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?
I wish I could continue, but my comment got deleted as duplicate post, which it was not. Not sure what the mods are doing here.Huh, either deleted comments being restored does not federate, or my instance is having issues.
Replying to this post here (which I can’t see on my instance, as my source comment was deleted but not restored):
Yes, that’s what I mean. That defederation is not some kind of par-for-the-course thing, but a last resort because tools are lacking. Which goes counter to what this post is about, that one should expect such a thing.
The tools are lacking, as you said.
This post is not about how things should be. It’s not about how things might be one day. It’s about how they are right now
But that is tangential. It is not some kind of intrinsic thing you make it out to be. That’s my whole point.
Essentially, you want to spread this state of things, I want people to know there are currently bugs and problems because this software is in a pretty early state, not Alpha anymore, but not very far along the beta state.