Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I don’t believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I’ve seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn’t like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren’t forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn’t an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.
The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn’t be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.
In general, I’ve found myself happier and discussions more interesting when I replace a lemmy.ml community wo with one from another instance. When there are two competing communities with similar active users, i’ve found the non-lemmy.ml one to be better by pretty much any metric.
So it does work. Make a better community and users will come.