Feddit UK

Hi, chiming in as a person from Mastodon from the past 7 years.

The rake in the grass that Feddit UK is going to run into is Transphobia.

FedditUK says in its rules that it wont allow Transphobia in its communities, fair enough, if thats truly what they mean great.

But this is the same rake in the grass that many of the newer instances over on mastodon since Musk took over twitter have run into, many of the journalism instances for example had strong "No Transphobia" rules, right up until a Telegraph journalist that was a user on their instance posted a transphobic article at which point the mods suddenly felt they simply couldnt restrict the free speech of a journalist even though it directly contradicted their own server rules.

The firm "No racism, no transphobia, no homophobia, no casteism" of the federation is pretty strict on that and many new comers to the fediverse find it shocking how "i just want to debate your right to use the toilet" isnt allowed on federated instances. And remaining connected to the greater federation requires that social contract and showing you're actually moderating and removing bad actors from your instance and blocking bad faith instances to protect your users and users of other federated instances who may use your communities/magazines/subfeddits for discussion.

The giant federation that agrees to these rules thrive as a big hub network, but theres thousands of tiny instances out there that dont that are defederated for very good reason (loli, gore, terrorism material that is illegal to own/view in the UK), a dark side to the fediverse ocean which is often joking referred to by mods as the "c*m" side of the federation (due to the sheer staggering amount of tiny 1-5 people instances with that word in its url), that includes places like gab, truthsocial, spinsterdotxyz (anti-trans subreddit), and so on.

lemmy federates with mastodon and pleroma, which means its open to all the above instances, theres gonna be a ton of instances that lemmy instances need to block to keep their users safe from spam and illegal content.

But after that, the question still remains, what are the admin or moderators of any of the FedditUK communities going to do when the transphobia rake appears in front of them?

After a second thought, I'll keep the blocklist free of political instances, even though most I personally disagree with. In terms of any large ones which are grey areas of legality (loli and stuff like that), yeh I'm protecting my own back by blocking them.

That does mean the blocklist is only 1 atm, I'll keep an eye on what other big instances are blocked by other instances and keep the blocklist updated by doing that. Realistically a lot of the ones I would want to block will be so small I wouldn't notice them so that list will be kept fairly thin I imagine. (I'm not gonna be like beehaw or even feddit.de who have fairly large blocklists)

I get the frustration of having stuff blocked which might feel restrictive, so I'll try and keep the blocklist as small as possible but I do still think some should be blocked.

breaking federation

Federation doesn't imply that everything is open to everything. It can't do, there are too many people that just can't be civilised to each other.

If federation is to work and build enjoyable and productive discussions, then people's behaviour cannot be completely free. And the work to notice and block individuals will largely be done on an instance level. You can't have every instances maintaining a blocklist of every undesirable account across the entire 'fediverse'

If instances are not able to keep on top of bad users then unfederating those instances is the built-in check. Hopefully that will not be required too often.

There are plenty of instances whose entire purpose is to facilitate discussion that is fundamentally distasteful. They are free to do so, but we should feel no obligation to allow that to happen through our site.

I've no problem with maintaining a minimal blocklist in as far as we are a small site and are less likely to face problems, but we should be prepared to block where not doing so makes the experience worse.

This will very quickly go the same way as IRC. The spirit of Eris lives again on ActivityPub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

IRC is a plaintext chat system which was originally decentralised and federated. Technically decentralisation and federation is still perfectly possible in the IRC protocol. Nobody does it so freely any more, ever since the Eris Free Net decided to go its own way because it made sense to do so.

It achieved this by blocking any IRC server that is connected to the Eris server.

In this case it wasn't political - it was due to spam, flamewars, and organisational problems (what I just called 'the spirit of Eris'). If you throw politics in there (or rather the fact that these days moderators are accustomed to seeing political views they already agree with on the Internet), I think it just will accelerate things towards defederation, or federation with only people we seem to agree with (read: easy to moderate).

I'm generally against defederation as much as possible, but would personally prefer that the proper NSFW stuff wasn't on my feed.

It can be a bit jarring to be scrolling through content and there's suddenly an anus or something on my screen...

I don't think it's too much for people to have a separate account for porn and such if they want to see that, and it helps protect the feddit.uk instance from legal issues.

It's not as easy as that.

The problem at the moment with lemmy is that the moderation options for communities are pretty basic. So a community moderator can only delete posts or comments, block individual users or block any posts apart form moderator posts. So if a community is the victim of a coordinated attack from another instance, there's not a lot that the mods can do to defend it.

There will be instances created just with the intention of disrupting communities that they disagree with. If community mods can't defend their communities, defederation may be the only option.

Also defederation is a two way street. An instance might decide to have a no censorship policy, but that might lead to it being defederated by other large instances.

I think it should be fair if a community is illegal or starts to attack our communities with spam and brigading, but that's it

I tend to agree that blocking some political subs etc is perhaps not the best, since every user on the instance will suffer, but please take a skim-read of the banned Beehaw instances - you will find something you do not want on here. Tom as a server owner also will have a vested interest in blocking some of this content that passes through his infrastructure.