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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Reminder that defederation is an explicit feature implemented into fediverse platforms. It is meant to be used as the instance sees fit. The notion that you can never defederate with anyone defeats the purpose of the fediverse, we might as well make one huge centralized platform in that case.
No other instance owes you a federation to your instance. The fediverse's whole philosophy is that instances get to configure both who they federate with and who federates with them.
Finally, there is a certain irony in the people screaming "freedom" and "free speech" telling admins of private instances what they can and can't do with their own platform.
I agree in principle but if it ends up with defederation-by-default, or something similarly restrictive, you'll kill the whole point of the federation and we can just go back to Reddit. IMO it should be used very sparingly (mostly to combat full on spam kinda like with email) and largely let the users themselves decide.
OP rants about seeing garbage from garbage instances but if you actually subscribe to the communities you want, you'll only see comments from those "garbage instances", and there can still be decent people with interesting viewpoints on there.
That's all true. I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow. People are less likely to stick around if there is a high risk that their favorite communities becomes fractured into isolated instances.
If that was the argument presented I doubt there would be any argument to begin with. Saying ‘hey, you might not want to break connections with site for no reason so your users aren’t surprised or worry that they…so on and so forth’ could be met with a ‘hey, thanks for the advice’ and everyone would have moved on. Accusing them of censorship and attacking someone else’s freedom of speech because you don’t think a personal decision they made was justified because other people utilizing their platform expected something else is a completely different animal.
The onus is on the user to keep track of what the instance they're on is doing. Beehaw behaved in a manner that I don't agree with, so I chose not to sign up there. Lemmy.world has so far defederated from instances I would also choose to defederate from. If the admins ever start defederating willy-nilly without good cause, I'll choose another instance.
I would argue that the Fediverse is inherently more stable than other platforms. The big platforms are defined by inconsistency. If you don't like it, you can take your ball and go home and that's your only choice. The Fediverse lets you take your ball anywhere you want. You don't even need to change apps