cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6853479
mastodon.art has decided to suspend firefish.social from their instance due to issues with its administrator. The administrator of firefish.social was found to be boosting posts from a known harasser on another instance. mastodon.art takes a firm stance against racism and suspending full instances in these situations is part of their policy as a safe space. The known harasser has a history of using slurs, harassment, and editing screenshots to spread misinformation. However, the administrator of firefish.social has now forged a screenshot to paint mastodon.art in a negative light.
How is it an issue to be faced? It’s an advantage of how the fediverse is built.
It can force those who disagree with defederating to find a new instance that has access to all the communities they want. It also makes onboarding new people significantly more complicated, as their choice of instance will drastically influence their feed.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against defederation, just pointing out that it causes issues that need dealt with.
those aren’t issues, they’re features.
your instance should be curated in a way you agree with. new users should always understand what they’re signing up for.
Things change over time.
For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that’s not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.
But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.
I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don’t “get” the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I’d love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.
I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I’ve found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).
Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can’t post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that’s not in the fedipact, there’s this feeling where now I can’t join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I’ll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there’s a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.
Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don’t like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it’s abused, and how you really can’t trust that admins of a server you join won’t be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.
So now, if I want to like my fiance’s posts… I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.
Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.
You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.
Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.
But what happens (as did recently) when instances change direction? What happens (as did last year) where one instance admin had the wrong contact details for another so a message didn’t get through and ended up with an instance blocked and defederated for no good reason. What happens when an admin has an episode and gets in an argument that results in tit for tat blocks.
How can any new user know this might happen? How can they know what they are signing up for when descriptions are so brief?
Defederation is a good thing but unfortunately the people are human and fallible.
You can always set up your own instance if you are disturbed by the actions of admins on instances that you have joined.
Alternatively, if the instance you are on changes direction, you can easily find a new one. It literally took me about half an hour after I learned about the Fediverse to get myself set up on several instances, then later on I decided which I preferred. But I didn’t delete the other accounts- they’re still there in case I want them someday.
But what happens if the instance you are on is defederated through no fault of your own. As has already happened, even not through the fault of the instance admin but another instance making a mistake and adding it to a block list.
There isn’t an easy way to migrate everything to a new instance. And the migration options we do have a a bit buggy.
Perhaps people have seen the survey of ex-mastodon users? It really brings out that federation is simultaneously an advantage and a problem.
At the moment, it looks like the only solution is to have multiple accounts and when you do it’s starkly evident that there’s content that you miss because of federation issues
I think the issue is that your are expecting a perfectly seamless, Reddit-like experience, with all the admin work done for you but also always done to your satisfaction. That isn’t what the Fediverse is about. It’s more of a DIY ethic than a “The admins suck but this is all we have” like on Reddit.
I’m also not sure what you’d need to “migrate” to a new instance other than yourself. Karma isn’t super relevant here.
My main account is on Beehaw, which has very rightfully defederated with some other instances. When I log in using accounts on other instances, I don’t see a massive amount of missed content. In fact I’ve seen so little of interest that I’ve stopped looking, it’s not worth my time.
I don’t recognise that expectation. I simply expected to be able to join and interact with friends/online acquaintances without someone else’s decision about something I have no control cutting us off.
As for migration, in most cases you can’t yet migrate your post history and migrating your followers/following list is hit and miss.
These are practical issues that need sorting if the fediverse is to succeed and last. Otherwise people will end up back on managed services like Bsky, threads and Reddit.
Have you seen the jokey post going around. This is what it feels like in the fediverse.
“Hey, can you switch instances? Your admin favorited a joke that I didn’t appreciate once. Might need to block you otherwise. Oh, and that crowdfunding platform you use? Back in 2006 they let an organization I don’t personally align with use their platform. You should abandon that. Also, -”
The jokey post is true. The difference is whether a user sees this as a bug or a feature. Many of us see it as a feature. If you see it as a bug, maybe Lemmy isn’t for you.
I also don’t want to see the Fediverse “succeed”. Both Reddit and Facebook were great for a while, then they “succeeded” and enshittification began. The Fediverse is fine how it is, it doesn’t need to become the most popular thing on the internet in order to keep my interest.
I agree that defederation is a feature, but this in specific is a contradiction against what is the normal “it doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for” that gets said whenever discussion about onboarding new users for Lemmy, Mastodon, etc comes up.
I run my own instances for both (partly to avoid this, and also because I quite enjoy self-hosting) but if I didn’t and wanted to get my friends onto the Fediverse, this would be something I’d have to take into consideration for them as I couldn’t expect them to possibly understand it.
In reality, its more like “It doesn’t matter what instance you sign up for… unless there is someone/a community you want to follow on instance X which is defederated by instance Y and the only way around it is to either create multiple accounts (which most non-tech oriented people aren’t going to want to do) or pick a different instance as your main instance and manually move everything over since there are no migration tools for the most part”.
In my opinion this is probably the number one reason why the Fediverse will never be mainstream, for better or for worse (though I’d be incredibly happy to be wrong about this).
Again, I think defederation is a tool that needs to be present on the Fediverse for pretty obvious reasons but I do think that it is also a double edged sword.