Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
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It’s not my intent to determine how things “should” work.
This is how things DO currently work.
If lemmy.world could read this they’d be very upset
It makes perfect sense to me. You’re allowed to do with your own server what you want. That’s one of the advantages of foss.
There have always been private communities. Just because these ones are running on standardized protocols that allow communication between servers, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly required to be public and let everything in.
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There exists no means to be private without defederating from literally every other instance.
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The intent of Beehaw appears to be giving people a safe place that they can return to, but they can venture out just as well. That ideal does not mesh with an allowlist. The goal doesn’t appear to be to curate a specific experience, it is to block bad actors from harassing Beehaw’s users on Beehaw’s hosted communities.
With this in mind, I think it absolutely does make sense for lemmy to include permissions that restrict what foreign users can do vs what local users can
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The tools are lacking, as you said.
This post is not about how things should be. It’s not about how things might be one day. It’s about how they are right now
Maybe the lemmy software doesn’t offer that as a feature right now, but from what I undertstand it’s not an issue on protocol level. So it’s mostly a lack of user friendly configuration options?
Broadly speaking, that’s correct.
Regardless of how development goes in the future, this post is meant to highlight the realities of the current, and the ideological realities of what content on the fediverse is, as well as where you are served it from.