In light of lemmy.world's pre-emptive defederation of hexbear, would anyone support defederating lemmy.world? - eviltoast
  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
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    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”.)