So fwiw, if you are looking for feedback here, I have ended up walking away from Lemmy (well, I maybe check the front page 1x every couple of months) in part because I think there’s a population of antagonistic users who effectively game the rules by being antagonistic up to the limits of what’s tolerated. My belief is that trolling reinvents itself every few years, and right now Lemmy is in a spot where it isn’t catching up how modern trolling works.

Which would be awesome. A fediverse that depends on all servers being the same is effectively centralized. A fediverse where there are freestanding reasons for joining any of a million different servers is a fediverse where dependence on outside servers is minimized, which is a good thing.

You want enough content to keep things interested but don’t necessarily need the logic of any and all instances to be that they must depend on access to a server other than the one that operate on in order to be worthy of use.

An advantage of federating is to accommodate servers with a variety of objectives, and maximizing content isn’t always the primary objective. Sometimes it’s to cultivate a good community that uses the tools in on the platform but not necessarily to have the widest reach of content, because creating places that moderate harassment and antagonization is sometimes the higher priority. Sometimes that, and not maximized access to content, is what draws people in. The major influxes of users to Mastodon at it’s start joined for exactly this reason.

I think the concern regarding centralization was always with respect to the network as a whole - all of Twitter is just on Twitter, all of Facebook is just on Facebook, neither are spread across servers. Having multiple servers that exist for their own purpose serves to support decentralization, and having one server that has all the stuff you want that doesn’t connect with other servers is not realistically going to create another Facebook situation in terms of centralization.

I’m also generally wary of arguments that everything needs to be connected because trolls frequently make that argument, hoping to pry open the platform for more harassment, and by design the fediverse is structured to be resilient against that.

I think this is an excellent idea, a worthy project, and I applaud you for putting some real thinking into practical steps!

My federated X wishlist had social media, reddit-like thing, instagram-like thing, and a youtube-like thing. A federated IMDB alternative would be awesome.

but I like that writefreely uses Activitypub and I wanted to have that explicitly,

Plume uses activitypub right?

I mean, you can say it’s similar to anything, depending on what analogy you are trying to make. Then it’s just a question of whether your analogy is constructive or confusing.

I’m reading a book about Lyndon B. Johnson right now, so a convenient analogy for me would be North and South cultural differences in how they reacted to the vicious mutiliation and murder of Emmitt Till. In the South, it was considered unsurprising, not worthy of outrage, not a big deal, and some people even made jokes about it and thought it was funny, or even actively cheered it on. In the North it was a moral horror.

Imagine going into that subject, and insisting that we should be respectful of the cultural differences between the respective sides. That would be small minded shallowness masquerading as an insight on moral tolerance.

But what about [insert analogy] where it’s different? Oh, well with [insert analogy] it’s a question what you are trying to illustrate, and how relevant that is to anything. (A lot of people can coherently make an analogy that is nevertheless not pertinent, which chews up time and sidetracks everybody, and can be an excuse for not engaging with criticisms).

But the point is, there really are cases where it’s perfectly appropriate, even morally necessary, to conclude that certain things shouldn’t be normalized in the name of respecting cultural differences, because that whitewashes away harms. And insisting we shouldn’t engage in judgment is an exercise in shallow, vague and confused invocation of high minded principles in circumstances where they don’t apply.

I should clarify. I mean to say something like “the option to federate or de-federate.” Federating with the bad guys is bad, and the option to defederate from them is good.

I think it’s good that it’s necessary. Reddit runs on teams of sociopathic mods. Masto mods are much more chill and

I think the system of block lists is pretty good. I don’t know if it’s easy to use a block list maintained by other instances, the way you can “subscribe” to adblock lists but I think that’s a good way to handle it, to avoid the big workload, get something that auto-updates, and still have granular moderation.

The function that demonstrably draws chill well-meaning people to mastodon and pushes queer people and minorities away from alternatives like pleroma is demonstrably the ability for administrators to perform full-instance blocks.

This part threw me off. I agree with basically everything you said, but this sentence made it sound like you were saying the opposite. That is, to me it reads like “federating is bad because it pushes queer people and minorities away from Mastodon” even though that’s the opposite of what you mean.

Maybe just me.

Anyway, I think this is 100% right. It’s a good way of circumventing the free speech trolls, whose arguments were 100% in bad faith from day one. So you can pick and choose where you go!

I think one bad effect is that there are some confused people in the middle, who don’t moderate, who will let their communities get poisoned, and I guess I just wish the effort didn’t have to be on each individual mod, because there will be a lot of gaps that let trolls get through.

The cultural difference is about how a society deals with a situation.

Like by normalizing, and spreading cultural acceptance, which directly feeds into how prevalent it is.

Awesome!

Regardless of whether it’s wanted or not, I bet this will be regarded as the flagship instance, and choices made for who gets on the allow list will serve to set a precedent that others may follow in how they decide to federate.

I’ve always said I thought the Nutomic did a great job setting the tone for what was and wasn’t expected/allowed here, and I think it carries on the very excellent standard set by other activitypub projects like Mastodon and Funkwhale in terms of not being open to toxicity. I think the allow list can help with that as well in terms of setting a standard.