Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
Midwest.social might be another one, though it gets more and more complex b/c they’ve mixed in “leftism” with “being in the midwestern USA”, so a lot of their users and communities there don’t realize what that means, i.e. they think leftism = liberalism as in Bernie Sanders, not = Marxist-Leninist communism except scratch that, outright fascism just using that as a thin veneer to cover their true authoritarianism. And now they hold those users and communities hostage to anyone that would threaten to defederate from them - though they are currently still small(-ish).
Also, you can tell fairly easily when individual users shift over from such an instance to one that is not defederated - the rules they play by on their own instances is one thing, but what they can get away with on other instances is also the very same thing (“my way = the only correct way, and if I have power then I will enforce that, while if you have power than I absolutely dare you to use it”). Hence while defederation solves some issues, it also merely shifts the issues around to have to deal with some other way at some future date… or else as you say we simply allow it to choke the life out of the whole endeavor entirely.
Which is already happening. We who choose to come here tend to forget: there are a whole huge class of people that refuse to use the likes of Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Threads, and even Reddit, b/c they cannot stand “social media”, as it contains such toxicity. Their solution to avoiding such rudeness into their lives is to simply not partake at all. They read books, play games, solve puzzles, touch grass, etc., and since coming to such a place is not fun, they simply… don’t. When I was on Kbin.social, I started recommending the Fediverse to such people irl, b/c it seemed poised to be different than Reddit et al., though now that I have come over to the Lemmy side and experienced firsthand the likes of Chapotraphouse on hexbear.net and anything at all on lemmygrad.ml and now more and more things on lemmy.ml (which I just blocked yesterday), I can no longer in good conscience recommend the Fediverse to people. Like administering your own Linux machine, good experiences can be had, if you put in sufficient effort to curate your experience, but that is not what the vast majority of average people are looking to do.
So we will grow, or we will die. Thus I would be in favor of defederation if that were the only option, though now I think that there are other alternatives to provide a more “opt-in” - rather than mandate an “opt-out” - experience, e.g. as InEnduringGrowStrong suggested elsewhere in this thread, have new user sign-ups automatically block “those” places on the list, and have a bot send them a message about how to remove those blocks if they wish. The site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 is another option to consider heavily - like porn, perhaps we should not be in the business of banning everything, when merely labelling such experiences would be sufficient as to warn users that it is there? (or both:-)