In the graph above I’ve arranged the 28 Threadiverse instances with at least 200 monthly active users (MAU)—orange instances running Lemmy, green Piefed, and red Mbin—on the basis of which instances they defederate.
Each instance has its MAU count listed below it, sourced from the latest MAU figures at Fediverse Observer, with adjustments made to the totals for Piefed (due to undercounting by outdated instances, as noted here; I used @Vicinus@piefed.zip’s suggested estimate of 7,200 Piefed users) and Mbin (due to tardigram.com having a duplicate listing).
After adjustments, there are an estimated 43,287 monthly active Threadiverse users (35,184+7,200+903), of whom 87.84% are on the 28 largest instances. The percentages listed alongside the MAU figures correspond to each instance’s share of the total MAU count.
Defederation data was sourced from Federation Checker. The tool doesn’t support Mbin instances, so I left fedia.io in its own category. If any defederations are missing, feel free to let me know. Ideally such a chart should also include community blocks to better illustrate which instances block what, but that data doesn’t appear to be as easily searchable.
I also noticed cases of some instances being listed as being defederated by another instance, despite not appearing on the defederation list for that instance (i.e. reddthat.com and lemmygrad.ml are listed as being mutually blocked, despite neither having the other on their block lists). In testing that federation, I noticed that !wholesome@reddthat.com did not federate to Lemmygrad while !memes@reddthat.com did, so clarification on that matter would be helpful.
While I’ll update my generalized chart as needed to correct errors, perhaps at some point an automated federation mapping tool similar to the one feddit.de formerly hosted could be developed to more completely illustrate instance federation.
Okay but… have you ever tried to force your group to get together despite those two being unable to get along? e.g. Russia vs. Ukraine? China vs. Taiwan? Israel vs. Palestine? USA vs. a neighbor with oil?
Whether one side (e.g. Ukraine) can “get along with” the other side there (e.g. Russia) depends a LOT on whether they are able to agree to follow some shared rules (e.g. to not murder the other side). These are not mere political differences in the sense of left vs. right, but rather those who are proud to remain ungovernable (while seemingly not understanding what that phrase originally was intended to mean) vs. those who would rather nope out entirely than exist side-by-side with them.
Please also note that Lemmy’s block tools are so misleadingly misnamed as to be almost worthy of the moniker of calling it disinformation. What “blocking an instance” does is to:
What that so-called “blocking” does NOT do:
Besides, even if insurance blocking actually worked, it would still do nothing to not showcase the content for an anonymous guest account or a newly created account, i.e. it does nothing to help others deal with “the situation”, only yourself. Which is especially notable when people access Lemmy’s content from apps like Voyager that by default does not show the instance name, thereby treating all content from all instances as being equal. However, I would argue that e.g. Poland does not fear attack from all nations equally - does Poland want to be on guard against Taiwan? Or North or South Korea? What about Russia?
Defederation is a blunt tool, but is virtually the only one offered by the Lemmy devs. When the software is made more robust to offer some other alternative… then this issue can be revisited at that time.
Also, you are free at any to self-host your own instance. But to tell Ukraine and Russia that they must get along… or else what? I am saying that I reject the underlying premise of your argument. “People getting along” should not be the ultimate goal of the Threadiverse. A better goal IMHO would be “People enjoying their experiences while here”. Which for many, means blocking Hexbear - and yes, for some it means NOT blocking it - and therefore since the answer is neither a clear yay or nay, we are forced into preaching the controversy for every new potential member, even though that very complexity itself is often what drives others away.
Though PieFed.zip offers an intriguing and innovative compromise: upon joining the instance a user block is placed upon the Hexbear and lemmygrad instances, and a message sent to the new user about how to remove or place such blocks. This makes federation with those highly controversial instances as opt-in, as opposed to opt-out or impossible to block or not block. That’s really neat! However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it’s worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?). Also this in turn opens up an entirely new rabbit hole on top of that, where Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) would need to agree on a set of shared practices…
In short, the technology of the Threadiverse is still quite primitive in so very many ways, despite the upcoming release of Lemmy vs. 1.0. Yes defederation is a very blunt instrument, but it’s all that we have been given to wield for the most part. But the alternative IMHO would be far worse, being forced into allowing bullies to thrive. The Paradox of Intolerance is ironic, but very real: allowing the intolerant to exist in your space, worse yet platforming and even promoting them, means that you yourself are intolerant. Fences between neighbors is the only hope the Threadiverse even has of surviving. Yes you are allowed to be sad at that fact, but it remains true nonetheless. Move past your sadness, to get to what must be done to thrive and move forward in a positive direction?
e.g. learn Rust and contribute to the code development of Lemmy!? Unfortunately, merely donating money is unlikely to help, as much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml, and the devs have refused to open a way to provide funding for the former independently of the latter. Or learn Python and contribute to development of PieFed? It likely won’t help with interoperability between PieFed vs. Lemmy, and both require investments of several years, but if you want to help then there is no better way. So long as the technology remains as primitive as it is now, these kinds of blunt instruments are all that are available to us - someone would need to invest the effort to provide better.
