So, the instance I joined Lemmy on last week largely to participate here defederated from lemmy.world an hour ago. It’s early post-Reddit days, which is the only reason I’m posting a general tech tip in /r/!austin, but it’s a previously impossible inconvenience that isn’t theoretical. Choose wisely or start your collection of alts early!
One read on this may be that lemmy.world may not be the best instance upon which to host !austin (i.e. if, for whatever reason, they’re not able to maintain federation with other instances).
Another thought is if you really want control over your “home” instance’s federation you could host your own instance and call all the shots. I’ve been considering doing this but mostly out of curiosity. Admittedly you would probably want to be fairly technical for this to be a viable solution.
It also looks like the Lemmy devs have been considering the possibility of implementing profile migration between instances, which could be interesting.
All of that said, I’d be curious to know the specific reasoning given by your last instance on why they decided to defederate. I don’t want to sound accusatory or jump to conclusions but this kind of post strikes me as… FUD.
Profile migrations fix a lot of the problems inherent with choosing an instance to call your home. Having an option to migrate entire communities as well would be super nice, especially in the possible event of an instance shutting down.
Another thought is if you really want control over your “home” instance’s federation you could host your own instance and call all the shots
As someone who is going to move a subreddit over to Lemmy, this is a really good idea. I could just host that one on my own, and if I don’t add people to my server, I could make sure that it doesn’t get overloaded. People could connect from other federated servers to view and make posts/comments.
That’s what StarTrek has done. The various StarTrek subs have closed permanently on Reddit and all moved together to their own Lemmy instance, startrek.website.
Yeah, I imagine that’s the equilibrium that the Lemmy Fediverse kind of lands on. At least for subs with more technical mods. I do wonder if this is sufficiently complex that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, in general, stays fairly niche as most users won’t consider that super amazing user experience. But, to me, that’s kind of the interesting and fun part – what happens next in the Fediverse experiment.
In my case I am the sole mod, and pretty much 99.99% of the time the only person posting content. Plenty of people subscribed, and they are very active with comments, but it’s a small sub and very niche to begin with. So moving to a niche platform sounds like the right thing to do at the moment. I have spoken with the person running the node I am on and he is cool with me moving it there. But if things start having issues, like I am not comfortable with the direction that node is taking, I will start looking into starting my own up, and just keeping it simple and small. I might just spin up a new server here to see what I can come up with, but there’s a lot to it, and spare time lately just isn’t there.
Nah lemmy.world is the better service to host your stuff on. The others are just very happy with the ban hammer/defedding. The list of instances blocked by beehaw is massive and Lemmy.ml the less said about them the better.
Both are too ideological to be hosting anything on either.
The admins have been very open about the whole thing. It basically revolves around the open signup policy (my other instance requires a short essay and decides on admission because of the tone they want to see) and the fact that a few bad actors were harassing admins, mods and users. The currently available option that addresses this is full defederation; the decision is being sold as temporary until finer controls are available.
Lemmy.ml decided to defederate because they said users would sign up on other sites and then troll the mods. Instead of asking others for help moderating, they decided to not participate in the global fedeverse.
Lemmy.world has lots of users willing to help mod and a server operator that cares. That’s why I will stay here.
Where have .ml said they are defederating?
They are still showing as linked in their instances page
Apologies, I meant beehaw, still getting used to the multiple server concept! lemmy.ml is just overloaded, its Beehaw that was making news today for unfederating.
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From the mods’ explanations (ongoing), it sounds like if any aspect of an instance is a problem (communities or users), the only way to block it is full defederation (god I hate typing and seeing that word). They’re hoping once the tools are less blunt this can be rolled back, and, frankly, I can understand why they don’t want an instance they’ve put years of effort into losing its tone.
What sort of redundancy are you referring to? I’m still wrapping my head around all this, so I can’t imagine what that would look like outside of basically instances that serve as embassies. I’m planning on spinning up an instance myself to play with at some point; that would be accelerated if another schism hits down the road and it becomes necessary to federate for myself.
defederation (got I hate typing and seeing that word).
Replacement ideas:
- defenestration, always fun unless you’re one of the two representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor, or a Russian oligarch
- defed
- d10n
- corn fed
- kfed
- fedex-ed
unfed
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Yes Lemmy.world is accepting signups again. I just setup an alt account and it used an automated email verification process
IMO, defederation should be a last resort when all else fails, reserved only for the most toxic of communities in which modding efforts have either failed or become too much for volunteers to handle.
Honestly, I think a “quarantine” function could be a nice feature to have in the future, where an instance could designate other instances (such as lemmynsfw) as opt-in federations rather than defederating them outright. May give users a bit more agency and control over the content they see without having it all be up to each server admin.
