The apparently-close connection between the primary lemmy devs and the lemmygrad.rs instance (as well as other potentially problematic behavior/associations) has been a major point of discussion in recent r/rust posts about trying to move the community somewhere off of reddit. One common recommendation in these threads is that the community should adopt/recommend an instance that has defederated from lemmygrad.rs (See for instance here.)
I’ve only just joined (as part of the reddit exodus), so I don’t feel comfortable making this as a recommendation or even a request, but I do want to know: is this something that the current lemmyrs administrators are interested in and/or already planning? Personally, I don’t mind either way (I understand there are pretty good tools available to users to “self-isolate” in this way). I do think, though, that it would be reasonable for special-interest instances like lemmyrs to defederate from all instances that aren’t specifically related to the special interest; i.e. lemmyrs could defederate from every instance that isn’t programming or at least technology related. That said, the obvious reason not to do so is that we’d lose access to programming communities hosted on general-purpose instances.
Again, I don’t have a strong personal stance here, and I realize the answer could change over time, but I think it would be good to have an explicit stance on this given that it has come up several times on reddit already.
P. S. I was surprised not to find an existing thread for this, so please forgive me if there actually is one and I just missed it.
Hey, thanks for bringing this up. I completely agree that this is indeed something that we should discuss as a community. I haven’t had the chance to make a thread about this yet, so we’ll use this one :)
I have been keeping an eye on the de-federation of some instances but afaict the primary reason they did that was because of the open signup nature of those instances resulting in a flood of potential bot/troll accounts which the mods couldn’t keep up with (understandably so). LemmyRS is (and probably will be in the foreseeable future) an application only instance. We just don’t currently have the infrastructure or the manpower to deal with a completely open instance.
Any user who signs up using this instance presumably understands the target topic is Rust (and we have communities on this instance to cater to those users, so it’s already pretty self-isolated in that sense). If someone wants to subscribe to communities on other federated instances they’re completely open to do so. While things settle I think this approach should serve us well (please feel free to disagree and provide any counter arguments).
But again this isn’t my unilateral decision, I would simply do what the users of this instance want as a group.
I agree that we are already pretty self-isolated. And I don’t think it makes sense to defederate before we actually have a concrete problem. Defederating from other instances not only limits the users on lemmyRS, but will also limit users on other instances to discover and learn about Rust from this instance (which I see as the main downside).