TLDR: there are extremely good reasons why things are as they are now.
That’s not true at all, the maintenance costs of lemmy.ml’s are miniscule compared to what the devs get.
As I understand it, keeping in mind it’s been a bit since I looked at it, it depends on where the community the interaction is taking place in is hosted. That’s always the central truth and where other instance collect the votes, comments etc. from. So say piefed user Alice blocks a user Bob who is on a different instance, or the instance Bob is on altogether.
If Bob then replies to Alice in a community hosted on lemmy then the reply is accepted and federated out to everyone. Alice’s instances notes that she blocked Bob and drops the replies, no one on Alice’s instance can see them.
If Bob replies to Alice in a community hosted on Alice’s instance then Bob’s instance logs the reply, sends it to Alice’s instance where it gets discovered that Alice blocked Bob and the reply is silently dropped. Any instance now checking the community for new comments will not receive Bob’s reply since Alice’s instance dropped it. Bob’s instance however already logged the reply, so it remains local to Bob’s instance only.
What I don’t know is what happens among piefed instances, I think there is some functionality to notify Bob’s instance that Alice blocked him if Bob’s instance is running Piefed and it will delete the comment, but that part I’m least sure about.
The way blocks work in Lemmy is that a user will simply not be shown what they block, federation is completely unaffected. An ordinary user can only decide what they are shown not what others are shown.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)
I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD
Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.
My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?
Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.
Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?
99.99% of the time a murderer is not in the process of actively murdering anyone at all… atm. If you look just prior to any major western election, you may notice a difference in the content. Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed. I might be slightly hyperbolic on this point - I do not care to find the precise dividing lines between what is allowed there or not - but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers. So… of course people are going to get along inside of them.
Anyway it is not for any of us to say why people want to defederate from a troll or echo chamber instance - if people desire that, then they should have that right, personally for themselves, right? Even though it makes the network effect harder to describe for the rest of us. Again, this would be a totally different conversation if there was a true instance blocking feature existing in Lemmy, but as it is, there is only defederation vs. no defederation, at which point very many instances choose one of the options made available to them.
And no means no? Or at least, it should. And we should respect that too? It is naive to try to force a victim to put up with bullying tactics, especially when it is always an option for the victim to leave the Threadiverse altogether, rather than stay and be subjected to seeing all of that.
You have not had sufficient time yet to fully inform yourself on the subject, but you will get there, at which point you won’t need to simply believe what I say but you will know for yourself. One great place to start btw is the MeanwhileOnGrad community, which documents a bunch of the reasons for division.
I need to add this though: you said yourself that you ignored political topics, yes? So… if you are looking for your keys, and you remember dropping them somewhere, but you restrict yourself to looking everywhere except there, and then don’t find your keys… do you see where I am going with this? Perhaps that was not even your conscious choice: maybe your admins made that decision for you by blocking certain specific user accounts, which would profoundly affect your “view” as to what Hexbear is. Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear’s toxicity. Here is one post that provides a compilation of links: https://discuss.online/post/13916278. Oftentimes the originals get removed so it may be hard now to verify those historical events, with so much time having passed between then vs. now.
And yes, I’ve personally experienced those interactions my very own self. I walked right into a community like ChapoTrapHouse (though perhaps it was one of their ancillary ones?), accessed via browsing All - CRUCIAL NOTE here: therefore I lacked the context of having read the sidebar text first (btw some 3rd party apps seem to go out of their way to hide that even, requiring like 5+ clicks plus moderate scrolling, i.e. buried quite deep) - and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that Biden was at least working towards lowering the price of gasoline in the USA. I would have been up for a well-grounded discussion, replete with factual information and having cited source material, but instead people relentlessly continued to send me Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding, and not messages like “I believe you may be incorrect and here is my reasoning”, but mere emotional vomit, venting their frustrations with the world onto me who dared speak again the trends that prevailed inside of their echo chamber, where beyond a certain level of dissent is no longer allowed. It may help to know that that is the entire point of ChapoTrapHouse, but how would I have known that, browsing by All and not even making a post, just replying to a comment inside of it?
