Why YSK: Choosing an instance with defederation policies you’re most comfortable with is important to make your Fediverse experience smooth in the long run.
Here is a chart showing the defederation count of each instance.
| Instance | Defederated with how many other instances |
|---|---|
| beehaw.org | 405 |
| feddit.de | 101 |
| lemmy.world | 63 |
| lemmy.ml | 44 |
| sh.itjust.works | 4 |
| exploding-heads.com | 3 |
You can get it by going to the instance’s instance list and scrolling/Ctrl+Fing down to “Blocked Instances”. To find the instance list, go to https://your-instance.url/instances, for example, https://lemmy.world/instances
This is kinda why I wish we had user-level instance blocking, there aren’t any popular instances that match my preferred blocklist and I don’t want to have to go out and request federation for everything I want to see. For example, the top sites I don’t want to see are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, and exploding-heads, and while beehaw gets all three, they also block instances I don’t find problematic like lemmy.world.
So I ended up on lemmy.world and manually block all the stuff I don’t want to see, but it’d be loads easier if I could just ask not to be shown content from instances I want to avoid.
Kbin allows user-level instance blocking, so that functionality should be feasible to implement in lemmy eventually.
Couldn’t this be accomplished by deploying your own personal instance? Or am I missing something.
You’re right, however it might not be that simple especially when considering costs.
Pretty cheap if your personal server is just for you… And even if you want to add a few friends & family. I plan on starting my own instance next month.
In my country those prices I looked up were far from cheap 🙃 but soon I hope I do get the money to have my own server
If you’re on android, connect has the ability to filter whole instances.
Beehaw federates with lemmy.ml
I find the whole thing a bit infuriating actually. I get the reasons for all the other defeds and actually support them. Unfortunately they refuse to do so with lemmy.ml because it’s one of the largest instances and their users usually don’t start shit on beehaw?
lemmygrad and exploding-heads I can understand but why lemmy.ml? It’s a general purpose instance with no known bot/Nazi/Tanky/other fascist/etc. infestion.
I thought lemmy.ml was run by the same people as lemmygrad. (And the Lemmy code creators)
At the beginning (of the reddit exodus) the admins were definitely banning people from lemmy.ml for being “critical of the Chinese government” calling it racism. (“Orientalism” was their term.)
I switched to lemmy.world that same day, and haven’t really kept up with that instance since then.
I think it’s funny when assholes (and it’s always the assholes of any group) scream that anything slightly challenging a point of view is racist/phobic…no it’s not you fuck heads there can be legitimate different points of view without it being from hate. For example I’m an American, some shit we do well, lots more shit we do poorly, but calling anyone who calls the US on their bullshit “racist/phobic/current term de jour” makes me assume the person accusing is a moron and their opinion shouldn’t matter…it only gets weird when you have two genuine morons trying to claim the high ground like say a white supremacists being upset a black supremacist is calling them out, they both suck.
I’m sorry…I’m in Florida and there’s so much goddamn stupidity here it’s insane. Take drag shows…have you ever been to one? I’m straight straight…but drag shows are a blast, everyone leans in enjoys themselves and move on. The shows are aimed at adults and spend no time indoctrinating kids unlike the Catholic church…hell I can’t think of one news story about a kid getting molested at a drag show/brunch/library hour, can’t say the same for church, but nobody is trying to protect the kids from getting diddled by “god’s” messengers.
I’ve lost my point, but fuck Florida.
I’ve tagged you as incoherent. ✌️
I’d have to see some specific examples to pass judgement.
Here ya go: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199
Edit: be sure to scroll down for the admin comments on the matter.
And note that I do not know if they have since changed course on this for lemmy.ml
Holy crap. This should be it’s own post. Just purged all the “serious” communities I was following on there.
I know what you mean but I had to laugh because I linked a post. That is to say, it was its own post haha.
I’m not going to lie, I’m constantly waffling between Lemmy and kbin in no small part because Lemmy (the software) is maintained by that same admin.
Haha yeah, good point. I guess I should have specified it would be a good post on this community specifically where people look to find handy tips for using Lemmy effectively. The fact that one of the huge instances where a lot of your search results come from when you’re starting out looking for content has such an aggressive pro-totalitarian moderation strategy is an unexpected, but very useful insight.
