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Comment by NoboruWataya | Hacker News Reader

What instances are people here using? I recently decided to give Lemmy a try. From what I had been seeing I was planning to sign up to BeeHaw, only to find that they had defederated two of the largest instances due to their lax sign-up policies. I can understand their reasoning and it looks like it was relatively well handled, but it still makes that instance impractical. I ended up going to VLemmy as it was one of the recommended ones, seems fairly general purpose and doesn't seem to have much "baggage" (political or otherwise).

They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much, but if even large instances are going to start defederating then there is a kind of Keynesian beauty contest to choosing the right instance - you might not care what an instance looks like if you're just using it as a gateway to the fediverse, but you need to choose an instance that doesn't repulse the other instances too much.

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Beehaw is a bit dramatic. I'm part of one of the most active lemmy instances, It only just brought in upstream lemmy as it forked 2 years ago when the community was created, because lemmy wasn't ready.

Beehaw has some weird ideas about harassment and hate speech. Essentially civility and concern-troll like behavior cranked up to the extreme.

The instance I'm on is a bit rowdy but has a tight culture and something like 600 average users online at once, 20kish accounts, and a very active banhammer to boot.

We take things like transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc very seriously. The mods have zero patience for wreckers and "debate me" types. As a result, we find historical figures such as John Brown very admirable and hold strong opinions on what should happen to slaveholders and their ilk. Beehaw doesn't seem to like that.

The thing to understand about this defederation drama is that the federated system don't create these stresses, they expose them in a visible manner.

Reddit has all these problems too, as well as any other big site like Facebook, etc. The solution there is a one-size-fits-all policy that generally, surprise surprise, conforms whatever the dominant culture of the company that created it is. I mean, what else would it be, right? No sarcasm. Then further modulated by the commercial interests created by the advertising-funded nature of the large-scale community. And especially because of that, the desire is typically to just shovel any conflicts under the carpet.

But these pressures are still there. They often seem to explode at some point. Reddit may or may not be seeing that now.

This is why I remain unsure and unconvinced that these one-size-fits-all communities can function as communities for the long haul. There's this intrinsic build up of stresses that will eventually overwhelm the system. Clearly they can function for a decade or two, since they have, but can they go beyond that? Yeah, in Internet time that may seem like forever, but it really isn't all that long or stable on human time scales.

You simply can not shovel the whole of humanity into one "community" and expect it to work.

>As a result, we find historical figures such as John Brown very admirable and hold strong opinions on what should happen to slaveholders and their ilk. Beehaw doesn't seem to like that.

What does this even mean in the context of a social media site?

> Group A: “We should punch Nazis, we actively encourage punching Nazis” > Beehaw: “Hey! You can’t advocate for violence towards people!”

> Group A: “They’re Nazis, they deserve it”

Something along those lines. In this case not exactly “punching Nazis”, but advocating something “should happen to slaveholders and their ilk”.

For context, John Brown tried to organize a violent rebellion among black slaves in the South: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

This sounds like it boils down to "everyone I dislike is a Nazi." The mirror image of this would be:

> Group A: “We should punch commies, we actively encourage punching commies” > Beehaw: “Hey! You can’t advocate for violence towards people!”

> Group A: “They’re commies, they deserve it”

Something along those lines. In this case not exactly “punching commies”, but advocating something “should happen to commies and their ilk”.

I know who John Brown is, but that history is completely immaterial to the topic at hand.

Which instance is that, if you don't mind my asking?

I am also curious. The main reason I haven't even tried figuring Lemmy out is because I figured it'd be exclusively full of "free speech" people, like other Reddit alternatives.

I think there's room for both... I'm also pretty much okay with judicious use of individual block buttons, as well as add-ons that will allow shared/convention block lists. I generally lean towards a platform being open (source and speech), and letting individuals filter. Of course, that would leave opportunity for someone to create solutions. Site bans also happen to/from some systems.

I also find that many people are way too quick to label, and will find myself tending towards that as well. In practice, I try to keep a conversation open and civil so long as personal insults aren't flying. I am human, however and will also close conversations if I reach a point where I, myself, am likely to slip. I feel it's a fair approach.

