cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6853479
mastodon.art has decided to suspend firefish.social from their instance due to issues with its administrator. The administrator of firefish.social was found to be boosting posts from a known harasser on another instance. mastodon.art takes a firm stance against racism and suspending full instances in these situations is part of their policy as a safe space. The known harasser has a history of using slurs, harassment, and editing screenshots to spread misinformation. However, the administrator of firefish.social has now forged a screenshot to paint mastodon.art in a negative light.
I spent way more time than was warranted digging into this completely petty drama.
Eris seems to have been widely blocked and defederated for using the word ‘based’ and for thinking ubuntu.buzz was about linux. I’m not sure what kind of perspective makes that a priority, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be one based in compassion or world experience. Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.
Defederation is an important feature, and people should be able to defederate from whoever they want. What isn’t okay, though, is people going out of their way to propagate pettiness as much as humanly possible. Eris seems a little rough around the edges, but I also get the impression that the folks interacting with her in all the overly dramatic nonsense I just read are not acting in remotely good faith. They resemble a twitter mob looking for somebody to hate on, taking zero interest in understanding or nuance. No thanks.
I thought the whole based/cringe thing was just zoomer slang?
Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.
Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don’t know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.
I’m pretty sure it started with Lil B “Thank You Based God”.
Lil B was an underground rapper with… varying levels of quality (at least at the time). His thing was calling himself “Based God” as people were calling him “based” as a negative (presumably to mean he was dumb), but thanks to his music and understanding internet culture and turning it in his favour, he managed to turn “based” from something that was negative to a positive.
Then 4chan got ahold of it for Donald Trump’s election and that word has never recovered.
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Go figure. 4chan was pretty based 10 years ago.
4chan was never based.
Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.
Also probably important to note that even being connected to 4chan isn’t always a bad thing. The web (particularly youtubers) have made 4chan as a whole to be some boogeyman website full of hackers and nazis, but it’s a loosely connected web of forums (known as boards), many of which don’t have anything to do with another apart from being anonymous. It’s kind of like lemmy in that regard. I’ve browsed it in my time, and while it is definitely quite a toxic site, most if not all the toxicity originates from a select dozen-or-so boards, and only 3 or 4 of them are even popular (b, pol, r9k, x). Hell, if you go right now to /a/, you’ll probably just see a bunch of weebs discussing anime like any other forum.
note: this isn’t to say 4chan is safe like beehaw. The whole culture of the site is very archaic and a lot of people on there are still there saying slurs and being generally offensive, but when you stay away from hellholes like /b/ or /pol/, I’ve seen worse on reddit.
If some stranger on the street told me they used 4chan, without specifying what board, I mean I might be suspicious of which boards they’re using (depending on context clues) but it’s not a buzzword that translates to “white supremacist”
I agree. Not all these forums are about the same content nor do they all involve the nazi stuff.
/vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.
That said - I haven’t been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I’m sure it’s probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan…
I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.
If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn’t see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because “petty” makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.
The worst I saw was “defedfags” and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, “If you thought what I said before was offensive, let’s see how you respond to something intended to be negative.”
The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It’s not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.
Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call
Why is this article a problem? Seems like a good thing to keep in mind - federation and using open source software doesn’t mean you’re private.
The article is not a problem.
From what I seem to understand, the “problem” is that someone got accused of being a Nazi sympathizer because they boosted the article, that had been posted by someone accused of being a Nazi, which made the .art admin want to defederate from all of them due to some (not clear) previous history they might have… but it just happens that the “sympathizer” is also the developer of a relatively popular Fediverse project and instance, so by blocking them by association, they’re also by-association-by-association blocking a lot of people who couldn’t care less about who develops the software.
If smells a bit like when people wouldn’t want to check out Lemmy because the Lemmy devs host a “tankie” instance.
I share your understanding.
Also, setting aside the question of whether the user they boosted is a Nazi or not, anger over boosting a post made by a supposed Nazi seems a little misguided.
If the post is a racist rant, sure, that’s a big problem. If the post is something innocuous, because Nazis have regular interests as well as hateful beliefs, I can imagine boosting it on my kbin account, where boosting exists. Because I don’t go check the post history of everybody I reply to or boost. I just boost good content. And the boosted post was an EFF article.