And then either just before or just after that, I made the same mistake again, this time for lemmygrad.ml. Afaik, I am banned from neither space (unless it was done retroactively), but I almost left Lemmy altogether when I realized that it truly was not fun to be here. I continually received notifications for again WEEKS and WEEKS as people continued to dogpile onto that comment. There is no way in Lemmy to disable notifications on a comment btw (this this capability exists in PieFed). Presumably I could have deleted it but I’ve never backed out of my opinion before and that thought literally never occurred to me - I want to be told that I am wrong, when I legitimately am. However, these people were offering idiotic takes, and it therefore became my problem for continuing to entertain those communications.
Another point to note is that nobody is saying that ALL users on the triad, including Hexbear, are bad. Though conversely, if a majority of problematic content is coming from that source, and the mods+admins refuse to do anything about it from their side, then defederation becomes a tool of last resort to try to protect your own users from such harassment - which again, obviously is not coming from literally 100% of the users on those instances. Rather, defederation is reflective of a breakdown in communication between instance admins, with irreconcilable differences that cannot be… reconciled, any other way.
Yes, but (1) this has already happened long ago, much of it predating the existence of the Threadiverse even, like Hexbear is very old and only later switched to using Lemmy, also Lemmy was an echo chamber even before federation with other instances (lemmygrad.ml) was implemented; (2) this theoretical FOMO about “discoverability” should not in practice trump my own personal rights to not have to listen to anything that I do not wish to see - e.g. I do not find it enjoyable to see mods tell users to kill themselves, literally, with a gun; and (3) please DO actually read about The Paradox of Intolerance. Defederation is bad, yes, amputation of a human limb is also bad yes, but sometimes it is preferable to an even worse alternative.
I think we do not differ on ideological grounds though - you concede that IF members of an instance are caught relentlessly trolling and otherwise harassing those of other instances, then in theory defederation is an acceptable outcome? Not an ideal one but… if the software allows for zero other alternatives, as has been the case now for many, MANY years? In that case all that remains is to read some of the examples of this actually happening, which you had not encountered before. The links I included above should be a good place to start at least, but there are just tons and tons and tons more where that came from.
Hypothetically, imagine someone saying “death to America”… okay, perhaps they should have the right to think it, perhaps even say it, but why should I have to be forced to hear it, constantly, and not be allowed to do anything at all to stop it? Defederations are decisions that instance admins have made regarding what content they will allow to be platformed on their machines or not. They NEED to have the right to make this decision for themselves.
This in turn places the burden of deciding which instance to join or not onto the end-users. You will want to pick one that matches your values. Here too it gets difficult, especially when instances are not forthcoming about what or particularly why they do what they do. Very little to almost no progress has been made on this front IMHO, at least on the Lemmy side, except to offer the generic advice to join Lemmy.zip or perhaps better yet PieFed.zip and use its significantly enhanced (yet still very imperfect and in fact quite problematic in other, just different ways) instance blocking tools of PieFed.
This is untrue, a common criticism about china on hexbear is their continued trade with the zionist entity for instance. There is especially quite a bit of criticism of Russia, especially about their homophobia and stamping out of worker initiatives.
I have yet to see an instance where a person respectfully disagreeing gets modded. I’ve been on hexbear for 3 years and I’ve seen people post about every topic under the sun. Yeah if you come in and post tank man with some smug one-line people will respond in kind, but I have also seen good-faith discussion with liberals and on contentious topics
This is not what happened. I know this because you’re talking about me[1] and there was no suicide-baiting involved. What happened was that a user posted a “cutesy” comic about the SA scene in stardew valley involving Shane with no content warning. In the scene Shane kisses the farmer out of nowhere, without their consent and later apologises is for it because he knows it’s wrong. The comic even goes further into the “poor Shane just needs some love” angle than the game itself iirc.
I pointed this out at first politely:
Then the mod of that community came out to defend with this stuff like “it’s posted in the stardew valley community”, “it’s just a game”, “shane’s really depressed and an alcoholic”, “the playable character has shown interest in them” all in one reply. Just a cornucopia of SA apologia. Now I’m not gonna pretend that I was absolutely clear-headed here. A person very close to me struggles with CPTSD, and on a bad day a comic like that might have sent them into a seizure, might even have hospitalized them for a day depending on how they fell when they seize up. And that’s the more violent, visual part. It affects them every day, it has literally disabled them, it robbed them of their future this is not “just a game”.
