Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
A lot of it is people wanting to avoid another Eternal September .
If you have a community you’ve built, and like, a flood of people who don’t understand the culture and behavioral expectations swarming in can be viewed as, frankly, an unwanted invasion.
I also think if this was some new startup (say, Bluesky) instead of Meta, there’d be a different tune, but that’s because a good portion of the people who run the communities and invest their time and money into building the community they want were burned by the aggressive enshittification that Meta is basically synonymous with at this point.
TLDR: this has happened before, and it’s absolutely destroyed communities just due to the sheer volume of people who don’t understand how to behave swarming in and drowning out everyone who the community originally belonged to.
Now, this is a great case! I totally understand culture and overall vibe of communities, and I think if you have a very special niche or different community, it’s fine to defederate. Problem is general instances like lemmy.world
Yeah in that case I’d agree; if you’re on a giant public server that anyone can sign up to, I’m not sure there’s any particular value to be found in defederating anyone, other than places with uh, questionable content.
Thing is, define “questionable content.” Then look at it the way a bad actor would. How can it be abused. To some, any LGBT+ content is “questionable.” To others, advancement of minorities. Who gets to draw the line? Who gets to decide what’s “questionable.”
I was attempting to say CSAM without saying CSAM.
There has to be a middle ground. Applying to be in communities sounds good but what’s the point of a public forum that isn’t public. At some point if you continually defederate others, don’t you become the defederated one?
I think that defederation is the middle ground.
One extreme is The Algorithm tells you who you’re going to talk to, and shoves junk at you nonstop, and the other is that you have to just accept and filter through whatever gets posted with no filtering at all.
Defederation puts the control back in the hands of, if not the users, then at least the administrators and mods of a community; if you can control who can see your content, and what posts you see then and only then do you own the platform instead of being a faceless number that’s only there to be shoved into a dashboard to calculate your revenue value.
One could argue that there is actually less transparency from an admin than there is from a corporation. An admin has complete control over an instance and zero oversight if they want to be shitty without being caught. Ideally the “hive mind” would weed this out and defederation IS a tool to deal with it, but the control argument can go both ways. In all cases we start by trusting the controller is acting in our best interests and need ways of handling things when trust is broken. Defederation, as the sole tool, might be too heavy handed.