Unless Mastodon is one of those places where you just follow people, and do not see anything from people you do not follow. Then the question of “is the person whose post they boosted a Nazi” is a lot more relevant. I don’t use Mastodon. On Lemmy and kbin I follow nobody and see stuff anyways because I subscribe to communities/magazines.
That’s the same theme of a reply I made yesterday. I read the article and might have even boosted it myself because as a fediverse citizen, I’m concerned about any government agency seizing an instance like this. The “well known racist” claim is demonstrably false, because I still don’t know who they are talking about nor would I know the person behind a username.
To be fair…
There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)
I don’t like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don’t like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn’t suit their political views.
I don’t think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind “avoid using Lemmy” than “avoid using Calckey/Firefish”.
Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called “karab.in” (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.
But the kicker is: right now, we’re discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.
So as for endorsing one or another:
- None of these instances have ads, so our content (for now) is about worthless.
- Both instances have donation links… but if you haven’t donated, then you aren’t supporting either.
- The devs for Lemmy and Kbin also have donation links, and you can support them by filing bugs, or better yet fixing some. If you haven’t… well, still not supporting either 🙂
Using any of these without giving back, is not “endorsing” it, it’s mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more… why not mooch off of that one? 😛
I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.
BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The “tankie” one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from… except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to “subscribed” or “local” and you’ll be fine.
There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)
I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.
I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest.
I can relate to that. It usually isn’t a coin flip for me though. I’ll align with some technology over another because I truly can see an advantage. That technology might be the underdog from the beginning. Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin whereas all of them combined are the underdog for certain more well established social forums. I engage with all three (and others still), because I don’t know the future.
Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin
There’s a third one I didn’t know about?
That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.
The article wasn’t the problem, it’s more of a “A boosted B’s link and C thinks B is a racist, so C defederated their instance from A’s.”
C seems… oversensitive and fragile, but I just tweeted (Xeeted?) that I want to watch Mitch McConnell’s brain melt on livestream so I’m probably not a good judge of how to properly behave on the internet.
Oh, I understand the tactics being used. I was implying that person c was obviously stalking person a and pounced the moment they did something less than perfect.
My guess is there isn’t anything of substance, so person c’s sensitivity got amplified with time and obsessing over whatever is going on, leading them to overreact. But, not c has to double down if they want any chance of being taken seriously if a significant cause to defederate occurs.
I want to watch Mitch McConnell’s brain melt on livestream
This is, in zoomer speak, based.
I don’t even see who posted an article in my feed unless I open up three post and look for it. I upvotes things all the time without knowing who posted them. I’m all about aggressively defending safe places and I don’t think they were out of line to defed, but I agree that this whole thing seems awfully overblown from what I’ve seen. The users deserve an explanation of the defed and why and the story should’ve ended there.
Generally, if someone’s being a total asshole so severely that they have to be yeeted with several thousand other unaware bystanders, I expect to see a bunch of examples within the first… 2, maybe 3, links.
If someone can point me to a concise list of examples (actual data), I find it more disturbing that an admin on another server can yeet my account because they make noise on a discord server.I mean, yes, federating is a feature, but why even offer the ability to enroll users? Maybe for a group of friends, or something, but just rando users is nothing but a liability to everyone involved.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is that ubuntubuzz.com is about the Linux distro, and it’s the first hit for “Ubuntu buzz”. I’d definitely interpret ubuntu.buzz to be about Linux, at least if I didn’t check the about page.
There’s an amazing amount of conversation about how this person is supposedly a racist with no evidence to support it. Am I missing something?
I got around 5 links deep for each of the links in the admin’s post, and fuck if I know. There was an argumentative user, but they were articulate and thoughtful. Not dropping slurs or wasting space nonsense, but still bordering on “edgy”. The person pushing the defederation appeared to be bullying them and on a power trip.
It was embarrassing. That’s all I took away. (My opinion can change if someone digs through the shitpiles of nothingness to pull up some actual naughty posts, but that’s not going to be me.)
Irrational people behaving irrationally.
Is it just me or is mastodon.art the source of almost all of the drama on the fediverse?
@donuts I recently had a short conversation with someone from mastodon.art. They denied the GIMP devs an account on their server, because GIMP is a slur word. And they made a public announcement of this fact. Looks like the moderation/administration people are assholes, if they act and communicate like that. This community is new to me and all I know is about this GIMP announcement and this new drama.
