Is there a way to shop around for a Lemmy instance based on how many instances are blocking it and how many instances it’s blocking? For example, I noticed that the lemmygrad.ml instance is relatively popular, but it seems like a lot of other instances block it. It also blocks a bunch of other instances. So, if there are any communities on there that might be relevant to me then I would be missing out. I guess I could just create an account on a walled instance, but I would prefer not to keep creating accounts. I’d like to just find one instance that maximizes my access. Is the answer to just run my own instance?
Some folks think that defederation is a bad thing. OK.
Here’s a little experiment you can try at home.
- Stop using GMail, Hey, or whatever email service you’re currently using.
- Set up your own mail server (there’s instructions on the internet).
- When the instructions say to use a Remote Black List just ignore them.
- When the instructions say to validate domains, ignore those too.
- When the instructions say to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just let those slide.
- Try to send / receive email
- Also try to read your inbox. For added benefit turn on all notifications for received mail.
Voila. Now you have an unfettered email experience.
And this, class, is why defederation is useful.
Please send your comments to the overworked TA in the back of the room.
Is running your own Lemmy instance as difficult as an email server?
probably not, but you’d get the same amount of horrible stuff as you’d get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i’m making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn’t block anyone, you’re exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don’t block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you’d see
Edit: apparently lemmygrad is much worse than I realized
The only caveat I have to this is that being communist shouldn’t be an automatic block. Lemmy.ml doesn’t block lemmygrad and I see no reason why it should, the posts I see are like “wow capitalism is fucking us up” not like “Tiananmen did nothing wrong and let’s repeat it x1000” so it really doesn’t seem comparable to proactively blocking Nazis. If you block “both sides” of a violent conflict like, say, the war in Ukraine, you’ve suddenly blocked everyone with a useful opinion.
I saw a lot of tianamen didn’t happen, CCP worship, etc on there for the first few days after I registered, which is a bit problematic.
I wound up blocking them after a couple days, more because I don’t care about a tiny fringe movement (in my country), and don’t have any interest in their content.
lemmy.ml is also run by communists, as are quite a few other instances, I imagine. No one’s really saying that communists should be blocked.
But lemmygrad is specifically a vanguard edgelord site. Even those of us who are communists don’t necessarily want to deal witih /c/GenZedong.
Plus, I left the instance I host for me and my friends open to lemmygrad, and I had people from the server create accounts and just bulk subscribe to communities there.
It’s not the communism people are blocking it for.
Lemmygrad isn’t blocked because of their views, it’s blocked because it’s a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don’t include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out
And that doesn’t apply to liberals and every other ideology on this site? Every person has a political view which affects their opinions
if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they’d get mass-defederated too. like i said, it’s not their views they got defederated for, it’s their behavior
To be fair it’s not like I know what lemmygrad does, I only joined yesterday, but it just seems like typical ‘tankiephobia’, I don’t exactly agree with MLs on everything either but some of what they get accused of is just beyond the pale. I mean generally if someone is a western liberal they don’t get endlessly accused of being a mass war crime apologist even though that’s basically what the ‘war on terror’ was.
Behaviour like what though? Disagreeing? I don’t even know what ‘sealioning’ means, it basically seems like just saying ‘this person has different fundamental assumptions to me therefore they’re acting in bad faith’.
Have you read Lemmygrad’s sidebar at all? They describe themselves as Tienanmen Square truthers, are openly pro-DPRK, and fully support genocide in the name of Communism. They exemplify everything bad people say about tankies and they take great pride in it.
Wanting to cut out tankies and Nazis is NOT being a radical centrist who wants to “both sides” every issue, it’s just being a normal human being who doesn’t have bees in their head.
Ahh no I access Lemmy via the mobile app. Thanks for the information, I’ll be blocking them.
Agreed that blocking is a security precaution… but this is not just an anti-spam feature, defederation in user communities can come from any motives, including political, religious, or whatever other views the instance owners find undesirable.
I think each user should be able to pick what kind of blocking experience they wish for themselves. There should be as a bare minimum a way to set either an instance, or a client app, that can interact with instances that are defederated among themselves (without acting as a bridge, obviously).
