I’m a mod of !leftism@lemmy.world, and the last resort preemptive defederation from hexbear has me concerned. As a mod, what are the specific rules that I need to know about to make sure our community fits the guidelines of LemmyWorld? We aren’t a huge community and there aren’t a huge number of posts every day, but I want to see this community grow and thrive. I can’t do that without knowing the guidelines hexbear violated to warrant defederation. We’re focused on left unity, so I need to know what we can’t allow.
The hexbear thing was bizarre imho, and made me believe the federation concept is unworkable. There were even people saying to also defederate lemmygrad, which has federated with lemmyworld for apparently years while causing zero probs that I know of (I am new here though). I looked at lemmygrad out of curiosity when I got here, had a few lulz, and moved on. They have their own culture and in-jokes and it stays there, which is fine. Chapo Trap House (CTH) on Reddit was the same way from what I could tell, but Reddit banned it at the same time as the metastasized cesspit The Donald so it would look less partisan.
I think lemmmyworld is probably best seen as a mostly no politics instance. That can be ok I guess. It means though that your leftist community is probably better off on lemmy.ml or hexbear or whatever.
Lemmy world is a couple of months old :)
I don’t think it makes it unworkable, but I think it warrants a democratic process in this kind of decision making. We as a society should shift away from the mindset of “this is my ball, you just get to play with it” and embrace the idea that forming instances is a form of mutual aid (maybe that’s part of why I’m a mod there lol). I think hexbear culture might leak a bit, but I think you’re right that it will mostly stay there (also I personally I enjoy their style of humor).
As for moving the community, I would like for it to stay here. We aren’t big or active enough to get a migration to occur, and most of the alt instances already have a leftism community. If the admins want to pivot to strictly no politics, then fine I guess
But an instance is someone’s ball the server, the domain name, the admin credentials, etc. We are guests here, including community mods. And the server admins as you say are volunteers. They shouldn’t have to put up with bullshit just to please us. So any topic community like politics that generates disagreement will be precarious.
Starting a new instance isn’t the answer because of siloing and network effects. So we need more of a peer to peer model than a federation of servers. Or anyway, put the federating onto the client side. I made another post about that earlier.
Isn’t federation already a form of peer-to-peer networking? And while I agree that clients need the ability to block entire instances, spinning up your own server is already a way to do that.
Without something to enforce that Democratic process, and with no incentive for instance hosts to commit to it, it’s unworkable.
The issue with the whole platform, from the get go, has always been that without a central authority to hold it together, each instance is inevitably going do whatever it wants. The technology for Lemmy does not inherently solve the social issue. Defederation, as a concept, is antithetical to the ideal of the fediverse. But it’s also necessary to keep it managed. As long as people can choose to, for any reason, they will use that tool.
I think a new solution needs to be proposed. Like…I don’t know, floating communities or something. Communities that are not tied to any instance. Or perhaps instances that only host communities, not users. Just spitballing, I have no idea what can be done.
The way it exists now is not going to save us from another Spez, it’s just giving us hundreds of mini-Spez’s.
I’m a little hesitant to wade into these waters - I’ve not been around Lemmy long and know Lemmygrad only by reputation - but I was a r/CTH lurker/commenter before it got quarantined, during the quarantine, and right up until it got banned, and from what I remember, the kinda tankie stuff I’ve heard that Lemmygrad espouses (however jokingly/sincerely) would get the kind of real pushback on CTH that started slapfights and flamewars. Idk how strong the “those bastards killed Rosa” component is over at Lemmygrad or how effectively they counter tankie bs, mostly because I’m too old and busy to bother with things that don’t enrich my life (like arguing online). Consequently, I absolutely understand and sympathize with not wanting to waste whatever precious time someone might have left to live engaging with genocide denial and other authoritarian handwaving.
Really? Seems political as fuck to me - this whole place does. Whole thing is predominantly left-wing (minus the odd troll and “enlightened centrist”) and in principle I agree with most of it - it does get fucking exhausting, though. Saddening, frustrating. And that’s just the content itself, to say nothing about volume: a dozen instances on here, multiplied by a dozen or two explicitly or just practically political communities/mags per instance, and more appearing every day.
The sheer weight of all the politics and (admittedly justified) outrage started getting to me, and I started taking steps to filter it out for mental health reasons. Stewing in this much politics is frankly not good for anyone. Let alone US (and, somewhat, UK) politics. Let alone US politics for those of us who aren’t American - and are therefore powerless to do anything about it, but for whom assorted idiocy over there still has very serious repercussions. (And is being eagerly mimicked by assorted wannabe-fascist twats over here, too - see, it’s easy to get caught up in.)
So, filtering it out is the obvious solution, right? Unfortunately, that is not easy: in fact there’s no good way of doing it at all, because mags end up on the front page even if they’re ghost towns where only one guy/bot is posting. In other words, the front page has absolutely no notability requirements. (I’m on kbin if this is less of a problem on other instances/“frontends” or whatever.)
Even the one mag I saw with any kind of decent memes was offputtingly, angrily political half the time. And I’m not doing the “bOtH sIdEs” thing or similar shitheeling - it was mostly LGBTQ stuff, and they have every fucking right to be angry about a lot of things. I am too, for that matter. It’s just the quantity, and negativity, and the difficulty in getting a tiny, little fucking break from it to look at some cats in boxes. Even on Reddit it’s at least more feasible to block individual subs, because here one “sub” can correspond to several communities on several instances, all of which need to be individually blocked.
I’m jonesing for regex or tag-based community filters like a heroin addict, frankly. My only worry is that there’d only be ich_iel left and I’m not that steady in German.
Federation model works, since people can make their own instance where they set the rules or join an instance that is federated with the instances they want. Like kbin.social I think is federated with lemmygrad and bunch of other places.
I think people are just having trouble getting used to the idea of not needing one central site to deliver everything they want. Don’t forget. These aren’t corporate run websites running with the goal of monetization, but user run and cost them real world money that they are opening up to users to use for free.
There is some degree of entitlement that isn’t necessary to begin with, since if people are that upset they can make their own or join a more networked fediverse instance.