I do miss when online communities were mostly local BBSes where you will meet, see and interact with locals that will have differing views from you. That doesn't mean there aren't toxic personalities, but only that a little bit of understanding can at least go a long way in terms of community and society. I feel that, in terms of politics at least, negotiation from opposing views is supposed to be part of what makes it worth. The general ill feelings towards anything that is "other" is disappointing.

With a prior warning that a lot of people aren't big fans, and the instance hasn't formally federated yet, it's hexbear.net. Far left with specific rules against sectarian infighting, wrecking, etc.

It's generally a really positive place, a lot of well read folks who can back up their views. Not pure shitposting a la genZedong.

Not a fun place to go if you want a debate off the bat.

It was originally a diaspora for /r/chapotraphouse after they were banned for "promoting violence" after basically saying "slave owners deserve to be killed", which like, yeah. It was banned at the same time as /r/the_donald which really felt like a "if we ban one extreme, gotta ban the other". If you ask me, the sins of the two weren't equal but we did a ton of brigading so we sorta deserved it anyway. Diaspora split between discord and hexbear. The latter has two daily megathreads that get more interaction than most lemmys see in a week.

It will be federating soon, lemmygrad to start with and most likely some hobby and special interest lemmys soon.

Thanks for the info! It's not really my speed but it was interesting to read through the front page.

Lemmy has/had the other extreme where it was full of "Gen Zedong" people.

Lemmy was created by communists.

Not quite shitposters like genZedong but committed communists nonetheless.

I gave a little writeup to the comment under you, if you're still interested.

Beehaw sound like the pseudo-socialist crybullies who wreck every Left space they're let into, in my experience.

bingobango

If the Lemmy fediverse is so fragmented...

Then shouldn't people like us run our own instances, which then just act like an aggregator and wrapper around our single user account?

Or am I federating TOO MUCH in a way that's hard to explain to new people?

Because in my head... Each subreddit/community maps almost perfectly to 1 instance, and each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance. That feels right to me...

So why would that be stupid?

Genuinely curious and open to being corrected.

> each technically savvy user also maps almost perfectly to 1 instance

Today, nothing speaks against that. But if this proliferates, I'm predicting white lists to become more common on "sensitive" instances like Beehaw.

It's just like Email today. Sure you can run your own Email server. But expect to sometimes end up in the spam folder of users with Gmail accounts. You can thank the spammers for that, and the trolls if that ever becomes common on Lemmy.

You're basically right. The devs have explicitly said that the ideal is for every user to run their own instance.that said, while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.

>while it's not hard to run an instance it's well beyond the level of effort most people are ever going to spend.

This. And it's not just lemmy either. Mastodon, pixelfed, diaspora and other fediverse-capable platforms are a pain in the ass to set up and self host.

As a technical guy, I've set up most of these and while it's certainly possible to do, the hoi polloi don't have the knowledge/skills to do so and aren't interested in gaining such skills.

RPM/DEB/etc. packages with set up scripts and windows installers would make a world of difference, but instead we have 'curl <url> |bash' and docker containers.

While I'm not really too upset about the great unwashed being able to access the Fediverse (I wouldn't mind if it were mostly the technically minded, but I can just choose who to follow to get that), the current situation does little to improve the network effects of the Fediverse.

IMHO, the situation is similar to a scenario posited in another discussion[0] about devops, where developers throw their code "over the wall" to let the ops folks handle deployment/operations.

Except the "ops" folks in this case are mostly non-technical end users. With the results being pretty much what you'd might expect. And more's the pity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354049

I love Sandstorm.io, but each instance seems to act as an island of users / apps, by design.

...I wish it had thrived enough to have Federated Apps integrated with it intelligently.

I love how the App Store works on Sandstorm.io and in Linode (for initial set-up, anyway).

I also hope that this stuff gets integrated with something like Tailscale... So if I run an instance, I can see which individual users or apps on other instances are allowed to talk to my apps on my instance, and it's all end-to-end encrypted...

I continue to hope for the fediverse to do well!

And yes, people will subscribe to Allowlists and Denylists, and that's not great, but people are terrible...

> The devs have explicitly said that the ideal is for every user to run their own instance

I think the only people motivated to do that would be trolls and spammers. In fact, it's probably easily automated too.

