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.
Defederation is one of the big issues fediverse social media will face, now is getting more population and will be more in the future
It’s not an issue, it’s an intentional and important feature.
Don’t want to be defederated? Don’t let chuds and bigots on your instance. It’s pretty simple.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.