Hey all, I recently left reddit like many of you. I have a question regarding lemmy and the fediverse on the history of banning and defederation. I have noticed several posts calling for varying communities to be disconnected. were these removal requests as prevalent before the mass migration? Usually I am all for communities existsting in their own spaces, barring illegal content. I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
I think when I started out with Lemmy a few weeks ago I would have agreed with you. And a lot of that is because “Lemmy” (and kbin) are put out there as alternatives to reddit itself. And the answer to the question about “well, which server do I join?” Seems to be “Pick a server! Any server! They’re all equivalent!” And I have learned that’s very incorrect and I think that’s the wrong framework.
Each server is it’s own alternative to reddit.com. ActivityPub allows each servers to grow it’s own local community by federation. But that doesn’t mean that all communities need to be compatible or that it’s bad if certain communities are incompatible. Note very carefully here that I’m talking about communities and not individual users. Individual users choose to be part of a community on their own… by selecting servers to join.
When you think about it that way then all defederation does is mark communities as incompatible. That’s not a value judgement about individual users. It’s not about individual users. Individual users can easily create accounts on servers that are on either side of a defederation and belong to incompatible communities that way.
If you think back to Reddit, it was already de facto this way. In a lot of cases, if you stumble upon certain subreddits and comment anything whatever you could suddenly find yourself banned and shadowbanned from other subreddits automatically that you have never even interacted with. So in many cases people would be told to create separate accounts for use on either side of these ban walls. And that solution works in the fediverse just as well (if not better). Defederation is a far more humane solution than individual bans and shadowbans and moderators muting you for 72 days when you ask what the heck just happened.
It seems like tooling and clients could really help. For example, if it’s easy to just switch accounts and servers in your mobile client or browser or whatever… who cares ultimately? In theory clients can even make it so that it’s completely transparent to you by reaching out to multiple servers and using preferred accounts to interact with each instance.
Ultimately all defederation really seems to affect at a structural level is intercommunity aggression–that reddit never was able to control well–such as brigading and dogpiling. Good riddance to those modes of community engagement.
People already post multiple social identities already. People have a twitter, instagram, facebook, tiktok etc and share them all where they care to. Having multiple fediverse accounts shouldn’t be more different than that at the end of the day.