine a lot of it could just be ported over.
I think your underestimating how real the battle against spam still is in the email space. If you use Gmail you’ve got a huge company doing the work for you. If you work in IT and run a corporate mail server you’ll see that we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-spam/phishing filtering.
Bot spam is totally separate and unfortunately I don’t see how you’d be able to port the work over.
I’ll take your word for it. That’s too bad.
So how would one get defederated? Say someone creates an instance for questionable material, does every other instance have to manually add it to a blocklist?