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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: If the fediverse has any hope of achieving critical mass, it can’t confuse users by constantly breaking federation for every minor disagreement.

One more reason to break federation.

The federation was always meant to build communities around shared interests and values.

If I wanted the twitter "experience" I would just use twitter.

If I wanted a "free for all" environment I would be on 4chan.

Has that happened?

I was trying to understand how it work in practice. It would be relevant to picking which instance to use.

Constantly, it's great. There's big air-gaps between the US Lefty and US Righty fediverses. If you want to talk to both sides of that divide then you'll want to have accounts on multiple servers. If you decide to only be on one side then it's easy to migrate your accounts around between servers.

If I host my own instance, can I federate with both 'halves'?

Or will associating with one likely get my instance blocked from federating with the other?

At least in the past I know that would get you blocked as it acted as a bridge to allow tweets from the blocked instance to get through.

> Has that happened?

Yes. Some are over things that should be relatively uncontroversial, like loli-hosting instances. Others are more likely to garner upset on HN.

I think this is a prime example of why the fediverse won't even come close to replacing Twitter for Twitter users.

Nah. There are various people who call for policies like this, but then most reasonable instance admins ignore them, and the fediverse continues to operate.

The same thing has happened in the free software movement in general; some folks have called for copyleft-only, and the rest of the world has largely ignored them and is fine with shipping BSD licensed software along with GPL licensed software.

And now we have gazillions of phones going into the trash, unusable because of closed drivers making continued usage unviable. Nice.

There is constantly threats like that in Fediverse. For instance some threatened to defederate if Tumblr implements ActivityPub and don't remove Ads and what not.

In reality biggest servers still federate with most servers. With latest changes in Mastodon you can now see whom they don't federate. It's not huge list, and if you browse those who don't federate with, it's pretty obvious why.

A lot of those defederated services advertises themselves as some sort of free-speech absolutist alternatives.

I don't think OP's comment is in any way representative of the fediverse.

My point was moreso that this kind of attitude among the group of people who are technically adept enough to run servers is unattractive to the average user, who couldn't care less about the license of the open source software they're using.

Good.

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