Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it's contained in their communities, that's easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.
Not for a new user who is not aware...
It would be preferable if lemmy.ml were an opt-in feature rather than one that someone has to learn how to opt out of, on top of trying to figure everything else about the Fediverse at the same time.
I am now strongly hesitant to recommend Lemmy to people irl bc of all the heavy mandatory curation that must be done before someone can have a pleasant experience. After accidentally responding to a comment in chapotraphouse, and another in lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Fediverse entirely rather than put up with the barrage of many tens of responses that continued for weeks despite me not responding to them anymore, and I don't want people to associate that with me. i.e. it is a bad look for us all when the "we" includes "them", and it hurts our growth overall. I strongly believe they should have the freedom to be however they want... (even though they do not reciprocate that thought) but that doesn't mean that I want to help bring new people into their audience for their amusement.
Right, while it technically has a user-level solution, you're right that a brand new user would simply not know about any of this.
I stumble upon a few now and then when they try and report stuff from there.
So... something like autoblocking the instance on user creation... which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.
Thanks for your input
I love that thought!
There is also the site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 to consider - many of the details were not immediately clear to me from that page (is it just images and visiting the community, but what about text-based posts from a community? it says the warning will be delivered the first time a user triggers it, but will a cookie allow that to persist for a user across sessions or need to be re-done each time?), but it does seem a promising avenue to explore.
I liken it to porn - if you enjoy it, then have at it, but at least warn someone prior to it showing up unannounced, or regardless of the fact that it came from elsewhere, people will judge us for having brought it to them. People will ofc complain about being labelled - and fascists will complain the loudest of all (despite their own heavy-handed practices, yet realizing that we actually care about such, it is a tactic that sadly works far more often than it does not) - but honestly it's just a thing that they could/should do for themselves, akin to how people of consideration will add warning/apology labels for e.g. a long reply to a comment, to let the recipient know that perhaps the read-through may be easier to postpone until a more opportune time for it. And there is nothing preventing them (those people whose content would become labelled) from being included in the process of designing what the precise text of that label would entail? Though if they refuse to participate in good faith then as you suggested, there are ways around dealing with the situation that are just as effective. And maybe the latter solution using tried-and-true methods needs to be done regardless, while the labelling option is still in the experimental stages (especially if the code developers drag their feet making it work in a manner contrary to their philosophy - i.e. they simply remove content that they don't like, not label it but leave it up, as we are talking about here).
TLDR: opt-in offers maximum friendliness + welcomingness to people and will increase our overall content submissions, whereas out-out turns people away and therefore lowers that.
I did not even know that you were an admin - and would have written a much shorter reply had you not mentioned it - but since you have some ability to influence things for the good of us all, then I thank you for your consideration to actually implement some solution or another to aid with these matters that many of us care so much about: growing & maintaining a healthy Fediverse, even between people with such disparate ideals!:-)