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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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