If instance ‘A’ has already blocked instance ‘B’, what does it matter to ‘A’ whether or not any other instances have also blocked ‘B’? Would the admin have to go far out of their way to block the instances that don’t block ‘B’ or is there a way to do it automatically?
they would have to go out of their way, but it’s bad practice to block because of guilt by association. most instances have internal federation guidelines that are somewhat looser than their own rules, but still include a baseline level of decency. so an instance that doesn’t allow nsfw content would federate with an instance that does (even if they wouldn’t allow images to federate) as long as they don’t go all freezepeach or harass everyone
It’s a fraction of the work of an email server, if you’re not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work
Now I want to see what the results of that are lol
depends, If you ignore all the outgoing things, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Your outgoing emails will always go into spam or disappear completely.
If you follow all the outgoing things but ignore the inbound mail checking, you will get quite a bit of spam. I run my own email server and instead of blocking bad incoming emails I just send then to the spam folder. I usually receive about 2-4 spam email a day, usually it’s just marketing crap or it’s a single link with some cutout of a wikipedia article to avoid spam detectors, and sometimes it’s trying to extort you. I find it fun to read them sometimes, one time I got an email saying I missed a payment for my domain name but they got the amount of VAT wrong AND the maths on the subtotal. Some of them are comicality bad. but not quite the flood you might expect. If more people where on my email server or if I signed up to any shitty website I came across I’m sure it would be a lot worse though.
What a ridiculous false dichotomy, obviously subs which are just creating outright machine spam should be blocked but the current policy is just creating complete echo chambers where the orthodoxy of the admins isn’t challenged.
tbh, there is no such instance. Not blocking any other instances is often a reason to be blocked by other instances.
An instance that blocks no one is in effect a “free” speech instance that prioritises the right to be bigoted over the need to provide safe spaces for folk. And that means that instances that value the need for safe spaces over “free” speech are going to block the instances that don’t block anyone else as a means of creating and maintaining that safe space.
Hmm? Do instances automatically block other instances if they don’t block certain other ones?
I self host an instance. I haven’t blocked anyone yet as I just sub to communities that aren’t bigoted.
Some decently sized Mastodon instances introduced a policy like this. “Unless you use my blacklist, you are defederated by default”. In practice, it means that those few instances are an isolated clique that only talk to each other. In my experience, those cliques are toxic, so it’s no big loss if you’re not able to contact them. But of course I hope this behavior doesn’t come to Lemmy.
I can see the issue but at the same time is scary. In the future this thing could be bad. Like who is drawing the line and where?
No one draws the line unfortunately, because no one controls the entire federated network. This is why it’s important to have many medium-sized instances on the Fediverse and not one massive instance and a bunch of other tiny ones, so one instance won’t get too much control and impose their rules on the entire network. But it’s difficult to convince non-tech users of this concept since they are used to centralized social media and will just sign up on the biggest instance.
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On the free speech and shitposting Fediverse instances, they get around this by screenshotting posts from blocked instances. I believe there are also some implementations that can bypass fetching authorization and fetch public content from instances that have blocked them. If something is posted publicly on the internet, it can be distributed further, so I don’t see why they should use this halfway solution that fragments the network without actually increasing the instance’s security (e.g. make the instance private and verify signups).
Nah, if you’re using your instance as an essentially private one, you’re not about to be blocked. If you’re running communities on it that run counter to the basic ideals of other communities, you’ll probably find yourself losing some federation however.
I run my own, and I’m not blocking anything yet because, honestly, I just won’t be vising ones I’m not interested in. I’ll probably block a few if I see things coming out of them that I really don’t want to see, but at this point it doesn’t affect anyone else.
U might want to take a look at the federation map. It might be a bit overwhelming but in the settings on the bottom left you may chose blocked and allowed in order to get some insights on who federates with whom.
Oh wow what did lemmygrad.ml do?
I hate linking you to reddit but this post came to mind Choosing an instance; and my issues with lemmygrad
Why can’t a user choose to block an instance? That sounds like it should be a feature request, at least for the app.
Okay, thanks for filling me in. I myself am skeptical about US-centric, mainstream criticism of China and DPRK et al., but I can see how that gets annoying when people get carried away with it. If there’s a way to mute instances rather than completely sever the connection for all the members of an instance with a block, I think that would have been more appropriate in this case. I think Mastodon has that functionality, but maybe not.
It seems like Lemmy does not have this functionality yet https://feddit.de/post/753220
They’re just generally annoying. They’re tankies, constantly praising Putin and the CCP.
Basically sums it up really, although it’s great fun to drop in and stir up shit every so often.
