Comment on With the current situation with Tiktok, it's time for the Fedivers to rise.
OpenStars@piefed.social 22 hours agoRegarding the Threadiverse in general, it seems that (1) many people find having to choose an instance first to be very confusing (not applicable to your situation I guess), (2) upon arrival these primarily Western people immediately see content proposing the murder of Westerners and demolition of the entire Western culture, whereupon they nope right back out (can you blame them?) and then complain bitterly about their toxic experiences here on other platforms, including Reddit and Bluesky and X.
Most of us forget how extensive our blocklists here have grown to be over time, and how much effort we put into Linux levels of tinkering to discover communities we like while blocking content we do not.
If I am wrong then please ignore me, but it’s a thought to consider.
Of course mostly it’s a network effect, so I am speaking about issues that we might actually be able to do something about.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 21 hours ago
Just checked my blocklist to remind myself and... yep. Yeah that's a big blindspot for us, the pruning and curating of the space has to be done by hand. New users, and especially younger users, are often used to that being done for them by the platform itself.
The fediverse is like a massive yet untamed garden filled with various species, some beautiful, many poisonous. They don't see gloves and shears and see opportunity, they see a chore.
OpenStars@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Agreed.
It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don’t know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.
It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.
A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.
So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.
MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Does defederating from hexbear also require defederating from other instances thar federate with hexbear?
OpenStars@piefed.social 9 hours ago
No? Life is rarely binary.
For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy’s actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven’t tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)
Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for “the dunk” and extremely likely to break your own instance’s rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community’s own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.
Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 9 hours ago
The way I understand the ActivityPyb protocol, it is Publisher/Subscriber paradigm. That means when you federate with another instance, you receive (Subscribe to) the things they Publish, and they subscribe to the things Hexbear publishes. So they don't "reblog" Hexbear just because they receive Hexbear content. Their users would have to deliberately reshare the content in some way (on Kbin/Mbin, this is done by Boosting, on Mastodon it's Resharing, etc etc).