We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
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And, importantly, the rest of the network can defederate from them.
Yep, we saw this in practice with the Wolfballs instance, which eventually ended up defederated from most Lemmy instances before finally shutting down early this year.
I’m a newbie to all of this, what happened with the Wolfballs instance?
Wolfballs was an instance run by a USA right-“Libertarian”. I want to say it was maybe the 4th largest instance, for a long time. It prided itself on being for free speech, and was from-the-start populated with topics like anti-vaccination, racism, anti-LGBT+, nationalism and all that rot. The owner would gloss over it with “we allow everyone, we’re not bigoted, we fight hate speech with better speech”, but their userbase clearly were, because that’s what happens when you advertise in right-wing circles and attract people who who get kicked out of other websites for hate speech, revolting almost everyone but their in-groups. That’s why most ‘pure’ free speech extremist forums just end up with (literal) Nazis, pedophiles and people so spammy or detached they can’t even hold a conversation.
Naturally there was a lot of tension between them and the largely socialist userbase here, including a lot of trolls coming over just to raid, so eventually lemmy.ml and wolfballs defederated. I believe it was already defederated by a bunch of other instance, for obvious reasons, but I think the devs felt an obligation to try and make it work with the wolfballs admin, since they were a legitimate code contributor and seemed to honestly think civil co-existence was possible and mutually beneficial. They sincerely held liberalist ideas, it wasn’t just a mask to feign civility like many racists do.
At the end of January this year, the admin announced the instance was closing (if you appreciate Content Warnings, I’d just avoid reading the comments). Among other things, they mention that they had sincere beliefs the place would be used by doctors and layers who felt professionally censored, and that they had assumed neo-nazis online were just joking to troll people and were dismayed to realize, yes, they are serious and do believe in the nonsense they spout. Probably doesn’t help that the admin was in an interracial marriage.
Just to clarify, from what I remember wolfballs wasn’t as close-knit as beehaw or lemmygrad are, despite being so large. The userbases didn’t interact often, so the negative interactions made up a big portion of the few that were had. That’s probably the only reason it wasn’t defederated sooner.
That’s some nice Lemmy drama. The admin seems like an anti-vaxx doctor, no sympathy there. The alternatives they mention, (like calling Twitter good), would you say they’re all best to be avoided?
The alternatives? haha I don’t think you need to ask. Naturally I don’t use them, but many were either born or populated by communities banned from reddit or similar for being hate communities. So in the unlikely case any actually weren’t made with the intended target audience of toxic bigots, their userbase would have made it the case, just like Wolfballs.
Thanks for the detailed reply! This doesn’t sound like the first, nor the last, time where communities centered around hate inevitably implode under their own hatred. Or get shunned and isolated by the larger community (and rightfully so).
Yep, and I’ll add that I don’t even think the admin was hate-filled, but as a result of their ultra-freedom ideals, they tolerated hatred and soon realized they were surrounded by it, and it wasn’t just edginess or banter to get reactions out of progressives.
This is the most important characteristics in terms of moderation and the lemmy as a whole. It just cannot fall apart in a way Reddit did.