Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
Shared Fediblocks are a plague. Get added to one by somebody that personally dislikes you and every instance that uses the block will unknowingly block you.
Don’t worry, highly popular instances won’t get on the block list and small instances don’t matter enough for it to be a problem. Power always favours the powerful.
The issue is there’s no oversight here, or at the very least, no oversight that we can trust to be impartial.
When parties form a federation, it’s usually with a signed agreement, to maintain the integrity of the federation and keep it together. Shared standards, rules, ideals, regulations, etc. All I’m seeing here are parties trying to carve out a sub-federation, and with no neutral oversight, it’s just going to become a “people like me” circle.
And I guarantee at some point people are going to start thinking “Hey, if this instance isn’t subscribing to the shared blocklist, that must mean they want those other instances around, and therefore they deserve to be added to the list”
Then just like that, the fediverse has a defacto authority. Instead of one sepz, we have a council of them from the largest instances.
And I guarantee at some point people are going to start thinking “Hey, if this instance isn’t subscribing to the shared blocklist, that must mean they want those other instances around, and therefore they deserve to be added to the list”
Already is happening on the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse. Instances getting de-federated because they dared allowed their users to see posts from “bad” instances
Lol, sometimes I feel like the ‘fediverse’ (hate that name BTW) is filled with the worst people.
Lemmy is built as a single instance with federation capabilities as an after thought. The biggest clue to this and the reason why it will always re-centralize is that communities are server bound. There is no fediverse wide community and they is by design. Read this closed issue
This is a terrible idea that steers lemmy into being an echo chamber. Let admins use their own judgement.
But isn’t that what this program does? It allows you to choose an instance with admins that you trust. And those who want to review every single one manually can still do that. I’d love this tool. The ones setting up these servers aren’t stupid. They can use their judgement and use this tool if they want!
And those who want to review every single one manually can still do that.
But will they? This tool promotes blindly trusting another instance block list without due diligence from the admin.
Why not set up your own instance?
Don’t know. That’s up to them. The problem is not the tool but the unreflected trust in blocklists. The Internet is huge, if Lemmy takes off so will the number of instances. The amount of decisions needed to get a legal instance working in many countries will be insurmountable. I’d rather piggyback on someone I do trust as a rough basis. It won’t be perfectly tuned with my informed decision but the alternative is me not setting the server up. The list of defederation can be reviewed. If you’re careful about the template its not blind trust. Much in the same way as using FOSS software without understanding all components isn’t blind trust if you’re careful about the source and verify downloads. It’s not perfect but the alternative is not using the software at all.
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Thank you. I recently set up my own instance and realized the need for tools that can assist in managing.
This sounds a bit like how to bring the shared blocklists from Twitter to Lemmy. Those were a disaster on Twitter, and I don’t expect it’ll end any better here either…
Please don’t use tools like this. Manually curate instances you feel the need to defederate with. The Fediverse was built on a model not unlike that of email. You wouldn’t just randomly block whole email providers willy-nilly, so you shouldn’t do so here on the Fediverse either.
As a sysadmin that’s a terrible analogy:
- Shared email Blocklists are the norm, not the exception
- As a professional IT admin I would absolutely blackhole any vile hives of scum and villainy rather than dealing with their BS. If someone is going to do that for me I’ll use the tool.
Also a sysadmin.
Shared email Blocklists are the norm, not the exception
Shared blocklists in IT are managed by industry professionals for the purpose of safety from malicious activity and there are vetted processes for being removed from days lists. False positives happen, but you aren’t hung out to dry if you get hit, you just go through the process and clear your name.
Most of this “Fediblock” nonsense is several orders of magnitude less reliable, and filled with toxic people pursing personal grudges. There’s no process to clear your name, and I’ve personally watched multiple admins and their entire communities be publicly mocked and told they “don’t owe you anything” for merely asking why they were blocked, let alone how to remedy the situation.
These are not remotely equivalent and anybody who trusts them is a fool. The Fediverse has a serious problem with vile, bitter people who would not be out of place running an HOA. If we are going to emulate the blocklists common in IT, we need professionals in charge of it, not nosy busybodies.
we need professionals in charge of it, not nosy busybodies.
Great, you form the not-for-profit company to manage this and get the buy-in from a critical mass of servers. Gold luck finding and vetting staff
Read my other reply, I’m not talking about email blocklists, my reference is to email providers doing that, which is extremely rare and done with explicit intent and good reason.
Secondly, while I won’t disagree there’s some vile content out there on the Fediverse, do you trust someone else to make that decision for you? Why would you let someone else decide what is and isn’t vile for you and those using your instance? Better yet, how would you feel if some popular instance decides you were the vile one, and because it was a common instance to use for blocking references, your instance is now cut off from a good chunk of the Fediverse?