For those who don’t know: GNU Image Manipulation Program.
@shnizmuffin For those who know less/more, original name was General Image Manipulation Program, before it got renamed.
Ah, that goes farther back than I thought. I didn’t need GIMP until CS3 reached EOL.
For an extra bit of trivia, GTK, the GUI library that later became the basis of GNOME and lots of programs, comes from GIMP ToolKit.
It’s been switched around in later times, with GIMP using GTK now instead of the other way around, but GIMP is still essentially the forefather of all GNOME and related UIs.
STRAIGHT TO JAIL!!!
I think it’s the admin of mastodon.art the source of almost all the drama. Even the admin of the server where I am had issues with that admin and blocked her.
What other art focused Masto instances do people recommend? .art seems to get involved in a lot of drama and I’m getting tired of it.
I would also like to know.
I’m trying out socel.net if you’re still looking? They say it’s animation focused but all visual art is welcomed. I only just joined so idk a whole lot about it though, or if it’s any better in terms of drama.
Oh wow that looks like it might be perfect thanks so much! I just switched to a random other instance but luckily switching instances on Mastodon is easy. Especially since I don’t post there much. Ill move there now, thanks again!
I’m willing to go out on a limb and include furry instances provided there’s enough of a sfw community since a lot of my art could be considered that, but I’d prefer a decently active general art community if possible.
The admin of mastodon.art is terrible and a huge, huge troll - just ignore them and move on lol
Wow - bit overblown all in all. While it sounds like the quinoa guy is kinda a jerk, I’m not seeing any proof of racism on his part. He just boosted a legitimate news article (the Fediverse servers being seized that popped up yesterday) posted by this Eris character, who had been flagged as a racist troll in the past. This isn’t confirmed or denied in the various posts aside from a profile link on thebadplace.com - which has no information aside from a few racist tags on that profile (can’t tell who the profile is for).
This sounds more like the admins got snippy at each other in off-site discord drama and decided to take their toys and go home. Interesting for the /popcorn, but hey, if mastodon.art doesn’t wanna play with firefish, that’s their decision, regardless of the reasoning, end of story.
This is why I prefer using my own instance- I don’t want these federation choices made for me by people like this.
Same!
I don’t get it why tge commenters are upsetti of the way .art admin cleans their house.
If they smell anything fishy, it’s their duty to protect their instance’s users. It’s what is promised for joining .art.
There’s a reson it’s such a humongous instance. Because the admin is doing a stelar job.
It’s not to my taste, that’s why I’m on another instance. But my lord, leave people be.
If the admin is doing such a poor job, the instance will collapse, and people will simply migrate.
To me it looks like fragile egos are all around, and somehow get “offended” when defederation happens.
Also, GIMP is both a slur and a shitty graphics software. I’d personally block it as well.
To me it looks like fragile egos are all around, and somehow get “offended” when defederation happens.
i would imagine most people’s issue here is this seems to be more “extremely petty schoolhouse drama” than “actual thing worth defederating over”, especially when mastodon has better and more granular defederation tools at its disposal than lemmy or calckey
The way I see it (especially since regsitrations are “pls let me in”) .art is admin’s house.
If they ask you not to wear shoes inside, you either abide or leave. Petty or not, that’s the rule.
If they catch you or your friends with shoes inside, you and your friends are getting kicked out, since everybody else is barefoot/eating off the floor.
There’s really nothing weird, petty or childish. You get a warning (suspension?) if you don’t fix the problem, you get defederated.
“bUt mUh frEey speyCh” doesn’t work in a super-protective, highly moderated “safe space”.
There’s really nothing weird, petty or childish. You get a warning (suspension?) if you don’t fix the problem, you get defederated.
the issue here is not that i’m telling them to not do things–i don’t care what they do or don’t do. what i’m pointing out here is that people probably find this really stupid because it has an identical structure to and is similarly frivolous looking to a 16-year-old making a 10 page callout post against an artist for drawing problematic height gap
Sure. But, reading the comments under the .art admins posts on .art, .art people don’t find it petty, nor stupid. You’d see that they are thankful. And they are the only people who are affected by the defederarion.
I’m sorry to say, but it really does not matter what other people think. It’s like me, who has never been at your house, and never planning to be, thinking that your house rules are weird, arbitrary and petty. I’m also weirded out that you didn’t let that or this person in your house.
