this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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HARD disagree.
First, it's the actual reason cited by many people, over in r/RedditAlternatives, as the reason that they left. They did not inquire as what place they might go to that has more tankies - they wanted exclusively fewer.
Second, lemm.ee tried to federate with everyone, and look how that turned out? Literally nobody word-wide was willing to step up and put up with all the crap slung at them on a literally daily basis, so the entire instance was shuttered. Hexbear likewise almost died off, as they pissed off their admins and then one forgot to keep the domain license renewed, plus remember that time that one of their admins was caught literally lying to other instance admins? There is zero possibility of calling that instance one that "engages in good faith".
Third, the developers of Lemmy for years lied to us and told us that the ability to block all the users on an instance would be coming - but then when they delivered it, we found out that users blocked in that manner could still read, vote on, and respond to you, even send you a DM, and then a subsequent release of Lemmy weakened those walls even further by adding the ability for blocked users to trigger notifications to your account. Why should incels collectively have more "rights" than the people who do not want to have to put up with them? You can say that I am a bad person on the internet because I do not enjoy walking into a Nazi bar... and you can say that about all of the other people that took one look at Lemmy and noped right back out to Reddit, but whatever you call us, your rights end where ours begin. And you cannot force those people who left here to come back, and offer us content. That's just not how people work.
Fourth, tankies are calling for the literal murder of people in and the actual downfall of Western civilization. I feel like it is perfectly understandable then that people who live in Western civilization might not feel entirely at home and welcomed here?
Many of us only came to the Threadiverse because of Kbin, not Lemmy. And now many of us remain only because of PieFed, not Lemmy. Tankies are causing people to shy away from Lemmy, not the anti-tankies who want to expand it to make even more people feel welcomed, by e.g. making dealing with them be opt-in rather than something that takes thousands and thousands and thousands of clicks as you have to block people one by singular one. Your rights to freedom of speech and by extension to let them have the same should not allowed to trump my own rights to not have to listen, unless I explicitly want to. They are free to speak, but why should an instance be forced to platform them and spread their message further, without the ability to withdraw consent? Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort... and against echo chamber instances not operating in good faith, it's a great tool to carve out safe spaces on the Threadiverse where people can not have to listen to their disingenuous edge-lord crap. Thank you for listening - I hope I have offered something interesting to think about - and have a good day.
The math that underpins large networked systems isn't something you can disagree with. Smaller in those kinds of systems are always less sustainable. Instance level moderation choices like defederation have directly contributed to the balkanization (you can agree or disagree with if it's a good thing to do so; the preference make no difference) of the Lemmy chunk of the fediverse.
Smaller, less networked systems are more unstable and less sustainable. Period.
Your argument is disingenuous. You appeal to "math", btw without demonstrating any proof of that math, but then you also used words like "destructive" and "crippled", which are not mathematical in the slightest! Your argument devolves into just-trust-me-bro and i-am-very-smart. Surely you have some crypto that you would like to sell me as well?
Yes defederation makes a network less fully connected, but I suggest you reexamine the principles of the federated model, which does not require a fully connected network to begin with, and in fact one of its chief strengths lies in how it can handle such disconnection points. The only way it "cripples" anything is when an edgelord teenager no longer has a captive audience "forced" to receive their spew - yes, their feewings do get hurt, but the rest of the network gets stronger for having cut them out. Like a cancer that must be sacrificed for the health of the rest of the body to live.
CONSENT MUST MATTER, or we have no freedoms at all. They have the right to speak, and I demand the right to not have to listen to it, if I do not want to.
The fact that their admins are operating in bad faith and cannot control the toxicity of their members is not my own fault, but my response is under my own control. Even, as we literally see happening, if that means leaving the Threadiverse entirely.
Also, don't miss the point where the Lemmy devs have left no other option besides full defederation, if you truly do not want to receive messages from people on that instance. In theory this could have been a different conversation if the "instance blocking" actually functioned as advertised, but instead it allows users from those instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, and send you DMs, which even trigger notifications, the same as any unblocked user. That is no kind of "blocking" at all, so alrighty then, full defederation is the only option provided by the developers that will achieve the desired effect. (But this argument only affects the practicality of whatever solution is deployed, while I still think that consent should matter hence defederation should be allowed even on purely theoretical grounds. An instance admin should not be "forced" to receive messages that they do not want - CSAM being an absolutely perfect example of that.)
You are railing about moral issues I don't even disagree with. But there are basic, physical properties that networks have, that are scale dependent. There is no moralizing around that issue. And de-federation can and does occur all the time, its basically the norm between the major instances. And that has fundamentally crippled the growth of the fediverse (at least the lemmy side).
Just because I'm not bothering putting effort into responding to a slathering wall of text like you've composed, does nothing to change the fact that social networks, and actually, all large networked systems from the internet to a fungal colony, all base their survival in scale. I've done the work and shared it with those I've deemed worthy, here, regarding the network analyses I've built to run on the fediverse. Here's a hint: you aren't one of those.
Without scale, networked systems collapse. Without scale, complexity can't emerge.
A big part of this is architectural and we had that discussion years ago here. There are design constraints built into the original envisioning of lemmy that pretty much force these limitations. The biggest issue being that each lemmy instance is built to effectively be an "entire clone" of a reddit like system. The second is activity pub related, in that users can not "migrate" their accounts or community's to new instance, neither can we fork, clone, or merge a community.
The result is that we end up with duplicated communities, balkanized content, and an overall reduction in activity, which further suppress growth. There is no disagreement that the de-federation issue contributed directly to Lemmy's decline. We were all here for it.
You can whine about it... or find a way to deal constructively with it.
Disinformation != Misinformation != Information
To hear your defeatest talk, Reddit has won. Survival of the fittest and all.
I think we can do better. But never by ignoring the consent of the governed. Perhaps by listening to people, a way could be found to move forward? e.g. by allowing a true block of all users from an instance, as an alternative to defederation. Which Lemmy will likely never do, despite their promises for years and years to do exactly that.
i.e. it's a skill issue. Do better.
Its not defeatism. Its a basic understanding of how systems work, which you clearly don't have. You being obtuse doesn't change that. You and I can't change the issue at play. Without scale, lemmy dies. Its not a debate and its killed plenty of projects long before it.
In other words, hope in one hand and shit in the other; see which one fills up first.
Without growing the user base, this project dies. Its not a debate.