Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I’m not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.

I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the ‘wrong’ server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.

I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I’ve only just noticed that the edits/updates I’ve been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it’s similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we’re defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I’m just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I’m no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.

I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don’t know that the server they’re joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.

I’m not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I’m sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the ‘wrong’ server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It’s not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it’s really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.

Thoughts?

  • Yote.zipOPEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Hey! Fancy meeting you here! I would have tagged you, but with defederation your SJW account would never see it :p. I really appreciate the thoughtful post and share a lot of your sentiments.

    I personally think that lemmy will probably be okay even with its struggles because it is topic-based and not people-based. We don’t need everyone over here to have a good time, unlike social networks where you’re eternally waiting for your friends to come join you. As long as we have critical mass, we can talk about many topics to great effect. Some communities only work if we have literally everyone over here, but for general discussion and news, I’m not running out of content to read even with a small fraction of reddit’s userbase.

    I am hopeful we can stay here while problems get fixed, instead of being forced back to reddit to wait forever for “the year of lemmy” to happen.