I’m using Lemmy because it looked easier to set up but damn, once there’s kbin apps I might have to look into switching my server over to kbin.
I get you. I’m left leaning politically but after seeing life under totalitarian leftist regimes first hand, that’s a hard pass for me and I find myself struggling with interacting with people who think that’s okay.
Even though I like lemmy more than kbin, I’ve been thinking of switching too because Earnest sounds like a great guy whose philosophy is more in alignment with what I believe in.
Is this the admin response you’re referring to?
That is one of them. He comments throughout the threads.
This seems to have been taken out of context. Their response seems to be about a supposed “white genocide” some white supremacists have thought up and I fully agree with him that that’s bunk.
I don’t know how to share a specific context with N number of context like I could on Reddit yet. See the comment they’re replying to. They’re only using “white genocide” as an example of something people wouldn’t call you a “genocide denier” over you disagreeing with.
I feel like it’s more important to know why these defederations happened than how many there are. Well beehaw just screams their reason with their number but that’s a separate thing.
Way too complicated and tedious. Do you audit the blacklist of your adblocker? Doubtful.
For the vast majority of people, a cliff’s notes and prior experience with an instance’s general moderation policy and trustworthiness will have to suffice. Not so different that choosing a social media platform or subreddit, really.
In my experience, I think these numbers correlate nicely with how curated the moderation is and inversely proportional to the tolerance to objectionable content from a moderate POV.
and inversely proportional to how tolerant they are to extreme views… just to be balanced
Looking at my instance, all defederated instances (that are still up) are spam, child porn, or straight up Nazis advocating for violence against minorities.
Why is beehaw so high?
When they defederated from lemmy.world, the stated reason was the open registration policy. Their registration process is handled manually. I suspect that they operate a much tighter ship when it comes to moderation. This has it perks and problems.
I tried to sign up to check it out, but apparently the essay I had to write pledging my undying commitment to a community I had not even experienced yet was insufficient to be accepted. Their loss.
Mine was the same. I am generally a nice person, I just want a nice place to comment to people, talk about gaming, cars/motorcycles, animals and technology but I wasn’t good enough somehow. I literally wrote a paragraph. No idea what I had to say to get in.
I’m just a derpysmilingcat, I’m not evil lol
It could be their goal is not to be folks primary casual browsing instance, so just being someone that is stopping in to hang out isn’t quite what they are looking for.
Same happened to me! I figured I’d find an instance hosted closer to my home anyway and I found this little instance that I’ve really enjoyed.
IDK, I don’t feel like I had to say that much to get in with my alt. I just wrote about how I liked having some more heavily moderated spaces to discuss sensitive topics. I even mentioned that I planned to maintain an alt to access less moderated spaces, just that I also intended to respect the culture and the vibe of Beehaw when interacting there.
I signed up and my blurb was very short and basically said that I like bunnies and they have some nice looking communities including one about pets. Got approved. It was basically what I just wrote so I don’t know why others are being declined.
Everywhere else something like “I like to make electronics projects and play with computers.” is sufficient.
They are trying to create a “Safe and friendly place”.
They started with a commonly shared fediverse block list a lot of mastodon instances and stuff start up with. Since they’ve also defederated some instances that allow child porn, some political extreme instances, and some very large instances they couldn’t moderate the influx from.
They also defederated from instances that have open sign-ups because they allow bots to join too easily. This included lemmy.world.
That’s what I meant with the last part
The most unpleasant people I’ve encountered here have all come from lemmy.world, so perhaps this wasn’t such a bad move for them.
Pretty sure there are no significant instances that allow child porn.
That would depend if you think lolicon or hentai of canonically underage characters in general is CP or not.
