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?
It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.
Instances are very vulnerable right now. There’s not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn’t a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.
I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn’t matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.
The problem is that even the official lemmy documentation heavily implies that it doesn’t matter which instance you join because “you’ll still be able to interact with communities on other instances.”
I’ve been enjoying my time here, but there are some very valid concerns about how the current model of federation will impact Lemmy’s ability to ever really be an alternative to other social media- the obvious one here being Reddit. The Beehaw defederation really shows part of the problem here, because multiple of the largest communities that I see on Lemmy are hosted there. Yes, users on lemmy.world COULD make their own versions of those, but three days ago they already existed, were already being interacted with by hundreds of people in lemmy.world, and those communities are just… gone. Thanos snapped away from people on lemmy.world, who will understandably feel kinda miffed.