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maegul@lemmy.ml 3 months agoDefederation might be part of that
As you say, it’s a very blunt tool and likely only able to create more civil interactions by creating a fairly strong echo chamber.
My perspective on “defederation” conversations, hinted at in my comment above, is that it’s a new “tool”, a new phenomenon etc. Nothing like it existed on reddit for example. And so it’s natural that there will be “unwise”, premature and overzealous calls to use it as though it’s the solution to many of our social media problems, when in reality it’s a relatively subtle tool best used in concert with active and relatively sophisticated community building and organising.
Which all makes sense to me. But what’s a little sad I think is that we have here a pretty good compromise between “absolute free speech is bad” and “censorship is bad” for social media, and instead of embracing it as an ideology we’ve gotten some loud voices eager to use it as a territorial weapon for drawing boundaries around spaces for everyone else without, AFAICT, much the same in the way of actually building spaces that suit people’s needs (though that happens too of course).
If one wants or needs a space that is shut off completely from what one would call “extreme” politics, that’s totally fine. Doesn’t mean all of lemmy world and half or more of the communities on lemmy should be cut off in a big “us and them” statement. Instead … you probably need an instance that caters to that world view. You may need to try to start organising it yourself if it doesn’t exist. Except, that’s harder than posting a “lets defederate” post.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
I think I mostly agree. The thing with that, we could solve a lot of the issues with technology. Give users more tools to decide what content and which users to expose themselves to. Maybe hide or collapse content on a user level. But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy. And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don't see things change substancially, the way it is.
One good thing about the Fediverse is everyone can have their own instance and make their own rules. Theoretically that enables us to have a locked down "safe" space and an anarchic place with freedom of speech next to each other.
In practice most people don't lean towards the extremes, you're right. I want something in between. Not just a*holes and trolls but some meaningful discussions. I wouldn't want to be on a free speech instance. But I also don't want to be in a bubble all day. So something in the middle would be appreciated.
maegul@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Tools could always be better for sure! This is still beta software after all! And the fediverse ecosystem is still finding its feet.
That being said … isn’t subscribing to communities a pretty good tool already? I ask because it strikes me that many here might be talking about the “all” feed. If so, that’d be a case of people just not using the tools given to them (and also an abuse of this system frankly).
Think I’m totally with you there. The fediverse for me has been a bit of a let down in terms of how much it has just recreated big social platforms without more experimentation. It’s early days and all so I don’t want to be harsh on all the devs. They’ve done great things. But it does feel like some basic revamping could be quite nice.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
I don't get that either. The "All" feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren't even funny... I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the "All" feed. I still don't get it.
I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don't get implemented. Maybe they're just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don't seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I'd like to have something in the middle. And I think we've already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.
maegul@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Yea, I was surprised to learn this too. I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet it isn’t insignificant. I learned of the practice from a thread of people recommending to others that they use “All” and block all “the bad instances” to “clean it up” … and I was just kinda shocked at how much of an indifference to the design of the system and all of the community management and moderation all of the mods do not to mention an abuse of the federation mechanics to just block whole instances on a whim.
If it’s not too much to ask … do you have any descriptions or links or clues to see more of this?
Generally, there are quite a few people who feel this way about the fediverse as a whole. The sorts of people who are open to seeing all of this as an opportunity to make some progress on what “big social” did (perhaps like you and I). I’ve connected with a few in my time here (mostly over on mastodon) and the general feeling I’ve picked on is that all of this (incl the protocol itself) so far is a good “first step” or “prototype”, but that moving on to the next step and taking stock of what lessons have been learned could happen soon-ish.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I guess most want to discover new communities.
Maybe something like quiblr.com ?