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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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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[–] rknuu@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is true, except for one element:

Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.

A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It's less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to "join an instance that aligns with your preferences" for this reason.

Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.

Trust me, there's likely more gating present than you're aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won't mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.

[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there's some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist

I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.

While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across "the network", where "the network" is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.

Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers

You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you're essentially mirroring their content

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[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.