why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? “This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”.
The problem is that it’s not one single person deciding to unsubscribe to a newsletter - it’s one single person deciding to unsubscribe hundreds to thousands of other people.
I don’t want other people deciding what I am or am not allowed to see, which is why I’m on lemm.ee in the first place. There are plenty of other instances out there that are more than happy to make all of your decisions for you if that’s what you want, but this is one of the very few larger instances not like that, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 1 year ago
Defederation is a big deal because it's a solution that acts like a bomb, indiscriminate and destructive.
"I don't like this" great. Lots of people don't like stuff, and they shouldn't sub to stuff they don't like, and unsub or block users and communities they don't like.
The problem is that someone is making a final decision for everyone on that instance, about everyone on the other instance.
Person A on instance A doesn't like something Person B on instance B said. So they call for defederate. Suddenly, nobody on Instance A can see anything anyone on Instance B says and vice versa. Person C on instance A wasn't offended, Person D on Instance A liked Person B's content. Persons E and F on Instance B are perfectly fine people who never did anything wrong.
But nope, Person A defederates, and now nobody on either instance can talk unless they want to either hop around instances trying to find instances that are neutral to both(and there is such a thing as "guilt by association" on the fediverse so Instances might defederate just for not defederating with Instance B), or they'll need to have a bunch of accounts to get onto a bunch of different parts of the fediverse.
Defederation in anything but the most extreme of circumstances is actively damaging to the fediverse. Prior to the reddit migration, most lemmy instances were highly trigger happy with defederation, and fairly ban happy too. Thus, the system just stagnated. People still actively avoid the threadiverse because nobody wants to be walking on eggshells wondering what incorrect political opinion is going to get everyone on their instance dumped.
It's particularly bad with lemmy, because communities are server-centered instead of being decentralized. If you're subscribed to a bunch of communities on an instance and that instance defederates from you, then you're not only disconnected from the people on that instance, you're disconnected from all the other people on all the other instances connected to that community.
So rather than "I'm unsubscribing from this newsletter I don't like", it's "I don't like some of the articles in this newsletter, so I'm going to force everyone on my block to unsubscribe whether they want to or not"