In light of lemmy.world's pre-emptive defederation of hexbear, would anyone support defederating lemmy.world? - eviltoast
  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    If he dressed himself before trying to enter my store, I’d probably let him in. However I’d keep watching him; and on his first attempt to take off his clothes, whip his dong or throw poo, I’d throw him out.

    Note however that there’s an important difference between both situations: defederation affects a whole group of people. We could claim that some of them were whipping their dongs, were throwing poo, but we can’t automatically point at all of them and say “you’re all at fault”; that would be incorrect and immoral.

    Note also that I’d likely see this in a different way, if the defederating instance was beehaw instead of lemmy.world. Due to the purpose of each instance (generic and free-for-all vs. safe space), and overall impact on the lemmy side of the Fediverse.

    • bermuda@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      defederation affects a whole group of people.

      then they can just sign up for a different instance.

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        They can sign up for other instances. However the underlying “you’re from hexbear, so we’ll assume that you’ll misbehave” message is still the same.

        And managing multiple accounts is still an inconvenience for the users; one of the cool things about lemmy is that you can register once and access content across multiple instances, but once you’re required to sign up to 2+ instances you’ll likely end off in the larger one, starving the smaller one, due to the network effect. (The exception is if the smaller instance clearly fills a niche that cannot be satisfied by the bigger one.)

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          And managing multiple accounts is still an inconvenience for the users

          I mean, maybe if you’ve never used a computer before

          • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            maybe if you’ve never used a computer before

            It is inconvenient for people in general, not just for the ones who “never used a computer before”. Think on why.

            The matter here is if that inconvenience pays off for some reason. Such as potentially protecting lemmy.world users. I don’t think that it does, and again, there are moral issues at hand too.

              • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                im on wefwef/voyager and it’s not a hassle to switch btween my accounts i also have a 3rd account on lemmy.wtf

                And I have accounts in beehaw, kbin, lemmynsfw. And my point still stands - look at the big picture.

                It is not just account switching on its own; you got two overlapping but not identical feeds (Satan forbids if you browse by “all”), content that you’ve seen in one feed becomes noise in the other, before posting/commenting you need to make sure that it’s from the right account, messages that you aren’t seeing from account A because you’re logged into account B… it’s a bunch of small things, none on itself a big deal, but they do pile up. And eventually, they make your typical user say “eh, why bother with that other account? I’ll keep browsing from this one alone”.

                And if a lot of people end doing this (they will - humans are lazy by nature), it further reinforces the concentration of users into a handful of larger instances, at the detriment of smaller ones, due to the network effect.

                As such, I think that defederation should be only used once it’s attested that users from one instance would make another instance worse (“worse” is relative to the instance’s goals). Pre-emptive defederation should be only used towards hostile entities, not entities where a few users might be bad. (Note that hexbear as an entity doesn’t show signs of being hostile - on the contrary, the admins are even telling their folks there “behave well in other instances”.)

    • HonkyTonkWoman@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the follow up! New to Lemmy & still working to understand the impact of defederation, so I honestly do appreciate the expanded viewpoints.