It’s okay. I’m certainly not going back to reddit, but Lemmy has its own share of problems. I feel we need better protections with defederating and banning. It is far too easy to get stuck on a dead-end server or have some aspect of Lemmy irrevocably ruined due to minor political squabbles between servers. We are still far too centralized, and lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/beehaw.org/etc control a lot of the Lemmy experience with their defederation posture.
Just today, a community had to do an impromptu shut-down because the lemmy.world admin decided to permaban the main mod for trivial/subjective/biased reasons (read the comments).
One of the larger instances recently defederated another smaller instance and now Lemmy is effectively ruined for those users. It’s already annoying enough for normies to sign up for Lemmy and get the hang of it, and now they need to be worried about switching instances every 2 months when some admin decides to effectively wipe out a smaller server because of something out of the users’ control. The smaller instance in question had NSFW communities that the larger instance got annoyed by, so the larger instance decided to defederate every community and user from that smaller instance.
I feel we need some sort of infrastructure to limit the effect of these types of things on different parts of Lemmy (users/communities/instances). Users shouldn’t be lumped in with communities when defederating (at least not by default). Having an escape plan for communities also seems like it’s very important. What if lemmy.world announced it was shutting down tomorrow? All those communities will be gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe we should be able to export communities to other servers somehow, so we can be more decentralized against failures of specific servers and admins.
Even a single community being inaccessible to a certain user can really destroy their experience - the problem isn’t fully solved by breaking up “mega-servers” like lemmy.world. What if I couldn’t access the main Linux community anymore? Guess I’m fucked? Make a new account somewhere else? Is that really the best solution we can come up with?
It’s okay. I’m certainly not going back to reddit, but Lemmy has its own share of problems. I feel we need better protections with defederating and banning. It is far too easy to get stuck on a dead-end server or have some aspect of Lemmy irrevocably ruined due to minor political squabbles between servers. We are still far too centralized, and lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/beehaw.org/etc control a lot of the Lemmy experience with their defederation posture.
Just today, a community had to do an impromptu shut-down because the lemmy.world admin decided to permaban the main mod for trivial/subjective/biased reasons (read the comments).
One of the larger instances recently defederated another smaller instance and now Lemmy is effectively ruined for those users. It’s already annoying enough for normies to sign up for Lemmy and get the hang of it, and now they need to be worried about switching instances every 2 months when some admin decides to effectively wipe out a smaller server because of something out of the users’ control. The smaller instance in question had NSFW communities that the larger instance got annoyed by, so the larger instance decided to defederate every community and user from that smaller instance.
I feel we need some sort of infrastructure to limit the effect of these types of things on different parts of Lemmy (users/communities/instances). Users shouldn’t be lumped in with communities when defederating (at least not by default). Having an escape plan for communities also seems like it’s very important. What if lemmy.world announced it was shutting down tomorrow? All those communities will be gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe we should be able to export communities to other servers somehow, so we can be more decentralized against failures of specific servers and admins.
Even a single community being inaccessible to a certain user can really destroy their experience - the problem isn’t fully solved by breaking up “mega-servers” like lemmy.world. What if I couldn’t access the main Linux community anymore? Guess I’m fucked? Make a new account somewhere else? Is that really the best solution we can come up with?