this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
990 points (97.8% liked)
Fediverse
38832 readers
1050 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.