I am still surprised people didn’t anticipate stuff like this in the fediverse to be honest. We all have jokes or actual experiences about power tripping mods or admins on reddit, discord, twitch, forums, or any other similar situation when a petty person gets a minuscule amount of power and immediately wants to exercise it as much as possible.
Now imagine a person like that owning the hardware on which your social platform is hosted, having access to all the data on it, and in no small way determining how the software will be developed (or at the very least, configured) for their instance. And this is without even getting into the nightmare of what happens once money is involved.
As long as the fediverse depends on these few people maintaining it, it will always have problems like these - you’re just replacing the corporate overlords with petty nerds (and I use nerds here lovingly since I am one of those) and honestly, I’m not sure which one is worse. Fediverse should have from the start focused on individual responsibility and curation, making it extremely easy for people to host their own small instances that are efficient and safe, instead of everyone just moving to the biggest ones and using them like any other social media (but with less oversight). It’s a recipe for disaster. I dunno if that is even possible, but the current approach is kinda doomed to fail too.
edit: FWIW I think Mastodon does it much better, many tech-savy people host their own accounts and are still part of the larger community. However the discoverability is shit so unless you’re already famous, you depend on local feeds to find new stuff (or them to find you). If we can expand on it, make it easier to transfer your account and reuse it everywhere, make it cheap and easier to host and secure your own instances (even for casual users!), it’d be a better way to move forward IMO.
That’s why I avoid relying on instances maintained by this type of people and instance gravitate around instances hosted by non-profits I know and trust.
Where I am in France there are multiple very friendly non-profits that are centered around Free software and how digital technologies affect our freedom, who’ve shown to be very open-minded and responsible.
The reason they keep picking on smaller servers is because it works, and it increases their power. I was on one that got targeted by WP recently due to some disagreement with our admin. Literally I have no idea what the disagreement was. But we were added to the blocklist, something about being “harmful to marginalised communities”. And when our admin got discouraged enough to shut down the server, guess where probably about half of our users migrated to?
This is the kind of drama that is snooze worthy but I’m glad some people care enough to get riled up by it so things happen or change. Is there perhaps an actionable summary here or just this season recap on the story so far?
Death threats were issued, so the people involved probably don’t find it snooze-worthy.
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This is an outright lie
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Sure. I can’t speak for Pixie but I’ve seen several posts where Ro openly stated people could come have a civilised discussion with him and even gave examples of where he had those discussions and they paid off. He’s also admitted his faults. Also, while the instance in question does have some really good people idk if I want to call it well moderated. My first experience with death threats was due to that instance and I’ve seen them do it to others. There are also other admins whom have made posts about why they defederated from .lgbt with lengthy posts and blogs, so it’s not just specific to TBS
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You are very welcome
Surly blacklists should be democratised or at least per instance democratised. Anything else is the equivilent to handing the fediverse over to some private entity and giving them extrordinary power.
How do you democratize something when one person owns and pays for the hardware where your instance is? The moment the vote doesn’t suit them they can just overrule it. By being on a fediverse, unless you are hosting your instance yourself, you are literally under complete control of some other individual. Lemmy.world and kbin could tomorrow block each other and there’s nothing the two of us can do except either comply or leave.
Isn’t the point of Lemmy that you can just bounce to another instance?
There’s no way to transfer accounts afaik, and just hopping instances doesn’t solve the web of blocked / blacklisted domains anyway.
As for hosting it yourself, that’s apparently really hard and even big communities are struggling with it. Lemmy/kbin also have issues with all the content you interact with being also downloaded to your instance which sounds like a legal and curation nightmare…There’s no way to transfer accounts afaik
On lemmy for now there is not. But there is on Mastodon and having such a feature in lemmy is just a matter of time.
Sure hope so it solves all the problems. Well except voter spoofing thats a whole new can or worms.
All this drama happened on Mastodon. While user migration is a great feature to have for users, it won’t solve this kind of issues.
Also, “democracy” on a platform where anyone can have as many accounts across as many instances as they want is doomed. If anything you’d just be offering those power-tripping, time-flush aholes an extra veneer of legitimacy.
I don’t believe for a second that 90% of top posts aren’t already being manipulated to some degree, even if just by an individual with a bunch of extra accounts. It’s just too easy to do for it not to be the case.
Im sure its more than just the numbers with the prevelance of ai.
It’s not really feasible to hold a vote on a decision like this when users can make endless socks. But it’s not really needed too.
Blacklist decisions are democratized in that the most popular instances can choose or not to participate in it. And if the users don’t like that the instance is a part of the block list they can create an account on another instance that doesn’t participate in it. If an alternate blacklist that doesn’t arbitrarily block instances based on the whims of the maintainers is created then the popular instances are going to switch to it if it becomes popular or users will go to an instance that does.
The fediverse is a free platform and users vote with where their activity is.
I found this a very intriguing read. I’m sorry to read that all this happened and wish that people could just treat each other with kindness. And when not, be the bigger person and just ignore it.
This kind of drama does not help the fediverse grow. Not every disagreement is an attack on a marginalized group but neurotic individuals that can’t handle intrapersonal conflicts blowing things up into needless drama is going to actually bring more hate on those groups as it perpetuates stereotypes and blowing up petty disputes dilutes actual marginalization.
The whole instances thing is flawed. It’s mostly a copy of the walled garden system of corporate big social, including the capacity to install shitty power hungry leaders and the lack of user-centric freedom and control. Hopefully we get a more hybridised system down the line.
This is one of the biggest issues I have with Mastodon. It’s not even necessary to have users tethered to instances, that wasn’t the explicit intention by the authors of AP. Users should have more autonomy without the need to self host
that wasn’t the explicit intention by the authors of AP
Ohhh, didn’t know this. Do you have any links or insights on this?
Yeah, I will have to go through my bookmarks
Listen to this the good stuff is around 22mins
Link: waveio://waveio.app/episode?episodeId=11745645606
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You stated you edited and added your opinion you should’ve used the terms lied and mischaracterised, that would’ve been more truthful
You? I’m not the writer of the post…
Can you please explain what you mean?
