this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it's easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.
But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you'd written. This is worse than that because it's the opposite, and includes even reading the content.
Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone's error only to get permanently banned from viewing any "leftist" subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don't like when they don't even know what my thinking is.
I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn't catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it's too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous "trolls" has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I've heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.
You're not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and don't do the shit they defederated to avoid.
A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.
Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I don’t think I’ll mind mostly. I’ve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.
Let’s be honest, this federated forum/link-aggregator is in its infancy. Rexxit brought it into the lime light and just kind of put a magnifying glass on these sorts of growing pains.
I’d like to point out that most of the criticism I’ve seen has come from outside the community. I don’t feel like this will be a long term thing only. It’s really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.
The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.
Yeah, I personally would understand the decision more if they at least tried having mods. They don't. Their mods are just the admins. The admins are also the only ones able to make communities (magazines for kbin viewers) on beehaw.