This is exactly the sort of nonsense that swept Twitter with shared Blocklists, and the potential for negative impact on the Fediverse is even worse from it. Don’t let others decide make decisions for you just because it’s easy, as it doesn’t absolve you of responsibility when something goes wrong.
Now you compare EMails aka mostly private communication to a public forum, that’s even dummer…
The ActivityPub standard is modeled on email. Each instance is a server, and we all have inboxes. It’s a very apt comparison to use.
Also, unless the email is E2EE, then it’s not private, no more meaningfully so anyways.
🤦
Admins can and do use email server block lists, though, so maybe that’s a great example.
I suppose you’re right–for now. But at some point Lemmy etc will grow large enough to make manual blocking infeasible. Just how much effort does it take to start a new instance even today?
Wrong comparison. It’s not like a server admin using an email block lists (which are also often implemented badly, as anyone with a protonmail account knows…). It’s more like if Protonmail suddenly blocked Tutanota, or if Gmail blocked MS Exchange. The uproar and rage from that would be unceasing.
The Fediverse operates on a model like that of email, and in the email world blocking whole email servers from each other is very rare, and usually done with the most explicit of intent and for a very good reason. That’s how the Fediverse should operate as well.
Youre just flat wrong here. Basically every email admin uses RBLs to one degree or another.RBLs commonly block whole email servers that allow spam, not individual users. Thousands of email servers. You literally dont know what youre talking about.
The reasons “MS exchange” are not blocked is because they clean up their servers and ensure this bad behavior is not passively or actively allowed. Protonmail had some serious spam issues, which is why they were blocked. They were not doing the work it takes to be a good member of the “email” federation, so they were excluded from it.
RBLs are ruthless, because email has no enforcement mechanism for good behavior besides “you are not allowed to talk to me.” Thats the nature of federation. There is no central authority to appeal to, so each member of a federation instead sets their boundaries. You play nice, or other people dont have to deal with your shit, and RBLs are a proven and effective tool to help them accomplish that.
The only issue with reputation block lists for the fediverse right now is that it’s still very small. They will likely limit growth, but that’s up to the server admins to weigh agaisnt allowing hateful content. Youre always free to spin up your own server and federate with whoever is willing.
I’m going to found a user community for it! I’m kind of cooky, so I’ll name it “the church of LDS”. Surely nothing litigious will happen.
Jokes aside, great work :)
And here all I can think is “latter-day saints”
Nice to see history repeating itself I guess.
Interesting experiment though. I’d like to see how this plays out.
I see where this can be useful, but is this list categorized or at least indicate why a certain instance was added?
It’s different blocking an instance for simply repeated toxic behavior vs political leanings. Sometimes an instance can have both.
Letting new admins know and select categories/tags to block or let through could be an improvement, if it isn’t there already:
- NSFW (sometimes people want a SFW site, like browsing at work)
- NSFL (porn might be okay but not everyone have fond memories of ogrish.com and likes)
- Illegal in X jurisdiction (e.g. CSAM)
- Far right or far left
- Repeated instances of troll / spam bot accounts
- Abandoned by admin
There is no way to specify reasonings for defederation in lemmy right now :(
Disgusting. Let’s defederate with everyone whose ideology my echo chamber disagrees with111!
This is the kind of project that hurts Lemmy as whole. Defederation leads to fragmentation making Lemmy less likely to be a replacement for Reddit.
I disagree that defederation hurts Lemmy. It doesn’t hurt it anymore than normal moderation hurt Lemmy. Users on defederated instances are more than able to create an account on a non problematic instance and follow the rules there.
Defederation is essentially Lemmy’s version of quarantining subs on Reddit. And nobody except maybe extremists thought quarantine was a bad idea
The problem is that Reddit has a massive user-base and profits from the FOMO on newcomers while Lemmy is a very small thing most people don’t know about and there are multiple cases of instances defederating others just because they feel like it… like the BS that beehaw.org pulled. Now we’ve lemmy.world and beehaw.org two of the largest instances that don’t talk to each other.
- Lemmy is not a single thing
- No one is being prevented from visiting defederated instances
- No one should be forced to view content they find objectionable
- Neither should they force their views onto others
- Defederation is the equivalent of walking away from someone you don’t want to engage with
- Defederation does not delete content on other instances
- Lemmy is not reddit
- Defederation is not censorship
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It’s like pruning. Sometimes needed for infected parts, or suckers growing before their time. Too kills the plant.
