Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
I think the general idea behind Lemmy and activity pub was not to have all the instances and groups on one server to begin with. It’s just that some of the older users of Lemmy/kbin/mastodon, already had the servers up and running instead of people creating own self-hosted instances.
The intention was more for one server to host one instance on a specific topic and then federate with the rest of the community. That server would just be in control of that one instance, like a subreddit on Reddit’s main site.
Instead what you had was three or four people who were used to the back end software, creating a bunch of groups or letting be created a bunch of groups on their instance. This is going to centralize the population to certain servers instead of ending up with thousands of small federated servers.
And once the personal belief systems and moderation start seeping into all groups on that server we’re going to see problems. The more control one single person has, the higher the likelihood is that they’re going to start abusing the power in some way, even if they don’t think it’s an abuse their selves.
The fact that users can easily move to another instance will serve as something of a check and balance against this kind of behavior by mods and admins though, wouldn’t it?
Can they though? As far as I can tell there’s no affordance for migrating accounts, so if you want to move instances, you are forced to abandon your account.
Maybe not a huge deal right at this instant, but each day that goes by, users more posts and comments accumulate that makes losing an account suck.
Which means the is (unintended) pressure to stay put baked into the technical design. If letting users move freely between servers is a design goal, there need to be technical affordances for it.