They serve vastly different purposes. Lemmy would be a terrible place for people to chat about how their days are going, which is a key part of what microblogging platforms provide to be honest. And conversely, for structured conversations focused on specific topics, Lemmy has obvious advantages.
Beyond the basic structure, there are cultural issues with both that make them a bit tenuous for me.
So, the complicated bit about the fediverse is that there’s not one “the space”, there’s thousands of different spaces from which bad actors would need to be ejected. And, of course, not everyone will agree on who constitutes a bad actor, in fact there’s a huge range of different standards applied.
This leads to a situation where you just find out one day that some of your fediverse neighbors/acquaintances are hanging out with the nazi you blocked years ago. The nazi was out of sight out of mind to you because you had already blocked them, but if they’re low-key and mostly post normal stuff, it’s easy for your more casual neighbors not to notice. Not saying the parties involved here are nazis per se, just as a for instance.
The community uses the #fediblock hashtag to raise awareness of bad actors, primarily for the benefit of instance admins so they can update their block lists. There is a communal expectation that admins would be conversant with this.
There are also tools like these to aggregate that information, but currently it’s hard to get much out of them in terms of complete and human-readable context. (They’re primarily designed as tools to support instance admins rather than individual users.)
This whole thing is constantly happening on the fediverse and that part of the story would be completely unremarkable if the firefish dev wasn’t running a flagship instance and developing software.
If, as an instance admin (who we know was even in the discord channel where the admins are discussing this stuff) wasn’t keeping up with fediblock, that’s a red flag for the instance. The fact that he was also (even accidentally) associating with far-right software dev people to host his code is also a red flag, because, why wouldn’t you do some due diligence about that? (This should be a familiar issue to developers in this space, because, alas, there are a lot of nazi/nazi-adjacent people developing software that uses activitypub!)
Anyway, all of that doesn’t necessarily make the firefish dev a bad guy, it just makes him look kind of like inspector fucking clouseau, you know?
If it’s true that he’s also doctoring screenshots to make another instance admin (who is a recognized leader in fediverse community moderation standards) look bad, then that elevates the issue A LOT, especially for someone who is trying to get a lot of folks to adopt his software.
Not sure if there’s still interest here, but just saw this:
Welcome to the fediverse! Instance admins are under obligation to federate with every other instance possible, and are also under no obligation to do everything in their power to recapture the reddit experience.
Lol what does any of that wall of text have to do with “diversity.”
There’s not much drama here tbh; “admin defederates a somewhat controversial instance and some people agree and some people don’t” is, as other commenters have said, very business as usual for the fediverse.
I do think it’s natural in lemmy for people on other instances to have takes about defed calls because they may use communities on one of those two servers, or both, and be impacted as defederation splits the user bases. But it feels like most of the “drama” here is just free speech maximalist/libertarian trolling.
I feel like finding a good instance in the fediverse (that’s accepting users) is always a nightmare.
That being said, I’ve been happy with the vibes on lemmy.blahaj.zone and they have a calckey/firefish instance (that’s the main blahaj.zone). But it’s not strictly general-purpose.
I feel like I’m not not missing that much at least as far as the sound is concerned.
But it is true that you don’t get like the physical feeling of it (unless you have one of those weird vests, I guess).
https://mas.else.social/@choyer/110746384528095273
Someone checked and there’s already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.
https://jobs.firefishsoftware.com/about-us/meet-the-team.aspx
Who browses the local timeline on a large fediverse instance lol.
Anyway, reality is bad and we’re living in it, so I have relatively little patience for people who complain about doomposting. There’s a lot of doom out there.
If folks want to only see good news, start an “only good news” community (assuming this doesn’t already exist) and just stick to your subscribed communities view.
Firefox, but make it wet
(I don’t know if it’s a worse than “calckey” tbf)
We need the Lemmy equivalent of fediblock so we can post this for everyone to defederate
It’s going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who’s running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.
Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.
Does it have to be calckey specifically? If not, ubiqueros is misskey and rage.love is hometown. Blacktwitter.io is running normal Mastodon I think. Fediverse party lists neovibe.app (Mastodon) as Black-run. Weirder.earth (Hometown) has strong antiracist moderation but I don’t know the composition of the mod team offhand
I remember seeing a recently formed Black queer instance being posted about but I don’t remember the name, and of course because it’s Mastodon there’s not really a way to search for it 🙄 but I’ll see if I can find it edit got it: blackqueer.life, running Mastodon.
No disrespect to the blahaj admins at all (I’m on lemmy.blahaj.zone rigth now!) but safe spaces for queer folks aren’t automatically safe spaces for non-white folks and there’s a lot of historical pain and drama about that on the fediverse
Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.
At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.
From an opsec standpoint, certainly. Or they’ll kick in your door like the Kolektiva admin. Definitely best to use end to end encryption if you have any need to protect yourself from state actors. But also fuck meta
There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[1].
To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.
I don’t know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:
There isn’t one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn’t to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It’s to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.
Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.
It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren’t actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place – sometimes fractious, yes – where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.
One of the things that’s very funny to me is when free speech absolutists confidently assert that defederation, a standard practice and indispensable tool of the fediverse, is inherently tragic and destructive, and that people who don’t want to be in federation with the worst people and entities imaginable should leave and start their own protocol. (It would actually make more sense for those folks to leave and start their own platform where it’s impossible to defederate.)
The question is, if there are instances that are full of transphobic content, and they’re reported, does firefish defederate them. If they do, the view will improve. Although, global feeds are never very useful.