Spam, get banned, restart instance, repeat.

I'd thought about running a vanity instance with me being the only user. I can then sub to who I want/where I want as long as my instance isn't blocked... though I do feel that block/clean lists should be at the individual level and not generally at the instance level and easier to share in sub-communities.

I prefer blocking at individual level(s) as well over platform blocking, even for what I see myself. YMMV though.

I think you'll end up using a lot of storage space; in my totally uninformed understanding, you would end up storing the full contents of any community/sub that you follow.

Won't that happen anyway? A typical instance with 1000 users is likely to be subscribed to greater than 50% of the active communities out there.

Yes but the storage used by that instance is shared among 1000 users, rather than all devoted to just one user. Theoretically there would be a fair amount of duplication and therefore less net resource use.

> They say the instance you choose doesn't matter that much

I would way that's not true.

Mostly speaking from a Mastodon perspective, but should be true for Lemmy/Kbin too. Healthy small ones with active moderation should be a good choice as they have a lesser chance of being defederated. Many smaller instances recently defederated mastodon.social because of spam. You should also choose one that doesn't defederate other instances left and right (if that's what you're not after).

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and https://fedidb.org/software/kbin might be helpful.

Spam is one factor, but biases is another that I don't see mentioned often enough. I'm on mastodon.social, see zero spam, and reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.

I also signed up to another instance (which I am not going to mention) and to hachyderm.io (which nominally caters more to techies, and where I'm essentially lurking) and the local timeline is full of self-promotion and activism. Better cat pics, but I'm struggling to find good discussions. The former instance was just full of idealistic randos chanting as Twitter went belly-up, and although it was all "positive", it was very much the Clockwork Orange kind of positive...

Regarding Lemmy, right now I'm on the fence.

The defederation of Lemmy.world means I can't follow the 3D Printing community there (as well as a couple of others catering to makers and electronics), and Mastodon integration isn't working, so I'm really tempted to just subscribe via RSS or set up a private Lemmy/Kbin instance just to follow the things I'm interested in (which seems wasteful and overly complex).

Anyway, my opinion right now is that the bubble syndrome is really strong in the Fediverse.

> and the local timeline is full of

To me this highlights my top issue with fediverse replacements for sites like Twitter & Reddit.

I always want to be able to see everything. I do not care a single bit about the "local timeline" of my Mastodon instance (also hachyderm.io here). I have no desire to choose a Lemmy server based on its population. The thing I like most about sites like Reddit & Twitter is that they provide me with boundless one stop shopping, and I can choose to ignore things I don't want to see at any particular point of time.

I think a better model might be that there is one central raw feed, that is universal but that instances just prefilter it for you. That way you can have the raw sewage with spam, or you can view a sensitized version that filters for content, or trigger warnings, or even just users. So it's like a single DB table with many views. So EdgeLord420_69 can see and even respond to comments by PrincessSnowflake... but PrincessSnowflake won't see EdgeLord420_69 comments because PrincessSnowflake is using a view that uses a user whitelist of known safe respectful commentators.

Yeah this is a solution that would remove my own complaint as then I could choose an instance that either has no filter or is only applying something like standard spam filtering. I don't really care if other people don't have the ability to see what *I* have to say, I just want the ability to see what *they* say.

I understand that this is the approach being taken by bluesky social.

Same here. I was immediately turned off from Mastodon and even more from Lemmy by my initial interaction with them. As soon as I tried to get involved, I was required to pick from a list of instances with weird-looking descriptions and make myself a member of one of them. That's a lot more commitment than Reddit or Twitter asks me for, and it was enough to stop me from proceeding.

> reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.

I’ve ceased looking at the local feed (instead of people I follow), because it always seemed to be defederation drama.

This mostly seemed to be “This other large instance has one person we don’t like and won’t impose _our_ moderation standards, so we are defederating”. Or, poor you if you wanted to follow Doctors Without Borders because a news organisation your instance doesn’t like joined it.

Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this, but Mastodon doesn’t seem to be lightweight and I don’t know how sustainable it is for e.g. _everyone_ to do that.

> Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this

The problem with this is that running your own instance is also seen as inherently suspicious by the same communities, see the comments about Pleroma by the admins of many medium size instances - because it's easy to set up it's often set up by people avoiding bans, but they miss that easy to set up is a factor that helps everyone.

