masterspace

No, they're not. They're admins.

If that were true, then the software wouldn't have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel.

A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.

IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what "the point" of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.

In broad strokes yes, but in more specific and relevant strokes, the point of social networking software is for users to use it to engage with each other, not concern themselves with how it's servers are administrated.

People like good software that behaves intuitively, news at 11.

I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.

Software exist to solve a user's problem. All software's primary motivator should be user experience.

It's quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user's don't want to use (see: Reddit's official app / new site).

Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.

I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:

What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)

A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)

Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.

A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.

Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.

It's working for me, but quoted below:

Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.

For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.

Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.

When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.

Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.

What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.

Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.

[edit: grammar and spelling]

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.

That's true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.

This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected.

Yeah, if you copy Twitter's UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.

It's not complicated, mastodon just kind of sucks from a user perspective compared to twitter while completely copying it, leading users to dislike it.

Decentralization is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.

And I've worked at FAANG companies developing their apps and am well aware of precisely what they do to get people to use them, and it's not make a carbon copy of twitter that's harder to use.

I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.

If you want to organize discussion around topics, model it after reddit, where you subscribe to topics.

If you want to organize discussion around people, model it after twitter, where you subscribe to people.

Kbin and lemmy do a good job of modelling things after reddit, where you subscribe to topics. The decentralized nature just adds another layer of community duplication, but that was already a problem with reddit (r/gaming and r/games) and isn't that big a deal since all are subscribable from your preferred instance as long as it's federated with everyone.

The problem with Mastodon though is that it wants to model itself after Twitter where you subscribe to people, but unlike with topics, having duplicate copies of people is a real problem since it makes it hard to trust that you're actually subscribing to the right person and not a spam account. That is an extremely real problem that Mastodon tried to side step by pivoting to following topics, but at it's core the mastodon/twitter UX is not formatted for that, it's formatted for following people in real time and Mastodon seems like it has ignored that and is trying to insist that it's it's own thing that no one actually wants. Organizing discussion based around servers is not a user helpful format, it's exposing unwanted technical implementation details to the user in a way that only a tech nerd could ever love.

If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they're using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.

Don't want people to think it's supposed to be Twitter? Don't model the entire UX after Twitter.

If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they're using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.

Don't want people to think it's supposed to be Twitter? Don't model the entire UX after Twitter.