Would you care about my opinion?
I’m sorry to say, but it really does not matter what other people think. It’s like me, who has never been at your house, and never planning to be, thinking that your house rules are weird, arbitrary and petty. I’m also weirded out that you didn’t let that or this person in your house.
in a federated system necessarily yes it kind of does regardless of if you think that’s fair. we get shit for what we believe (and maintain) are extremely valid and straightforward reasons for defederating with a handful of not-malicious instances and that can impact who comes here and why. if you were to create an image of being–for lack of better wording–a messy bitch with a catty and overdramatic attitude (as many people seem to read this as being) your instance will gain that reputation, it will influence who your users are, and it can go so far as to be negatively reflected onto completely innocent users.
now, if the mastodon.art person doesn’t care about that then they don’t care, and i’m again not saying that i care either way–it’s their website, they can do what they want–but the presumption that this is in a vacuum or absent consequences is silly. it’s not!
a messy bitch with a catty and overdramatic attitude
literally the opinion of a handful of people. If that was true, the instance would collapse.
There will always be people unhappy with something. You can’t please everyone. The .art admin chose to please people of their instance, instead of maintaining a “look” that is expected from randos on the internet.
I’m 100% with the admin, and I’m glad the admin isn’t peer-pressured into being whatever people need them to be. Again, there’s a reason why the instance is so popular.
I remember artist tumblr in the 00’s. Participated, then moved over to twitter in the 10’s before I got sick of it. This looks like another continuation of that same community.
They can do what they like, but this reeks of the exact same kind of drama and mobs that, for example, drives fanartists to attempting suicide because they painted a character’s skin a shade too light. (Zamii070, if you’re curious.)
These sorts of communities form an echo chamber that, frankly, can be absolutely horrible for kids. Yeah, they can do what they want in their house, but I’m staying far the fuck away.
I know you didn’t mean anything bad by it, but the person you mentioned in that fanartist example doesn’t like being associated with that as she doesn’t want it to be her legacy.
What the hell is this comparison. Yeah, moderation = death, people. That’s why I’m on twitter, sorry, ex-twitter, where they respect muh free speech, that has never hurt anyone! /s
Sorry, rereading it and I think I was unclear. I’m saying that this community moved from tumblr, to twitter, and now to mastodon. I quit this community at the twitter stage when it became too detrimental to my mental health.
But this community uses moderation as one tool to enforce cliques, rather than to actually prevent abuse. Or, you could say, this community has a history of using moderation as a form of abuse.
Alongside that, this community has a history of inciting witch hunts over the most petty things. And they will be happy about what the moderators are doing within their own clique.
How are people starting drama over a FOSS program that has been around for 25 years? Gimp is free, open-source, and good software. People starting drama over that are looking for trouble.
Why is everyone calling it drama. How difficult it is to understand a dumb rule that says “no slurs”?
“Gimp” is literally a slur. The makers were aware of it and did for the lulz. Now they’re denied an account in an incredibly moderated instance because the name is a slur and everyone’s “why the drama11??11”
I think you have a different view on the project from reality. According to Wikipedia, the name “The Gimp” is a Pulp Fiction reference. The people who came up with the name “The Gimp” don’t even work on Gimp anymore. They’re CEO and CTO of the company developing CockroachDB. To imply that the volunteers running Gimp’s social media are some slur-crazy edgelords is counter productive.
I don’t think any people think of the slur when talking about the project, and I think this is a bunch of Twitter drama nonsense. If you want to change it, then join the project and change it, don’t harass volunteers.
A slur is a slur, no matter how you dress it.
If I made a program named “Fag*ot”, I’m sure, nobody cared about my story how it’s just a bunch of sticks.
If you want to change it, then join the project and change it
That’s not how it works. But there’s an effort to fork the program and rename it.
don’t harass volunteers
The ‘harassment’: “can we join your instance?” - “no, your program name is a slur”.
Wait since when is it a slur, and for what? I’ve only heard it refer to a particular role in a BDSM context
You’re one google “is gimp a slur” away from the information you seek.
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A person trolled (not even clearly in a racist way, sorry), and the Firefish dev/firefish.social admin happened to boost a news article posted by the once-troll
- Not for you to decide what’s racist and what’s not.
- If I was running an instance, that’s would be a red flag for me as well.
