Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances

  • experbia@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how itā€™s easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.

    But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message youā€™d written. This is worse than that because itā€™s the opposite, and includes even reading the content.

    Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someoneā€™s error only to get permanently banned from viewing any ā€œleftistā€ subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they donā€™t like when they donā€™t even know what my thinking is.

    I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesnā€™t catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but itā€™s too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous ā€œtrollsā€ has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times Iā€™ve heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.

    • Sentrovasi@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Youā€™re not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and donā€™t do the shit they defederated to avoid.

    • Nymphioxetine@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.

      Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I donā€™t think Iā€™ll mind mostly. Iā€™ve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.

      Letā€™s be honest, this federated forum/link-aggregator is in its infancy. Rexxit brought it into the lime light and just kind of put a magnifying glass on these sorts of growing pains.

      Iā€™d like to point out that most of the criticism Iā€™ve seen has come from outside the community. I donā€™t feel like this will be a long term thing only. Itā€™s really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.

    • Captain_Wtv@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I personally would understand the decision more if they at least tried having mods. They donā€™t. Their mods are just the admins. The admins are also the only ones able to make communities (magazines for kbin viewers) on beehaw.

    • sim_@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.