I am actually running a Takahe instance, and it is the lightest, easiest to maintain thing I've found. Doesn't seem to like Lemmy though:

https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe/issues/588

Looks like it's being worked on, so that's great.

Wasn't this the expected outcome of federated social media? More echo chambers for ideologues. It happens within Reddit too. You'd have two sub-reddits of the same kind with one having another word to differentiate it from the other. Often times, split through politics.

I'm running reddthat.com if you want a general instance that is federating with every instance :)

The only spam I ever get on Mastodon is crypto DMs from mastodon.social; my instance hasn't defederated it (actually, I don't believe defederating .social is very common; it's too big to fail to an extent) but you can see the temptation.

What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?"

People compare these federated social platforms to email, as there are many email providers and they can all exchange mail with each other. But there's no concept of being "defederated" in email. Or is there? I just don't understand the term.

There is, it's just not talked about much. It is incredibly hard to run your own email server today because even if you follow all of the rules the big players will often refuse to accept your emails (i.e. defederate your email server).

That’s a very persistent myth. I run my own email server and my mail gets delivered fine. There are a few things you need to do, yes, but it’s not “incredibly hard”.

It's not that doing the list of things is hard. It's that even if you do everything correctly, sometimes your mail will get dropped anyway for no explicable reason.

> What is the practical effect on the user of an instance being "defederated?"

The entire instance is sort of "shadow banned". Everyone on it can post, but no one will ever read it (except for the few dozen people on that instance). Since forums have some minimum number of users/readers that if the number falls below this people just give up and go away, it will be dead within a month.

Not only is it like being shadow-banned, but you get to be shadow-banned for what the other people on the instance are posting.

The Fediverse might be a good model for a Twitter-alike (it's debatable), but I don't think it's a good model at all for a reddit-alike.

Conversations aren't meant to always be civil. If you enforce that harshly, it turns into a place to post cat pictures.

So the likely fallout of that would seem to me be that if a "federated Reddit" ever got off the ground:

- Over time, a few instances will grow to dominate and nobody will defederate them because they are too big and you'd lose too much/make too many people mad. These will be the Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, etc. instances.

- As they become larger, instances will be motivated to follow established politics of the big instances so they don't get cut off.

- Small instances will exist as echo chambers for certain unpopular points of view and mostly none of the big instances will federate them. Porn, Nazis, KKK, Anarchists, religious extremists, etc.

- Possible large bifurcations may develop, e.g. "Fox News/Breitbart" vs. "CNN/Huffington"; each has large followings but they would probably not federate each other.

- New users who just want a place to do normal Reddit-like stuff will be confused by all of this.

Defederation would be like if GMail stopped working with Outlook.com. Millions of users with no way to contact each other.

Defederation in email would be a.example putting in a block where you can't receive email from users on b.example. With email this pretty much only happens because of spamming, so it would be very surprising for, say, Hotmail to block Gmail.

What I don't get is that this seems like something you would want to do for yourself as a user, not something you'd want your instance/server admin doing due to whatever drama of the week is going on.

> What I don't get is that this seems like something you would want to do for yourself as a user

Speaking as an admin, if a server starts sending me hundreds of spams an hour, it's going to get blocked because I don't want to spend (my limited) resources on spams, much less push the handling of that down to my users.

The email equivalent of being "defederated" would be if Microsoft and Google both decided to start dropping all mail from your domain sent to any mailboxes they run.

I'm on Beehaw, and I like the way the defederation was handled. Here's the latest from them: https://beehaw.org/post/594843 You can see some positive comments from users about the change and a transparent road map for re-federating.

To put it another way, would you want to join an instance that isn't trying (or is failing to) contain harassment and other forms of bad actors? That's the challenge the de-fed is addressing: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Seems like beehaw is a very pro-censorship platform, and everything that social media should not be, so it will be a hard pass for me. Social media is a big enough echo chamber

Edit:

Now having read their "What is Beehaw" Post [1], I can clearly see I was correct and would NEVER want to be a part of that oppressive community, That post is fill with political ideology, plainly false statements, and mental contractions... wow. just wow

[1] https://beehaw.org/post/107014

Yeah, I saw that and don’t mind them defederating. I don’t want to interact with those people…

But I’m really glad it exists. I’m glad they have a space for themselves. Glad I can (hopefully) find a space for myself, and that we are no forced into co-existing. I might even recommend Beehaw to some extended acquaintances… but it’s fairly anti-me.

