Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
Beehaw admins have no responsibility to “Lemmy as a whole” and to believe so is fundamentally misunderstanding what Lemmy instances are. They have a responsibility to their users to curate the space that they promised.
That makes sense. I think this also shows a general misunderstanding. Lemmy isn’t and can’t be a replacement for something like Reddit at the end.
A replacement for reddit in that it’s the same community, culture, and content, as reddit, just hosted in a different place? No. And I hope not.
A replacement for reddit in just being an alternative social media with a similar general vibe but instead is community driven and owned social media system that generally provides better, more informative, and less outrage driven content? I believe it is.
I mean everyone seeks something different out of those communities. I do wish for the second option in general as well. But at the same time get a lot of value out of large communities with a lot of participants and content.
Depend on what you want or need and that’s different for a lot of folks.