Don’t like to be associated with Firefish dev or want to contact people on .art? Migrate. Or contact the admin and ask for stricter moderation. Don’t want to migrate? Stay. But accept that not everybody want to share their toys with children from a sandbox that’s misbehaving.
Honestly, I really do not get what the fuss is.
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No, I mean it’s literally not up to you to decide what’s racist, from the .art point of view. If the admin smells racist dogwhistles, or even uses intuition, they’re free to use their judgement to act as they please.
Not everyone in the instance is misbehaving.
“Not everyone” works for everything in life. Shit argument. If your contra argument is to deal with this on a “per-user” basis, I’m pretty sure that would require a medium-sized team to do that for all users on the Fediverse.
“Abusing power” LOL. I mean, this is just pure petulance and entitlement.
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I do feel bad for the folks that feel they need her protection, as they are living in fear, although I suppose that’s their choice
That’s incredibly condescending. Not everyone wants to doomscroll on every single social media they’re on. Why is it so hard to understand?
Why do people understand that Behance, Art Station, etc, is a social network for art, but can’t comprehend that .art is for primarily for art as well, and not for twitter shit throwing?
Not everyone wants a muskian “everything website” that just bombards you with all types of content, like some sort for 4chan.
What is BBC going to bring to the table that cannot be accessed though their website? It’s just going to be a barrage of their articles with clickbait titles, just like it is on all the other social networks.
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Thread where calckey dev responds. https://firefish.social/notes/9hp49vhkce098zn8
what was wrong in boosting that post? was that article bad or something?
article was fine, mastodon.art’s mod didn’t like the person who originally posted it
i just wonder how one could possibly know whether that person was racist before boosting it. i mean, sometimes we all see stuff and repost or boost it without making a whole profile check on that person right?
I think it’s supposed to be “”“common sense”“” that disqordia is an iffy server that members of polite fedi shouldn’t interact with
Defederation is one of the big issues fediverse social media will face, now is getting more population and will be more in the future
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Don’t want to be defederated? Don’t let chuds and bigots on your instance. It’s pretty simple.
While this is the main reason for defederation, I think it’s important to recognize that humans are going to human and as of such you’re going to have defederation over extremely petty issues. In human history we’ve literally started wars over petty issues, costing countless lives - defederating is small stakes in comparison.
With that being said I agree with other posters that defederation is a tool. Just like any other tool it will be used in ways not everyone expects. A hammer can be used as a can opener if you really want. Or as art. Or in an elaborate machine. Tools may be designed for a purpose, but humans are creative and you can’t enforce that tools are only used in certain ways.
The point is that as a user I have no control who else is on the instance but could get defederated anyway.
From the posts I’ve seen several admins have clear mental health issues. Silly rivalries and imagined upsets cause whole instances to be defederated. It’s sad in a way as most federations have councils or independent regulators to step in so that members don’t lose out by the actions of others. But not the fediverse.
I would advise against armchair hypothesizing about the mental health state of individuals based on how they post online.
Hehe, the irony of this… is that’s a good rule for this instance… but the whole kerfuffle seems to be based on armchair hypothesizing about individuals not just by how they post online, but by how someone who they might be two or three times removed from by online association, may have posted online at some point.
Guess it goes to show what happens without that rule.
Yes and it’s already been discussed whether this post should be removed. There’s no quick and easy answer to a question like this, so much as there is a lot of shades of gray. There can be valuable discussion here so long as we take into consideration how to do so in good faith in a public forum.
most federations have councils or independent regulators to step in so that members don’t lose out by the actions of others. But not the fediverse.
There are at least two technological solutions to that at an end-user level:
- Apps (including webapps) that let people both easily interact with defederated instances, and block instances themselves.
- User migration between instances, which right now are kind of working on Mastodon, and kind of pending on Lemmy/Kbin/etc.
And one at a pro-user level:
- Run your own instance and federate with whoever you wish.
There are proposals for creating “councils” that could keep blacklists, whitelists, chains of trust, and whatever else, but once analyzed more in depth, they all seem to lead to more knee jerk reactions, not less.
I think the current discussion is a good example showing that it’s not as black and white, and definitely not easy, as you make it out to be.
I do think defederation is an important tool for the many pedophile, harassment or extremism oriented instances there are because of the fediverse’s decentralized nature. But it is an extreme action, and I don’t see it as a good immediate recourse when there’s issues with an admin or some users.
