Comment on we need more users
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week agoI did not make this up, nor do I think that the sign-up procedure is inherently difficult. But this is something cited by many people over in the bad place, e.g. in r/RedditAlternatives. So it seems relevant to the OP, asking for more users, to cite why they claim that they do not want to come here. Yes the cost may be low, but there still is a cost.
And here I presumed that you meant “signing up”, but if we meant to fully switch… yes that is actually super destructive to the Threadiverse in particular, but also is precisely what happens, on all of Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and nodeBB too I would presume.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m just going to restart my point for clarity.
Any barriers to bringing on users into the fediverse at any level is destructive to the future survival of the fediverse. This is specifically an issue that came up during any of the waves of migration we see from the bad place.
At various times there have been bans, both temp and outright, for all kinds of reasons, for both agreeable and disagreeable reasons, but regardless the impact is destructive to the fediverse.
Social networks thrive on users and through scaling aquire different properties. It’s more about the math of what it takes to keep a stable network and there is no getting around that. The “come one come all” approach things like the bad place use allows them to capture that kind of growth and without it, it’s just not possible to have the kind of detailed and varied and populated network you would get otherwise.
There have been specific moderation choices that have significantly curtailed and hurt the growth of the fediverse on all sides. Defederation is a huge one. Overly dogmatic moderation is another.
Like I agree that I don’t want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the “tankie”-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 week ago
If you want maximum federation in your instance, lemmy.zip exists.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s got nothing whatsoever with what I want.
It only has to do with the math of how large networked systems function.
Right now the fediverse is unstable and unsustainable. balkanization is a huge contributing factor.
It’s not a preference thing. If you want the fediverse to survive we all need it to be bigger and balkanization prohibits that
Skavau@piefed.social 1 week ago
Most of the major instances do federate with each other though. The only notable difference in terms of content you’ll get is if you like hexbear/lemmygrad currently.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
HARD disagree.
First, it’s the actual reason cited by many people, over in r/RedditAlternatives, as the reason that they left. They did not inquire as what place they might go to that has more tankies - they wanted exclusively fewer.
Second, lemm.ee tried to federate with everyone, and look how that turned out? Literally nobody word-wide was willing to step up and put up with all the crap slung at them on a literally daily basis, so the entire instance was shuttered. Hexbear likewise almost died off, as they pissed off their admins and then one forgot to keep the domain license renewed, plus remember that time that one of their admins was caught literally lying to other instance admins? There is zero possibility of calling that instance one that “engages in good faith”.
Third, the developers of Lemmy for years lied to us and told us that the ability to block all the users on an instance would be coming - but then when they delivered it, we found out that users blocked in that manner could still read, vote on, and respond to you, even send you a DM, and then a subsequent release of Lemmy weakened those walls even further by adding the ability for blocked users to trigger notifications to your account. Why should incels collectively have more “rights” than the people who do not want to have to put up with them? You can say that I am a bad person on the internet because I do not enjoy walking into a Nazi bar… and you can say that about all of the other people that took one look at Lemmy and noped right back out to Reddit, but whatever you call us, your rights end where ours begin. And you cannot force those people who left here to come back, and offer us content. That’s just not how people work.
Fourth, tankies are calling for the literal murder of people in and the actual downfall of Western civilization. I feel like it is perfectly understandable then that people who live in Western civilization might not feel entirely at home and welcomed here?
Many of us only came to the Threadiverse because of Kbin, not Lemmy. And now many of us remain only because of PieFed, not Lemmy. Tankies are causing people to shy away from Lemmy, not the anti-tankies who want to expand it to make even more people feel welcomed, by e.g. making dealing with them be opt-in rather than something that takes thousands and thousands and thousands of clicks as you have to block people one by singular one. Your rights to freedom of speech and by extension to let them have the same should not allowed to trump my own rights to not have to listen, unless I explicitly want to. They are free to speak, but why should an instance be forced to platform them and spread their message further, without the ability to withdraw consent? Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort… and against echo chamber instances not operating in good faith, it’s a great tool to carve out safe spaces on the Threadiverse where people can not have to listen to their disingenuous edge-lord crap. Thank you for listening - I hope I have offered something interesting to think about - and have a good day.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The math that underpins large networked systems isn’t something you can disagree with. Smaller in those kinds of systems are always less sustainable. Instance level moderation choices like defederation have directly contributed to the balkanization (you can agree or disagree with if it’s a good thing to do so; the preference make no difference) of the Lemmy chunk of the fediverse.
Smaller, less networked systems are more unstable and less sustainable. Period.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
Your argument is disingenuous. You appeal to “math”, btw without demonstrating any proof of that math, but then you also used words like “destructive” and “crippled”, which are not mathematical in the slightest! Your argument devolves into just-trust-me-bro and i-am-very-smart. Surely you have some crypto that you would like to sell me as well?
Yes defederation makes a network less fully connected, but I suggest you reexamine the principles of the federated model, which does not require a fully connected network to begin with, and in fact one of its chief strengths lies in how it can handle such disconnection points. The only way it “cripples” anything is when an edgelord teenager no longer has a captive audience “forced” to receive their spew - yes, their feewings do get hurt, but the rest of the network gets stronger for having cut them out. Like a cancer that must be sacrificed for the health of the rest of the body to live.
CONSENT MUST MATTER, or we have no freedoms at all. They have the right to speak, and I demand the right to not have to listen to it, if I do not want to.
The fact that their admins are operating in bad faith and cannot control the toxicity of their members is not my own fault, but my response is under my own control. Even, as we literally see happening, if that means leaving the Threadiverse entirely.
Also, don’t miss the point where the Lemmy devs have left no other option besides full defederation, if you truly do not want to receive messages from people on that instance. In theory this could have been a different conversation if the “instance blocking” actually functioned as advertised, but instead it allows users from those instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, and send you DMs, which even trigger notifications, the same as any unblocked user. That is no kind of “blocking” at all, so alrighty then, full defederation is the only option provided by the developers that will achieve the desired effect. (But this argument only affects the practicality of whatever solution is deployed, while I still think that consent should matter hence defederation should be allowed even on purely theoretical grounds. An instance admin should not be “forced” to receive messages that they do not want - CSAM being an absolutely perfect example of that.)