Anyone recommend something like Something Awful from it’s glory days? I don’t mind trolls and saltiness and edginess, just don’t want spam.

> Yeah, I saw that and don’t mind them defederating. I don’t want to interact with those people…

But what a complete farce this whole fediverse is. Any instance with any traction is going to attract people that you, I, or even the majority are not going to wish to interact with. Hell there's plenty on this site. And beehaw sounds like a community I have no interest in associating with.

> and that we are no forced into co-existing.

Not sure how simply federating servers forces coexistence.

Defederating is such a ludicrously blunt and ultimately ineffective moderation tool.

It isn't trying to be a platform, its trying to be a community in the same sense that a church or a softball league is a community. That takes handling things differently and they can afford doing that because its a federated network where someone who doesn't want to be OPPRESSED can just go to a different instance.

> Our goal is to create a platform in which nice people will want to stick around so that the experience is less toxic than other websites and because of such it needs to resemble an offline community - the rules must be more open to interpretation and the way the rules are interpreted needs to be a community effort.

> We want this to be a community - this means that discussions about behavior should organically arise. When someone violates a rule they aren’t banned immediately, but rather reminded that they need to behave appropriately. In the offline world, this might resemble a friend asking you about how you treated their friend, a pastor pulling you aside and talking to you about how you’ve seemed on edge lately, or security asking you not to vape inside their establishment.

Beehaw is a Community: https://beehaw.org/post/140733

>>It isn't trying to be a platform

They state they are a platform 16 times on the link I provided including directly saying ". Beehaw is a social media platform. "

Fair, I shouldn't have hinged on my comment on that as I read some amount of ideological neutrality into the word "platform" that they apparently don't.

Me: Surely it couldn't be that bad

Beehaw: On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism

I don’t think they are calling “rationalism” itself bad, but there is a fairly large contingent of people who call themselves “rationalists” who don’t show the slightest hint of self introspection or rational thought. They see everyone else as driven by sloppy or emotional thinking and completely miss that their own arguments and reasoning are sloppy or emotion driven.

The first step to being a true rationalist is to realize you’re as vulnerable to cognitive biases and emotion driven thinking as everyone else, and focus on your own thought processes first and foremost.

Being a rationalist isn’t about lording over other people, it’s about trying to make your own thought as clear and rational as possible, and that requires challenging your own deeply held beliefs and opinions constantly.

Most people I see who call themselves rationalists aren’t that.

The term "rationalism" is defined earlier in the linked comment. I don't believe it's being used with the typical definition. This quote needs context.

Every instance is filled with "political ideology". Its just that the instances you prefer do not specify it as explicitely. But saying ''we dont censor hate speech'' is just as much politics as ''we censor hate speech''.

IF they only said "We censor hate speech" then I probably would not have a huge issue, their ideological purity tests go well beyond that

I didn't find the original post so bad... it surely sounds like someone a bit unstable, guilty of their own existence... but not bad, specially when you start reading comments and learn that some people are so supportive of the idea of "being nice" that they suggest the author should fork Lemmy and move Beehaw to their own platform because the Lemmy creators have different ideology than themselves :D omg, talk about being intolerant.

> harassment

Harassment is such a vague term and has been stretched out to cover such a huge swathe that it can basically used to police almost anything.

Agreed. This is a strength of federation. Pick an instance that defines the term the same way you do. Communities with strong usage guidelines, like HN, can feel very safe to use.

HN does not ask the user to dance to be let in. Rules and guidelines are stated, users are freely let in, then moderation is reactionary rather than proactive. Beehaw takes the worst parts of mob mentality and label it as a positive thing. I'm sure it's a cozy club, but they will not be learning anything they aren't already wholly convinced of.

> Pick an instance that defines the term the same way you do.

