I was at a small roleplaying convention last week. It was great to meet the others again after about a year and game with them. Unfortunately someone was rather generous with their flu viruses and I got my personal helping. So I’m on sick leave for the second say but luckily, according to the test it’s just a flu and not the big bad C. On Monday I clobbered together a small template for my sister to build fake computer screens as props for TV shows… All in all a mixed bag of some good stuff and some annoying things…

Elon Musk supports eliminating rights for people who aren’t Elon Musk… That’s about it, I think…

Since this was a question about a lemmy feature, I’m talking lemmy here, arguing about fediverse, TCP/IP or electricity numbers/servers/plants doesn’t seem usefull in this context. Providing a link to a server that to your knowledge (you provided the reason) hosts illegal content can be seen as participating in this crime or at least advertizing. (Disclaimer: I’m no lawyer, I just remember whole BBS being seized for providing lists of (international) phone numbers to BBS that hosted warez and there’s stuff that’s worse than warez).

There are a few different things I’d like to mention:

• I don’t think, that there is such a thing as a massively defederated instance exists right now. The most blocked instance is blocked by about 11% of the instances, followed by two instances at 6%
• Even if the die hard scene users would know their instances, not every random troll or spammer would.
• This doesn’t address the possible legal issues of publicly announcing where someone could find illegal content
• If “small queer instance” refers to beehaw… That’s the second largest instance there is as of today according to https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

And lastly: If you’re new to the fediverse you maybe shouldn’t run your own instance in first place. Helping reckless people pull reckless stunts is a bad reason to promote a feature.

Currently it isn’t and I don’t think, that this would be the best idea ever since it could be misused as some kind of index to find bad instances. The defederated-list is available to the public and thus the defederating instance could in fact be “advertizing” the instances they defederated from (“Look, we don’t want this stuff here, but these instances are for [right-wing|transphobes|bots|spammers|porn]”)…

Depending on where the instance is hosted or where the admin lives, it might even be illegal to in fact point people to places where they can find certain things.

I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page

I used “meadia coverage” in a very broad sense here (as in online articles by magazines, blogposts and such)…

• https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/ mentiones lemmy.world way before any other
• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances while not media gets linked rather often an has lemmy.world, beehaw and feddit on top of the “all instances” list
• https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ for example links to awesome lemmy instances
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) again not media but in the same ballpark, lists lemmy.ml and lemmy.world

I honestly didn’t keep track I just noticed this during the last few days that if there were instanced that were mentioned or linked it was usually these three, but it might also be confimation bias.

The main difference between these two instances as I see it is that lemmy.world gets a whole lot more media coverage, attention and direct links than sh.itjust.works. You have to do research or visit join-lemmy.org to find a link to sh.itjust.works and then their tagline starting with “A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewal energy!” might just keep some uniformed (as in how this federation-thingy works) non-canadians from joining (yes, I left out the second part of the tagline, assuming most people who’d be put off by the beginning wouldn’t read any further).

I think it’s a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn’t accept new users at all and beehaw doesn’t really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I’m not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It’s just a fact fact that someone who can’t be bothered to do research and/or “write an essay” as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)

German it magazine iX has an interview with the mods of r/de. I don’t know if this was mentioned here before…

Interview (German)

Short summary: the mods of the large German communities see a huge issue with reddit not recognizing content creators and mods work and there seems to be growing support for an ongoing blackout or so they say.

It’s a technical limitation. In very easy (and therefore not entirely correct) terms, beehaw stopped talking to these instances. Beehaw will not load content from there, so you wouldn’t get any new posts or comments on communities that are hosted there, and these communities wouldn’t get anything you’d write because it’s always the hosting instance that keeps the master-copy of all content in it’s communities and only the master-copy is used to copy this content to other instances.

I don’t think anyone is calling you toxic (I honestly haven’t read all the comments). The decision was made due to the fact that the two instances in questions have and allow a huge influx of unvetted accounts and with that all those users also can walk in here. With this crowd comes a small percentage of toxic people that sre still to many be filtered out on this side using the current moderation tools.

Hi, I’m Nicktar, end-40s software architect and creator of unfinished projects. I love to find out how stuff works and if I can make it better or different or repair it but once I figured out how to do that and and know that I could do this, I lose interest and it becomes work… So my place is filled with (partially) working prototypes like cat toys, hydroponic flowerpots, broken tablets halfway turned into interactive picture frames, disassembled cordless screwdrives that need a new battery…

Also climate activist, table top roleplayer and currently quite busy playing around with Stable Diffusion