So the first time I say “I wanna shoot you. It’s just a comment.” this is in in direct response to his “it’s just a game”. The full line is
I wanted to highlight here the kind of violence we are talking about that is getting pushed aside with “just a game”, in a “what if it was targeted at you, but brushed aside as ‘just a comment’” kind of way. Admittedly I could have phrased that more clearly but I was very agitated. I believe emotions are an important part of conversations and showing that this is important to me on an emotional level and not just a debate where we trade arguments was important. Also I was trying to vent my anger at this whole aspect of society in what turned out to be an unproductive way.
The doubling down on it was me getting more agitated because I heard these trivializations myself in real life and I have to grit my teeth and look for a diplomatic way of resolution, the name of the game becomes harm minimization, and processing it later in a safe environment. It can take days to get back to a normal daily routing not to mention the injurious effects of repeatedly getting confronted with people downplaying or ignoring their trauma. So not having to do harm minimization here I fly off the handle. I believe there is a special place in hell for people (and especially men) who refuse to stand down and defend this kind of shit, but it’s not my place to send them there.
The “tripling” down is actually me backing off and simply saying “I hope [they] die soon”. Because at that point they even acknowledged the harm that the comic can cause but refuse to do anything to mitigate it. So I hope they just go away before they deal more harm.
Firstly, there has been a shift on hexbear away from dunking and more towards explaining but it’s a process. You can check the Code of Conduct on Hexbear that got revised a couple months ago. The “dunking” culture stems from back when the community was on reddit and was a self-defense mechanism to not have to deal with people constantly trying to get smug zingers and one-liners in. It was actually hexbear (then chapotraphouse) that was getting brigaded. And lastly you won’t see me do it again because (and it’s actually that instance that showed me this) because it does more harm then good and doesn’t actually help. So I will continue to swallow my thoughts, be more polite and process them later on.
https://hexbear.net/comment/5518159 ↩︎
I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.
Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.
Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)
I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…
Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.
This is helping providing confirmatory evidence to something that I have suspected for awhile: that my time on social media is changing me, and not always for the better. The more time you spend around people, the more you will act like them, speak like them, incorporating their words and ways into your own practices. I may have justified all that you said there in my head as it being in service to a worthy cause - keeping the very Threadiverse alive as it objectively dies slowly around us (based on subscriber activity numbers, now being at ~35k down from the peak of 55k and now unlike previously, with far less hope that the situation will ever meaningfully change) - but at the end of the day, since when has the end justified the means?
Except here on Lemmy, people say that it does all the time. Outright murder, guillotining someone, Luigi-ing people, bombing AI data centers, theft, and so on - all are only morally reprehensible if done vs. the working class (and even then, are higher wage-earners exempt?), while encouraged and even outright celebrated when happening to OTHER SIDE.
Then again, I think when you plumb deeper you will agree that an act done by a moderator is quite different than an act done by a mere user, and an act done by an instance admin even more different still. Mere users can be blocked and someone can move on, whereas an admin sets the tone for a pattern of behavior that impacts the entire instance - at which point blocking the one user not only causes direct harm but also does not address the wider issues, particularly for new joiners of your own instance. (Edit: I am not dodging the issue of the messaging vs. its content, just isolating the former earlier and now doing the same in turn for the latter.)
At the end of the day: consent SHOULD matter. It seems like people differ
solely(edit: primarily?) on what constitutes “informed” consent? Which is why I like some of PieFed’s features to not block but at least label certain matters, e.g. my scenario involving ChapoTrapHouse was significantly less likely to have occurred if I had used PieFed at the time, due to how it puts the entirety of the community sidebar text below each and every post. Caveat: 3rd party apps (e.g. Interstellar, Blorp, even Voyager offers experimental support for PieFed) may of course choose to do differently.Oh, before I forget (again), I was going to share this link: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed, which gives the perspective of someone who tried installing both Lemmy and PieFed software on their machine, and found the latter significantly easier. I have no direct experience there, but hope that will be enlightening:-).
Though while for someone spinning up their own instance the choice of software (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) is the top priority, I am coming to realize that otherwise it is the choice of instance admin that impacts and end-user’s experience above all else.
And btw I meant everything that I’ve said genuinely. Also, as you dig deeper, pay attention to the comments in response to that post: people agreed, both commenters and lurkers who signalled assent merely with voting, plus backed up as you see in the comments of this very post now. A lone post from a single person is insufficient to make things happen, unless it merely stated what others already felt was true, and it got the ball rolling. Together, apes strong. We can make the Threadiverse a more pleasant space for people - especially the uninformed to more gently introduce them to what is here. Though as to whether that ends up being a good thing or not, to encourage usage of social media… that is a topic for another time, and one where I am far less prepared to address.