“Let Chaos storm, let cloud shapes swarm; I wait for form”
Still worth while to do so, the trick is you need to defederate problematic instances. Not hide them, fully defederate. That stops problematic instances and communties from affecting your userbase. There’s many great Lemmy servers and communties out there. Just because a few of them aren’t great doesn’t mean you should dismiss all of them.
Also tracking protection in the browser to prevent reading browser history and such. Security and privacy practices are absolutely paramount if you’re planning on visiting services like that. Of course the best thing is to not visit them at all but some people feel they need to see it for themselves, if they choose they should be prepared and keep themselves safe.
I think it’s just very messed up, ultimately it doesn’t work against the real nasty people Reddit claims to be going up against because those people have bot armies that monitor their astroturf accounts so they know when the shadowbans happen and dump the account to move on to the next ones. No this system disproportionately affects the people who aren’t expecting it and probably don’t even deserve it.
Also for braindead spammers it’s actually a terrible strategy because spammers’ purpose is both to annoy users and chew through your resources, even if they are shadowbanned and uploading multiple gigabytes of white noise they aren’t annoying people but they are chewing through bandwidth and CDN storage. IMO that’s not feasible long term, and wouldn’t even be initially feasible for most Fediverse services, hence why most basically just don’t do it.
Don’t forget about shadowbans that attempt to make it seem like you aren’t banned when your entire account is hidden without your knowledge.
Stopping viewing on a per-account basis doesn’t make sense to me, since people don’t need accounts to view any content in Lemmy, therefore it’s trivial to bypass by logging out or fetching the discussion information without logging in from a custom frontend. What would be better is simply stopping them from interracting, just like what happens with bans, they can still view but all interractions are simply dropped or disallowed.
You should report them as trolls in any case, most instances on Lemmy have rules against trolling in general, further violations beyond that just add to the initial violation of trolling.
It’s not nearly the same as following communities or groups, it’s just a collection of posts grouped by tags, as opposed to a space where people discuss or post about a more broad topic. Also Communities and groups typically invite more interaction than simply tagging posts by virtue of being a place people post as opposed to simply being a post tag category.
I should note that there are groups on Mastodon (Not really in Mastodon itself but federated Group actors from other services show up there) though they are less intuitive and thus are usually overlooked by most Mastodon users.
I very much agree. Instead of complaining and isolating themselves and their users, they could be helping improve the moderation tools which benefits all of us, but instead they choose to self isolate, which hurts their users while the biggest servers that they defederated forget they even existed.
Late Reply: This is going to sound harsh but it’s true. I wouldn’t miss it. If Beehaw disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn’t even notice, and I’m sure that would be the case for many other people here. The problem is that because Beehaw has defederated so aggressively from the largest instances and shut its doors to new users, and people just moved on, or didn’t notice or care. I spent most of my first days on Lemmy.world and consequently didn’t see a majority of the content from Beehaw, but I did see many upset users who had to Migrate from Beehaw due to the defederations since most of the content and communities they wanted access to wasn’t available to them on Beehaw.
Since Beehaw didn’t (and still doesn’t) have community creation enabled it never really had niche communities like other instances did, it is rather forgettable because of that, what most people will remember it for though is the defederations and having to migrate accounts to not be cut off from the rest of the fediverse.
FYI There’s more than just one not allowing downvotes
These are all instances excl Beehaw that don’t allow downvotes (there might be some I might’ve missed):
I’ve also seen Mint, though it is much less common.
Most of the Laptops I see with Linux are Ubuntu, some Ubuntu based distro like Tuxedo, Pop_OS, or Linux mint, and very Rarely Fedora (I’m not sure, but I think I saw one ship with Fedora).
Canonical’s changes to apt could be considered malicious in and of themselves because it installs from a source you didn’t request for, sure seems malicious to me.
I haven’t made any arguments in this thread, you are putting words in my mouth, and not really helping your credibility. All I said is that the person should defederate Lemmy instances and communities which go against the mission of their instance. Something that almost all instance operators would likely agree on.
Just for the record though, I don’t believe people should be kicked out of a project based on their nationality, that seems incredibly xenophobic. I don’t know where you got that idea that I said any of those things from.