• To be fair to the large number of blocked instances on the Beehaw blocklist, most of them are from a starter blocklist that’s been circulated through the fediverse of “These are skinhead and child sexual abuse material instances. Block them before they even try to federate.” I think the only true defederation controversy is with Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works and that was a purely mechanical issue of “too much troll traffic all at once and no tools to surgically handle it rather than just burn down the whole thing”

    • I’m wondering what “over 400 blocked instances” means in practical terms. Most of us have no idea if 400 is a large or small number in relation to the size of the fediverse. Most of us don’t know how big those blocked instances are, or if they even exist anymore.

      Mostly, as you explain, I don’t care about numbers if what they’re blocking is hatred and abuse. Maybe “over 400 blocked instances” is supposed to be a criticism, but to me, it sounds like the people running Beehaw are doing their jobs well.

      • That’s a fair concern. You can check the data for yourself on the awesome-lemmy-instances repository; alternatively I have made this tool to make the search more interactive and user friendly: defed.xyz.

        Short answer to your question is: 410 is a lot. They are the second instance for number of defeds, only beaten by feddit.dk. Most big instances tend to have between 30 and 50 blocks, with the notable exception of sh.itjust.works which has only 5.

        To give credit where credit is due, few of the instances blocked by beehaw actually run Lemmy and even fewer are active (2 or more monthly active users). This doesn’t change the fact that it’s a BIG number.

        edit: pinging @Cube6392@beehaw.org as this partially answers their question.

        • Not really. How many users are on the blocked instances? How many of those instances have tried to federate with Beehaw? How active are the people on the blocked instances? How active are people not on those instances who do interact with them? A raw number of instances isn’t that useful to understanding the impact on the network graph

      • I agree. I think relying too heavily on blocklists can be a detriment to the growth and decentralization of the Fediverse. Who even decides what ends up on them? Maybe you pass through the crossair of whoever handles that while they’re having a bad day and boom, you’re barred out of 2/3 of all the content.

        • I don’t mind big blocklists honestly, the problem with auditing is purely on a UX side - if we would have a way to sort/filter isntances by software and have some kind of grouping (“all of these instances are on a list of badies”), it wouldn’t be such a problem.

          What’s really a problem is whitelisting. It’s proactively punishing those who use small/personal instances, and not federating is much easier than defederating, so it’ll more probably be abused by admins.

  •  Ada   ( @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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    291 year ago

    It just amazes me that our little instance went from something for me to play with, to an instance at the centre of ongoing fedi drama, and the source of several memes.

    • I view it as a useful over simplification. We can simplify politics all the way down to “Left/Right” but that ignores so much of what motivates and drives people. In our current political environment, an ecofascist and an anarchosyndicalist might both be labeled as “left” even though the only thing they have in common is thinking “Maybe we shouldn’t just destroy the planet?” so the political compass is an easy to print visual aid to help guide people to that political views exist along multiple spectrums. My personal view is that the current best “political quiz with information at the backend about who you fit with” is 9axes, and that’s mostly because we’ve gotten to a point where we’re ready to start labeling the political compass as “no longer a useful over simplification, and instead a gross oversimplification”

      • an ecofascist and an anarchosyndicalist might both be labeled as “left”

        but one isn’t left, because any sort of fascism is incompatible with the left no matter what they call themselves, which is a perfect example of why the PC is bullshit - authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism, but authoritarians and the right in general will, as it has done throughout history, co-opt leftist language and ideas to legitimise themselves and gain power.

        The fact that the PC even exists, let alone how many people think it’s reflective of reality, is just more evidence of the ignorance, both wilful and fostered (via state sanctioned education seeking to deny us an understanding of the system or the critical thinking skills to examine it, minimising any challenge to the status quo) that exists around politics, which the compass only serves to deepen.

        • Left and Right are far too ill defined in a complicated political system to say authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism. The very first left / right split was between two different groups of authoritarians with one side wanting to a government similar to the prior monarchy they had enjoyed, and the other side establishing a brutal dictatorship that killed 40,000 people for not hating the concept of monarchy enough. We need a more complicated metaphor than Left / Right because otherwise we get stuck in “no true Scotsman” debates about the many different spectrums of opinion someone can have. I agree the political compass sucks, I don’t agree its a tool to coopt leftness by right wingers. I think, as I said, what we need is to start normalizing more complicated spectrum tools like 8values and 9axes

            • I think there is a misunderstanding here, I didn’t say that you can’t create a new instance or a new account on a different instance to technically go around the defederation (for a limited time). I also don’t understand what your point is, the people from exploding heads can do that too.

              • the misunderstanding is in that I don’t understand where defederating is in any way censorship, but everyone is treating it as though it’s censorship. Defederating is just refusing to help spread someone’s speech, which is perfectly fine and reasonable. The message I refuse to signal boost is still there, people can see it, they can even choose to boost it further if they want. The people who originate the message are not locked out of the instance that defederate them either. But everyone acts like this is the equivalent of putting a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they shut up and I’m honestly really confused about it.

      •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemm.ee ) 
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        11 year ago

        you telling me that I’m not allowed

        You are not your Lemmy account, and you are specifically not one single Lemmy account. If you don’t like the policy of an instance, you can try to change it or go somewhere else. Ok right, in the attempt to influence policy, you can play the ‘you telling me that I’m not allowed’-card.

        Now that I think about it, the most uncensored Lemmy experience is being logged out. Every content is visible, no middle man can hinder you to visit these sites. It’s a bit like when a public library decides to organize their books into separate rooms. Would you call that censorship because you have to walk between the rooms to access all the content?

        Censorship would be fitting if certain content would be erased from the library. I think that’s only possible on Lemmy if all instances agree.

  • I can’t believe I keep seeing this slander of Blahaj. We federated with those tankie communities as an olive branch. And they defederated with us after it became clear we didn’t like them. We aren’t a bunch of safe space tenderqueers, we tried to make a difficult relationship work.

    And Beehaw defederated because they needed more moderators / more moderation tools.

    You’ve also put censorship in the bottom left of the political compass…

  • Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works I’d say are a little left? And exploding-heads, less authoritarian right, more boomer gab people instance with misused meme formats galore, totally unfun. Big R Republicans packed to the brim. Boring as fuck.

    There’s not really a top right corner instance anymore, there used to be one, hosted at nobodyhasthe.biz. Those guys were what you’d expect, N word everywhere everything is about Jews chud memes black sun all of that shit.