this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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This is true, except for one element:
Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.
A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It's less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to "join an instance that aligns with your preferences" for this reason.
Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.
Trust me, there's likely more gating present than you're aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won't mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.
A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there's some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist
I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.
While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across "the network", where "the network" is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.
Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers
You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you're essentially mirroring their content
This is the kind of respectful, well informed, nuanced debate that I used to have on reddit and missed terribly until I joined the fediverse. I'm worried it's going to take some fairly firm moderation to keep it from nastifying in the future.
There's a bit of a culture clash going on in these defederation debates between the "yay it's the wild west, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can go anywhere and do anything" folks on the one hand and the "yay it's collaborative, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can build community and do our own thing and have our own rules" folks on the other.
I think that just as much as we as individuals can go where we like and interact with what we want, mods can set up whatever instances they want with whatever rules and federation boundaries they want.
Sooner or later two people's freedoms bump into each other and someone's desired freedom to say something hits someone else's desired freedom from hearing something.
I think that painting defederation as a destabilising nuclear option that will kill the fediverse is as extreme as saying the same of moderation. The mods at beehaw decided that defederation was the best solution in the short term to some problems including some highly nasty content that pretty much everyone condemns, without themselves becoming overwhelmed. I respect that. Beehaw is, as far as I can tell, a great place, and I'm sure it takes a lot of work to keep it that way. The beautiful and intricate garden you're walking through might not be able to exist without the wall separating it from the pigs next to it. I know you're not a pig, but also you know that the wall isn't a huge deal, given that there's a gate.
Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.