They’re completely off the deep end though.
Deny and or support genocide, for one thing
@rrpeak@feddit.de linked one reddit post while I was searching for this one, so here it is anyway:
And here’s the OG mastodon post from fedi.tips:
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
Make sure to “Show More” on each post in the thread, including the replies. I thought it was all spamming the same post for a minute, lol.
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what’s the difference between ‘open’ and ‘allowed’?
I assumed this shows if an instance whitelisted/allowed another instance.
I don’t have the answer but I share your sentiment.
One thing I hated about reddit is the mods would ban you for participating on certain subs. For instance, I got banned from r/WhitePeopleTwitter for commenting in a r/Conservative thread. (I was actually disagreeing with someone, but that’s neither here nor there.)
The Fediverse feels like a worse version of that phenomenon. Entire communities are blocked off from each other by the admins of the instance. I fear that Lemmy might become a disjointed group of echo-chambers. Some might argue that reddit already is.
I don’t think that your concerns will happen. As the fediverse could be easy replicated and it is no problem to run an own instance federating with whatever you want AND be part of the rest.
My guess is that we will see more instances with different tastes if I may call it this.
By using tools like kbin you are also free to assamble the fediverse you want without the need to follow a single instance only.
By using tools like kbin you are also free to assamble the fediverse you want without the need to follow a single instance only.
Is there an app version of that?
Lol yes, I got banned from one of the communism subs for an honestly inoffensive reply I made to a post on the cum town sub. Go figure.
Anyway, it seems like the answer is to just run your own instance, but I wonder if a small home server might have trouble communicating with other instances, leading to even worse access.
If you’re a single user or a small group, a small home server works perfectly well. The requirements are pretty low.
I’m on https://lemmy.world. Apparently the people running it also run a mastodon server with 160k I think? users, so this might be good.
So, something like that works for a “normal” acct I think. I doubt there’s a way to avoid making alt accts if you also wanna explore alternative topics and lifestyles.
AFAIK, yes, the answer to have control on which instances are blocked is to run your own instance, that’s actually what I did.
For a way to search the number of instances that block certain instance, I don’t think there’s something like that yet.
If you turn your server off does that make your communities and account history invisible until you turn it back on?
I think each instance has a copy of the posts and comments.
For example this post in my instance is https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/post/834
But the original one is https://lemmy.one/post/22814
And then in the instance the community is hosted is https://lemmy.ml/post/1159362You can see the ids are different, so if lemmy.one goes down each instance already has a copy (except the images).
What will probably fail are the interactions, the original instance won’t have the new comments and votes. I’m not sure how it works after it comes back online.
I’m assuming that what you’ve got is a small personal instance. Does it have any trouble getting content from other instances?
Yes, it’s a small instance I’m only intending to use it myself, maybe some other friends later.
I’m doing it in a VPS with 1 core, 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD (it’s the smallest one).The only problem I had was because the documentation is a bit outdated, after fixing a single configuration everything has been smooth, I can easily subscribe to any community from any other instance and I can interact no problem.
You still have the issue that you only get comments made or updated after initially subscribing? Like the first time you go to a community all the posts have no comments, and you only get new ones after that point.
I’m thinking about maybe making a bot user that automatically subscribes to every community it can find just so I can have everything synced.
Yeah, this is expected behaviour. The feed that grabs the last 20 posts doesn’t include comments, so you’ll only get comments from that moment on.
I understand you can’t just go asking servers to send you every comment ever in its history all at once, but it would be nice if it could request like, one post’s comments.
Like my server could remember the date that it “discovered” a community, and if I open a post that was made before that, then request the comments. There might need to be rate limits for such requests. But it would be nice
can an instance have only 1 community for support and then have no content of its own? I believe that many already do (or near to it). This would likely be the recipe for blocking the least and being blocked the least.
Instance owners would block that kind of instance based on the activity of its users instead.
they certainly can do that. I wonder if we’ll get to that point where there are SPAM instances that every other instance will need to deal with
What about an instance with only one user?
self instance? sure, but that’s not one you can join persay
Ah, but I can if it’s mine, right? I’m going to give it a shot.
loads of people are making their own and doing pretty much this. I’m planning on giving it a try sometime over the summer. should be a fun project that I can actually keep using for a while. maybe even make my own notes or something.
I might explore options to make private content just for myself
