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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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[–] syntaxerror@lm.madiator.cloud 3 points 1 year ago

I think it is fair to also consider the excessive centralized moderation like the kind we criticize on reddit to be a part of the user experience. Those similar problems that only affect specific instances, but not all, is a part of the user experience here with lemmy.

To be fair, email works the same way and there are a number of domains that different email server admins block to avoid spam or for any reason they choose. I know some smaller ones block gmail and others because the gigantic amount of spam they send. I also recall the relatively quaint days of Ukraine drama in 2014 had motivated a local university to block my email because my web/email host was located in Ukraine.

Sure, there are times when individual server admins will muck things up, but rarely does my email not make it to where I want it to go. My point is that I think that this is being made into a bigger issue than it is.