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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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This is only a problem because lemmy.world has become one of the centralized hubs for Lemmy, which means that jettisoning them has a larger impact. The failing of lemmy.world is a reminder that we should be intentionally spreading out to smaller instances, that way a bad admin/instance can be cut off without losing much value. Additionally, by lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc having such a grip on the core of Lemmy, they are emboldened to make bad changes without fearing consequences.
Totally. I would love to stand up an instance but it’s a little above my tech knowledge and, frankly, I don’t want to have to think about the legal aspects of what happens on it.
If I ever somehow did it, I would probably not allow photos/videos. Disable downvotes. Things like that.
The more users spread out into smaller, more easily censored instances, the more the remaining fragmented bits of the Lemmy ecosystem still talking to each other will turn into echo chambers full of groupthink. This low threshold for defederation is the Fediverse's greatest weakness. Sure, it's possible to work around it—but how many separate Lemmy accounts are users expected to create? Even if you have accounts on every instance of note you'd need to manually cross-post messages to each balkanized server and their comment sections wouldn't be shared—exactly the sort of thing federation was meant to avoid.
Email, another federated system, has this same weakness. It's why it's increasingly difficult to run your own (outgoing) email server which other systems will accept messages from without going through a well-known third party like Google. Especially when trying to push content to a large audience (e.g. mailing lists), which happens to be Lemmy's core function.
Bluesky is using content addressing to deal with this, although currently it is only built around feeds and not forums. Your profile is truly portable and posts can optionally be retrieved from "mirrors" (one of the CDN-like servers called BGS) so you don't need to rely on your current hosting server (the account hosts called PDS) to federate with everybody.
I'm not the All-Keeper of Receipts on this matter and I don't have a Lemmy.World account, this is just what I've gleaned from various posts coming across my timeline. My comment you're replying to was also meant more to emphasize the strength of decentralization against this kind of behavior, both reactive and proactive, instead of being a shot at Lemmy.World directly.
That said, from my understanding, there's a few things they've done recently that users are questioning. They've changed their TOS/Code of Conduct, dropping some explicit protections for the usual protected classes i.e. gender identity/ethnicity/disability/etc and generally making the rules more unclear than before. The thread here is a brief look into that, and I especially appreciate the post by fiat_lux within it. Note the admin Xilly has responded within and said they would look into adding these things back, but obviously the conspicuous removal of them caused a lot of eyebrow-raising. A couple extra threads about this are here and here
A user was also recently banned for questioning the TOS, which they report here, and provide an archive.org link to their comments here, since the L.W team wiped their account out when banning them. Their comment seems like a very fair criticism, which the L.W admins supposedly invoked users to provide. This clearly seems like a power-tripping admin taking personal offense and deliberately permabanning and wiping out their account in direct response to the user's concerns of this exact thing happening, giving the impression of immaturity and laissez-faire enforcement of the rules. Additionally, wiping out a user's content while banning them is a good way to cover your tracks on the actual ban reason. It's a good thing archive.org was available to catch this one.
Speaking of archive.org, L.W has also recently started banning archive.org links and any posts that question that decision, which is discussed here.
I'm really not invested into this saga so if someone else has more receipts or insight on these situations feel free to add on.
Banning the Internet Archive???? What on earth is happening over there???