Defederation is an important tool to protect communities. It helps prevent the Fediverse from being overrun with bad actors.
Defederation is a feature, not an issue. Bigots, racists, etc can be confined to servers that allow that behaviour without polluting friendly servers with their content.
Too true, but there’s less evidence that this is confining bigots and more that the mastodon.art admin was looking for an excuse, no matter how tenuous.
How is it an issue to be faced? It’s an advantage of how the fediverse is built.
It can force those who disagree with defederating to find a new instance that has access to all the communities they want. It also makes onboarding new people significantly more complicated, as their choice of instance will drastically influence their feed.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against defederation, just pointing out that it causes issues that need dealt with.
those aren’t issues, they’re features.
your instance should be curated in a way you agree with. new users should always understand what they’re signing up for.
But what happens (as did recently) when instances change direction? What happens (as did last year) where one instance admin had the wrong contact details for another so a message didn’t get through and ended up with an instance blocked and defederated for no good reason. What happens when an admin has an episode and gets in an argument that results in tit for tat blocks.
How can any new user know this might happen? How can they know what they are signing up for when descriptions are so brief?
Defederation is a good thing but unfortunately the people are human and fallible.
You can always set up your own instance if you are disturbed by the actions of admins on instances that you have joined.
Alternatively, if the instance you are on changes direction, you can easily find a new one. It literally took me about half an hour after I learned about the Fediverse to get myself set up on several instances, then later on I decided which I preferred. But I didn’t delete the other accounts- they’re still there in case I want them someday.
But what happens if the instance you are on is defederated through no fault of your own. As has already happened, even not through the fault of the instance admin but another instance making a mistake and adding it to a block list.
There isn’t an easy way to migrate everything to a new instance. And the migration options we do have a a bit buggy.
Perhaps people have seen the survey of ex-mastodon users? It really brings out that federation is simultaneously an advantage and a problem.
At the moment, it looks like the only solution is to have multiple accounts and when you do it’s starkly evident that there’s content that you miss because of federation issues
I think the issue is that your are expecting a perfectly seamless, Reddit-like experience, with all the admin work done for you but also always done to your satisfaction. That isn’t what the Fediverse is about. It’s more of a DIY ethic than a “The admins suck but this is all we have” like on Reddit.
I’m also not sure what you’d need to “migrate” to a new instance other than yourself. Karma isn’t super relevant here.
My main account is on Beehaw, which has very rightfully defederated with some other instances. When I log in using accounts on other instances, I don’t see a massive amount of missed content. In fact I’ve seen so little of interest that I’ve stopped looking, it’s not worth my time.
new users should always understand what they’re signing up for.
I agree that defederation is a feature, but this in specific is a contradiction against what is the normal “it doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for” that gets said whenever discussion about onboarding new users for Lemmy, Mastodon, etc comes up.
I run my own instances for both (partly to avoid this, and also because I quite enjoy self-hosting) but if I didn’t and wanted to get my friends onto the Fediverse, this would be something I’d have to take into consideration for them as I couldn’t expect them to possibly understand it.
In reality, its more like “It doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for… unless there is someone/a community you want to follow on instance X which is defederated by instance Y and the only way around it is to either create multiple accounts (which most non-tech oriented people aren’t going to want to do) or pick a different instance as your main instance and manually move everything over since there are no migration tools for the most part”.
In my opinion this is probably the number one reason why the Fediverse will never be mainstream, for better or for worse (though I’d be incredibly happy to be wrong about this).
Again, I think defederation is a tool that needs to be present on the Fediverse for pretty obvious reasons but I do think that it is also a double edged sword.
Things change over time.
For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that’s not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.
But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.
I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don’t “get” the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I’d love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.
I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I’ve found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).
Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can’t post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that’s not in the fedipact, there’s this feeling where now I can’t join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I’ll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there’s a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.
Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don’t like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it’s abused, and how you really can’t trust that admins of a server you join won’t be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.
So now, if I want to like my fiance’s posts… I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.
Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.
You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.
Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.
This is what kept me off fediverse for a while. Reading about another incident like this.
If your admins are adults about things and don’t overreact to every little thing, then that’s great. But sadly not everyone is mature like that.
Mastodon.art has 29k users, so it’s not nothing, I suppose