Doesn’t matter in the case of Beehaw though because they defederate from any instance that allows pornographic NSFW content of any kind period - as do probably a majority of instances, at least until Lemmy creates better filtering systems.Beehaw federates with porn instances like lemmynsfw.com
Indeed. Hence, no one was all that bothered by the defederation from a large list of small instances with problem material. The question is “why is the number so high” and that’s a large part of it
there probably aren’t any big ones, but i bet there’s lots of tiny ones
With the federation system, if you run a Lemmy instance and one of your users subscribes to an instance that hosts CP, does your own server end up hosting CP? Or does Lemmy tell the browser to retrieve the actual content directly from the original server?
My understanding is that the image is still hosted wherever it is normally (probably the original Lemmy instance) but everything else from the post and comments come over. I’m not sure how well that would fly in a court when you can still access it via
yourinstance.com/c/cp.com.
beehaw.org at 405
Jeeez, that pretty much cements my reason for moving over from them. Defederating lemmy.world and other big instances for moderation reasons was reasonable for the time being, but that sheer number overall shows the control they want over their instance, and so much is excluded as a result, a lot of it likely due to ideological misalignment.
When moving over from that other site it was the first instance I tried, for no particular reason.
They made me write a statement why I would want to join the instance (okay, you need to filter the bots, fair enough) so I wrote a nice little text to let them know. I guess I failed to write the keywords they were looking for, so they denied my application.
That told me all I needed to know about the mods.
I would have just closed the page the second they asked me to write an essay on why I deserve to be on their website, lol.
Eh, lemmynsfw.com has a similar sign up for. The difference is that they accepted the reason “this is my porn account”
Honestly you could say because you like to talk about tacos and it would get approved most of the time. We have that turned on because otherwise we’ll get 60k spam users overnight. Email verification costs money especially if you’re being spammed with 60k requests and the statement box stops all of it.
Lol, you just need to write a sentence or two. I just wrote that I was leaving reddit and beehaw looked cool.
Same here. I wrote a statement saying why I wanted to join. They had a community there that no one else had at the time, so I mentioned how I wanted to participate in the community there.
Got denied like 2 weeks later, but it was during that time they defederated from lemmy.world. At that point I knew I was wasting my time waiting to see if I’d get accepted or denied.
I didn’t even get a response lol, they just never let me log in
Last time I looked at the list, It’s mostly an imported list of horrible mastodon/pleroma instances, not Lemmy servers, and seemed reasonable to me. Go take a look at a few.
Why did we even defederate from beehaw?
Lemmy.world hasn’t defederated with beehaw, as far as I know. Beehaw has been down for a little following the lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works compromise to patch their software; that may be why you’re not seeing beehaw content if you haven’t been.
Beehaw did defederate from Lemmy.world, though, due to the open sign up policy meaning that users could bypass their account creation restrictions, creating additional workload that their moderators could not handle with the current Lemmy toolkit.
I think it’s worth mentioning the amount of instances full of bots as well. I just started hosting my own instance and decided to check other instances’ block lists to defederate from at least some bot instances. I now have about 50 blocked instances. (instances with 60k or so users each with no posts)
Whats in .jugler.jp and in burgit.moe? If even the nazis dont whant to have anything to do with them then they must be really bad.
Probably loli hentai which would be illegal in many jurisdictions.
deleted by creator
Great post! I want to add to this, you can use this site to check what instance blocked who https://federation-checker.vercel.app/
Search with lowercase, for some reason did lemmy.world not show all the instances that blocked them only instances they blocked when L or W was in capital letters.
So is it possible for users in lemmy.world to see content from beehaw? Does this only limit beehaw users from seeing content on lemmy.world?
Lemmy.world users can see behaw posts, but beehaw users can’t see Lemmy.world posts. Comments cannot be seen by anyone outside their home instance.
Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world, but Lemmy.world did not defederate from beehaw.
If you look at a Lemmy.world community through beehaw, you will only see posts from before defederation, or posts made by unaware beehaw users.
What do you mean by comments cannot be seen by other instances?
If instance.c has defederated with instance.a and instance.b, instance.a can still comment and post on communities from instance.c—but neither instance.c nor instance.b can see those posts and comments.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure it goes both ways.
You are wrong. Defederation only goes both ways if both instances decide to defederate each other.
Beehaw and Lemmy.world was one way only. You can see all of beehaw’s posts, but none of your interactions will leave your home instance.
