I am still playing around with Lemmy like I am sure a lot of people are. I have accounts on multiple instances to see how things are and what not.
I understand why beehaw decided to defederate with .world, I just didn’t think much about the consequence of it after it happened. Today I was browsing the !anime@lemmy.ml from my beehaw account and looked at the same from my this .ml account and realized I am missing so posts… Any user from .world posting a discussion thread for an anime I watch from, I can’t participate in…
I could create my own discussion post about the anime, but now there are two posts going about the same thing. beehaw users would be able to see and participate in this now, but every other instance will see two posts. Duplicating the same thing and splitting the discussion unnecessarily.
I love the power, control, and principles behind Lemmy and the wider fediverse, its just something that is annoying me at the moment. Its amazing for taking care of spam instances (70k users with no posts? yea right), but when one large/popular instance spanks another, it can be problematic. Thinking of maybe self hosting (which I am no stranger to) as a way to avoid an issue like this in future.
Still like Lemmy and wanting to push through these “quirks”, but just wanted to vent a little.
Defederation is simultaneously very useful and very dangerous.
Large instances have the power to kill smaller ones by defederating them, since they control an overwhelming share of Fediverse content. That is a lot of power in the hands of a small group of people, each potentially with their own views and agendas.
I think defederation should be reserved for openly malicious servers and used as an absolute last resort. Think of the Internet and how horrible it would be if countries decided to just disconnect from other countries based on conflicting ideologies.
The vast majority of users on legitimate instances just want to explore interesting things, share some thoughts and have a good time. Defederating hurts legitimate users the most, trolls can easily hop instances and find another way to troll.