But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have “separate front ends” at the moment (guessing you’re referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance’s website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I’m talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than “decentralizing” everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
Yeah, that’s exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is “decentralized”, you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else’s relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that’s because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn’t how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That’s what defederation is as well. If you don’t have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn’t exist at all, that’s real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities
As I stated elsewhere, I don’t really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn’t it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don’t connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn’t have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn’t just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It’s just an argument for choosing good admins.
You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can’t see what’s on their server just because they don’t like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
“real” decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
Well, that’s a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn’t they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don’t exist at all, not one where there’s just more of them.
Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don’t have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don’t want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
Well other admins should be entirely in their right to cut you off. Same as anyone should be able to block you. If another admin decides to cut you off, that’s up to them, you can’t stop that and shouldn’t be able to. That is anyone’s freedom.
But usually it is not a problem, as long as you are reasonable. Why would another admin block you if you are reasonable?
And what I’ve been saying from the get go is that no one should have that kind of power. That you can get banned from a community is one thing, that you can get banned from all content available on one instance and that one person can decide you’re unable to communicate with tens of thousands of other users just because they don’t like your face? Well that means that Lemmy is no better than Reddit.
Post on a community moderated by Lemmy’s main dev to share a political opinion he doesn’t agree with? Say goodbye to all Lemmy.ml users, you’re banned from the whole instance mother fucker! No one should be able to do that in a decentralized system and if that’s what people want from Lemmy then they should stop pretending it’s decentralized because it’s not.
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
I am not talking about NSFW, I’m talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that’s probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.
If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.
You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it’s mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.
If you decentralize the hosting and make it a
“public database” where everything is backed up on multiple servers then yes, you can in fact have people hosting the content they want to host without having actual control over the website itself. If they don’t want to host NSFW content then they can filter it, someone else will host it and people can pull it from the database when they browse the website from their favorite front end.
But if a new instance is created after one was deleted, the new instance users will never have access to what was on that instance that got deleted.
We have “separate front ends” at the moment (guessing you’re referring to apps, otherwise people log in through their instance’s website), but the content the users have access to and the people they can interact with still depends on the instance they sign up on, I’m talking about eliminating that completely and letting the users be the ones that decide who and what they can interact with.
I’ll never be able to check what’s going on on beehaw or hexbear as long as my instance is the one I’m on, but no one should have the power to decide that for me or the other users I’m interacting with.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than “decentralizing” everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don’t want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn’t solve anything?
Yeah, that’s exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is “decentralized”, you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else’s relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
No, but you can delete the illegal content from your server and other server owners can do the same on their side.
The way it works currently is no different for that, the person who controls the server can block IPs if they want.
What I’m saying is that if some servers are ready to host your content then it’s the users’ and moderators’ decision to block it on their side.
As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that’s because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn’t how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That’s what defederation is as well. If you don’t have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn’t exist at all, that’s real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
As I stated elsewhere, I don’t really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn’t it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don’t connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn’t have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn’t just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It’s just an argument for choosing good admins.
You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can’t see what’s on their server just because they don’t like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
“real” decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.
Well, that’s a choice Beehaw made. Shouldn’t they be allowed to defederate?
Quite a few people left Beehaw because of that, which is a sign that the decentralized model is working.
In your model, how do you deal with spammers, CSAM, trolls etc. ? Should every user do their own moderation for the 47k Lemmy monthly active users? Or should people create shared moderation lists? But then you still come back to the trust issues: do you trust someone else to add a user to a block list?
Allow NSFW content at your own risk, same for users and hosts.
Block users and communities as you see fit, why should a centralized authority decide for the users? It’s the same thing as Reddit except that there’s a bunch of centralized authorities instead of one.
I can create my own instance but other instances can decide to not federate with it.
If admins were the problem on Reddit we should work on making a platform where admins don’t exist at all, not one where there’s just more of them.
I mean sorry but that’s just what decentralization is, unless you want a fully peer-to-peer protocol which is not realistic at all.
Or, as I keep suggesting, you make the authority figures have as little power as possible, i.e. the only people with authority are mods so they only have control over communities and don’t have the power to prevent tens of thousands of people from communicating with each other.
They really have as little power as they can given the constraints. If you don’t want an admin to have power over a lot of people, join a small instance and advocate others do the same.
It really sounds like you just want to be your own admin though. Maybe a personal instance would be a way for you.
But other admins still have the power to cut you off, so no, that’s not a solution.
Well other admins should be entirely in their right to cut you off. Same as anyone should be able to block you. If another admin decides to cut you off, that’s up to them, you can’t stop that and shouldn’t be able to. That is anyone’s freedom.
But usually it is not a problem, as long as you are reasonable. Why would another admin block you if you are reasonable?
And what I’ve been saying from the get go is that no one should have that kind of power. That you can get banned from a community is one thing, that you can get banned from all content available on one instance and that one person can decide you’re unable to communicate with tens of thousands of other users just because they don’t like your face? Well that means that Lemmy is no better than Reddit.
Post on a community moderated by Lemmy’s main dev to share a political opinion he doesn’t agree with? Say goodbye to all Lemmy.ml users, you’re banned from the whole instance mother fucker! No one should be able to do that in a decentralized system and if that’s what people want from Lemmy then they should stop pretending it’s decentralized because it’s not.
I am not talking about NSFW, I’m talking about CSAM. There were a few CSAM attacks last year, some mods had to see some disturbing pictures of pedo pornography, that’s probably not something you want your average user to have to deal with.
Then it’s not the same. You have communities like !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com or !fediverselore@lemmy.ca used to document abuse from admins and mods, and modlogs are public, it’s a drastic change from Reddit.
Have you ever had a look at Nostr? It only has moderation at the user level, so that might be what you are looking for.
And those CSAM attacks weren’t prevented by the way it works at the moment so that point is moot…
That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.
That’s the server owner’s job, it doesn’t mean they should also have the authority to decide who the users are federated with.
Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.
If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.
You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it’s mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.
If you decentralize the hosting and make it a “public database” where everything is backed up on multiple servers then yes, you can in fact have people hosting the content they want to host without having actual control over the website itself. If they don’t want to host NSFW content then they can filter it, someone else will host it and people can pull it from the database when they browse the website from their favorite front end.