And this is why the idea of the fediverse (outside of a content blind common carrier type scenario) is DOA. Once you get outside spam and widely illegal shit, defining the "terms the same way you do" has nearly as many possibilities as users, and the overlap of that Venn diagram does not exist - so the natural evolution is just a bunch of tiny instances none of which want to federate with another.

The only purpose these new fediverse systems seem to have is for disjoint communities to increase availability - in one of the clumsiest ways possible and at the wrong level of abstraction.

I actually dislike the moderation here, in some instances it is extremely biased. I can remember an example of a post and discussion around tech, feminism, and how much of society has looped around to benefit women, and any comment that wasn’t overly positive on feminism immediately got detached from the post for “being inciting”.

After requested clarification, it was explained that this was done because it is a contentious topic that has high likelihood of getting heated, but moderation was completely blind to how allowing only one visible perspective on an issue completely distorts how a community’s stance at large on that issue is perceived.

HN is more of a case of “least worst” rather than “best”, for me.

To me this is a weakness; it requires me to read between the lines of a whole horde of different instances' statements of principles and try to make an informed decision based on that. Many people don't have that kind of time/interest/inclination, they just want to be able to read some discussions.

I see some real trash-tier posts from lemmy.world that show up on kbin but not, thankfully, beehaw. I think they were right to defederate.

> What instances are people here using?

I’m one of many to run my own instance, letting me be in control of who I federate with (though there’s of course the risk of being defederated myself). It’s not for the faint-hearted, but doable, and doesn’t require much in the way of hardware (for me, a Raspberry Pi CM4 with 8GB of memory).

I’d be willing to answer any questions people here might have.

I am also interested in self hosting my own lemmy instance just for myself and my close friends. Can you share the details of your setup? Do you host your RasPi at home?

> risk of being defederated

I was not aware of this risk. How does this defederation work?

> Can you share the details of your setup?

I’m running OpenBSD 7.3 and manually compiled Lemmy 0.17.4 from git (I plan to eventually submit it as a port). I’m running lemmy-server and lemmy-ui behind relayd to ensure both are accessible (this is a bit finicky, refer to the nginx config in the official Docker container to see how everything needs to be forwarded to make federation work). Lemmy-server (the backend) is a single Rust binary and lemmy-ui (the frontend) is a single-page web application whose server side runs under NodeJS. The PostgreSQL instance that holds the data runs on the same Pi. I’ve not yet installed pict-rs (which is what Lemmy uses to host images).

Rust, PostgreSQL and NodeJS are all from OpenBSD’s ports.

I admit that this isn’t for everybody, so most will want to run the official Docker container.

> Do you host your RasPi at home?

Yeah, it’s in a closet at home. With Lemmy running it’s still perfectly usable for the kind of hobbyist development I otherwise use it for (I may eventually want to switch to a dedicated server).

> How does this defederation work?

Any one instance is totally free to block anyone else. Plus I’m guessing that eventually, as the Fediverse grows, smaller nodes are going to be blocked entirely to keep spam under control.

How does the RasPi connect to the internet, DNS resolution, etc? I've not tried a home lab since years so no idea what's possible now.

An instance can block another instance from federating with it. So if I'm on instance "b" and it defederates instance "a", I can no longer see any of instance "a"'s communities or comments.

I'm on Feddit UK (https://feddit.uk/) as I realised that my primary use of Reddit was for the UK-based communities (DIY UK, UKPersonalFinance, Ask UK, UK Politics, Casual UK etc.)

It feels a bit sparse at the moment, but I'm hoping it grows steadily and not too much! :)

I think the easiest way to deal with that is to register a new handle directly through the instance hosting the community you want to participate into. I think participating in the community beats federation and having one handle for every instance. I don't think users care about federation.

You will not be let into Beehaw with this attitude, an attitude of "I'm a normal person with no specific intentions", or with any stated intention other than what is prescribed.

I've created and I'm keeping https://communick.news open for registration for the time being, but the creation of communities will be only for admins.

I've signed up with geddit.social. It's run by stux, who also runs mstdn.social for Mastodon and I think he does a great job there.

They defederated mastodon.art(?) recently and then te-enabled it, and the drama of (thousands?) of broken follows is still playing out on my timeline. I have no way to ascertain who is “right”, but am worried about guardrails and processes to prevent single individuals from doing (or triggering) the same…

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