this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By not being prepared for it. It was setup with default communities, like technology for example (correct me if I’m wrong), but no plan to deal with those with moderation capabilities and levels that reach their own standard.

i mean... yeah? it's not every day you suddenly have 5x the number of total users on your site visiting the site per minute because a major corporation just did something extremely unpopular with no forewarning. if we had that kind of clairvoyance, i'd be a millionaire and running this site would just be my full-time job. this strikes me as an irrational critique informed by the hindsight you have now, weeks after it began.

Somehow lemmy.world and others can deal with it without defederating others so that’s where I’ll go.

this is primarily because they have more permissive rules and no defined ethos they're trying to upkeep—or at least, they don't have the latter in a way that requires constant maintenance. (as a point of note last i checked, lemmy.world didn't even have listed rules, per se,[^1] so it'd be hard to parse what's even not allowed as a user besides "actively illegal content") we, by contrast, have a very clear idea of what we want—we spent a year thinking about it, and we're at a year and a half of making it reality—so defederation in the absence of better mod tools is an extremely obvious way to maintain that. actually it's the only tool we have in a lot of cases, which is a gripe we have with Lemmy that we're trying to solve

[^1]: although Ruud has told us he'll moderate hate speech, bigotry, etc. from the top, so implicitly those aren't supposed to be allowed. i question how viable doing this is with such an open-registration policy, more-or-less unvetted mods, and lots of communities to keep track of but i suppose all instances here can be thought of as large-scale experiments right now

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Every time I start a new project my first thought is obviously "how would this scale to hundreds of thousands of people?" (I tried breadmaking over the pandemic help)