The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn't just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can't read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don't want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
I think I get where they're coming from, it's like how sometimes how I'll pop on over to /r/conservative every now and then to read through some of the posts, although the majority is "the schools are turning our kids trans"
I like to see things from other people's perspective, despite how inherently opposed to it I may be. When I hear a new story for example, there's typically two versions of it. One from a voice that seems reasonable and well tempered and one that's rash and unhinged.
Often I'll find that the truth sometimes lies somewhere in between, not saying it's right in the middle, but having a fuller perspective helps me come to own conclusions.
With that said, I don't think this way of consuming media works for all people or even most people. I'm a pretty objective person, maybe even to a fault. I'm not offended easily, which makes viewing communities that many would find delusional and offensive not an unpleasant experience for me.
Again, people who don't agree with the way an instance is managed can just take their luggage and leave for an instance they prefer or they can create their own instance. That's decentralization baby!
Feels like the crypto crowd, people complaining about management because they don't understand what decentralization means.
Not happy? Create your own project and manage it however you like. Be the change you want to see, that's the power you're given here and that you don't have in the real world!
But now you are asking for the equivalent of every reddit user to make their own subreddit, host it and curate a feed to it, so they can browse it.
I mean sure, but it'd be like saying, you don't like the options for food, so grow your own, the seeds are there. You may want some junk food, but you may also want some organic vegitable produce or something inbetween. Supermarkets are double edges sowrds with everything inbetween, but to open your own/grow your own/source your own from the bulk suppliers, although possible, is astronomically more man hours of curation time.
But with all that said, the initial and I think leading point of the post was not the indivdual filtering, but rather, that they think a divide and conquer approach would be most effective against a Fediverse. Where one would want to prevent the expansion and adoption of a fediverse as a threat of info hoarding.
I'd be inclined to agree that as pack animals a NT person is going to want to group up in the largest instance. So, the larger the instance, the more likely they are going to want to join it. And should it get huge amounts of people, they'd get fomo.
If there are as many instances as there are subreddit equivalents, for want of the accurate name, people just wont bother that much, no?
The point of decentralization is exactly that though! People don't need to be all under the same roof for things to work, this way no central authority can control what's happening.
Your food example doesn't work because in this case creating your own instance doesn't prevent you from interacting with the other instances unless you're acting in a way that makes them defederate from yours, so you can eat whatever you want as long as you don't take a shit in your neighbors plate.
Same as #1, the point of decentralization is to divide things to prevent control.
You don't understand how the fediverse works if you experience fomo for an instance because it's bigger. It doesn't matter what instance you sign up to as long as it's federated with the other ones you want to interact with and that won't be an issue unless you join an instance populated by morons and if you do you probably deserve to not have access to the whole fediverse because it shows you're not intelligent or mature enough not to associate with morons. And worst case just create a new account on another instance if you're not happy that the one you signed up to is defederated!
As I said, I feel like I'm arguing with the crypto crowd about decentralization all over again.
We can toss this right back at you. If you're all for defederating anything you don't like, there's other instances to use.
Well I'm the one calling for respecting the will of the admin which is that the instance be managed democratically, I'm not the one complaining that defederation is bad after people voted in majority in favor of defederating an alt right instance. It's not about what I don't like, it's about what the majority wants, which seems to go against your opinion but in favor of mine so I don't know why I should be leaving 🤷
You sure about that? You're one of the main people that was pushing to defederate exploding-heads, which clearly hasn't happened. Please elaborate how you're "in the majority"
A vote took place and defederation won. As for why it hasn't happened yet? Go ask The Dude, he seemed keen on defederating Lemmygrad but not so much an alt-right instance.
Our complaints are part of an ongoing conversation about the future of the fediverse. This is a super important moment, and this is the right time for us to flesh out all the little details in our arguments. It's fine for you to disagree, but it's weird for you to jump in and complain about the fact that we're sharing our opinions.
We're not exactly doing a mutiny or anything. We are sharing our opinions on a forum.
You're literally and explicitly intolerant.
The way this instance is managed has been decided already and you don't agree with it, it's that simple. There's no discussion to be had since you're in favor of removing a right the admin gave the users (voting to defederate an instance). Take your pick, there's plenty of other instances to choose from and worst case create your own with your own rules.
And no we're not having a conversation about the future of the fediverse since you're expressing an uninformed opinion because you don't understand decentralization. Deciding the future of the fediverse would require centralization, the whole point is that each part can go in whatever direction it goes, no one can decide how the whole thing should work. If that's what you want then go back to Reddit and apply for an admin job, then you can discuss with people who have power over the direction a whole semi-decentralized system goes.
You are... taking part in the conversation with me. So you do think there's a conversation to be had. And this whole site is a conversation site.
You're worked up. Relax. I haven't hurt you.
But this can also be done by going to the defederated instance directly. Just like you would visit the subreddit directly because it would rarely show up in /r/all
This is exactly it.
Defederation, to my mind (and someone feel free to correct me) is about minimizing a given server's exposure to other servers that, by one definition or another, are problematic. Bots made out of the control of the people maintaining the server, servers with a large concentration of trolls, or other factors that either create risk for an instance owner or a shitty experience for the users as a net group they support.
For anyone crying out "Censorship! Hive minds and safe spaces for soy bois!" - these other instances don't just disappear. You can still reach them, still read them, still make an account there, still capture RSS feeds, etc. etc. As a user, you have plenty of ways to see and interact with whatever instance you choose, even if one instance is defederated from another.
Both explodingheads* and lemmygrad, in my opinion, are appropriate candidates for defederation with the above in mind. Both far-right and far-left politically focused communities with loose moderation are prone to brigading and, given laws around hate speech in Canada, create legal risks for sh.itjust.works (yes, lemmygrad too, calls for or support of genocide against racial or religious minorities are hate speech no matter what your rationale is). Cutting off direct interaction between these instances is a protection to our admin's resources and level of liability.
But if you, personally, want to engage with these communities, there's literally nothing stopping you, you just can't do it from here. Stop expecting that one specific instance will spoon-feed you everything you want, every time - that's how we got to where we are with mainstream social media. Where splinters exist, figure out ways around them.
*mentioned though I think we're still federated with EH? What's the hold up?