The comments under a post will only be from Lemmy.world users, however.
Thank you for clearing that up. I feel like I’ve heard both yes and no to this question. Still learning everything so it’s hard to recall what was correct. Also just want to say how cool it is that people don’t make you feel dumb for being wrong here. That’s one thing I will not miss about Reddit.
You can view beehaw through a browser. If you want to check for yourself. I did verify this by viewing the same community from beehaw and not just before commenting so I’m pretty certain I’m giving accurate information.
Welcome to Lemmy, I hope you enjoy your time here.
EDIT: upon further checking, what I have been saying seems to be inaccurate. It seems beehaw is no longer sharing posts, the newest beehaw post I can find in Lemmy.world is from 2 days ago. It is likely that 0.18.1 blocks post sharing to defederated instances.
So users in instance lemmy.world can see only the post in beehaw but not the comments in beehaw, because beehaw defederated from lemmy.world (one way only)? This actually creates more questions for me.
Why it is not possible to see beehaw users comments if lemmy.world has not defederated from beehaw?
Can I see comments on that post from users in instances that didn’t defederate from lemmy.world? Can I reply to those users?
When you view any content on Lemmy, you are viewing and interacting with the local copy on your local instance.
Federation means that your instances’s local copy should be up to date. Any changes or comments made on your local instance will be sent to the host’s instance, to update the master copy there, which is then sent out all other instances.
Defederation cuts this off, leaving users only able to interact with their instance’s local copy.
Posts are public. Any instance can download posts, so when Lemmy.world asks beehaw for new posts, it gets them so you can see all of beehaw’s posts, and get your content.
Beehaw defederated with Lemmy.world, so beehaw is no longer requesting updated posts from Lemmy.world. So beehaw users will see increasingly out of date local versions of Lemmy.world communities if they try to view them.
Defederation also means that beehaw blocks anything that requires two-way communication, such as comments and votes. This is why beehaw will have mostly empty comment sections on Lemmy.world.
If you post or comment on a beehaw community, that interaction will not be federated. Beehaw will not get it, beehaw will not add it to the master copy.
But Lemmy.world added your content to its local copy. Other lemmy.world users will see it, but no one else. Even an instance in full federation with both, because instances only get updates from the master copy on the community’s host. And defedrration means you cannot update the host’s copy of the community.
This behavior is weird and confusing and not user friendly. I think future versions should treat one way defederated communities as unavailable or read only. Content that is out of date without explanation, or comments that go nowhere without an user-facing error message is not good ux.
This is a great explanation, thanks.
Thanks. Very clear.
Well that sucks, is it possible to transfer our account to another instance then?
My understanding is that we cannot. I’ve seen people talking about it maybe becoming a thing in the future, but right now the only option is to just go register your name on another instance. Alternatively, I guess you can host your own instance with just you (or a few friends I guess) and then you control what gets federated, but for me that seems like a little too much work right now. I may consider that in the future if I had more free time.
Not yet, but is planned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
https://github.com/bunburya/lemmy2opml
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
some tools you can use to transfer your subscriptions and such.
It was my understanding that defederation was a one way thing? So if instance A defederates instance B, A will not see anything from B but B could still see things from A?
I can’t get past your username, you degenerate
Thank you
That’s a far stick up ones ass there at Beehaw.
They don’t like federating with instances with open signups
There are plenty of open instances on their federated list, ones that aren’t bot farms though
meh. to each their own.
That’s the whole point of the fediverse, at least from my perspective. embrace the smaller communities as much as the big ones. same with open vs closed. they all serve their purpose and minimizes a homogeneous environment that allows niches to exist, much like the early internet.
Maybe consider altering your links so that they point to the /instances pages of each site so that people can go directly to the list of federated and defederated instances for each. Likely there are people who haven’t yet discovered that page.
Is there a way to see what specific instances each instance has defederated from? Just curious
Click on “instances” on the bottom of the page
Yep. Jumped between a couple of instances because of it.
- beehaw.org: 405
- feddit.de: 101
- lemmy.world: 63
- lemmy.m:l 44
- sh.itjust.works: 4
- exploding-heads.com: 3
who owns the urls?
