this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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What are you referring to as a ban? Complete bans already require synchronization between different federated instances. Sometimes the home instance of a user is unable to entirely delete the content of a user because of it.
Not really. Mod actions are over a community, not user history. They are perfectly able to remove user comments within their community, and since they are the authoritative source that controls whom it is spread to that has greater influence. That never stops the same content by the same user from appearing elsewhere.
They would still do the same, but the "usually leading to the ban of those users" perhaps does more to reveal what your actual problem is than anything else. You and me will have to disagree, because admins should not be authoritarian figures, but should only have control within their domain.
If they want to administrate over a group of users, they can have control over which users are and aren't allowed over that particular group. They can issue their own warnings to users.
If they want to administrate over communities, they can have control over which communities are allowed and how users are allowed to interact with those. They can remove users from those communities entirely.
The small but loud minority of toxic users can just have their authentication instances defederated if those instances refuse to do anything with them. If it is an authentication instance doing the defederation, then it will affect all of their users. If it is a content provider instance, it will affect all of their communities. In the current system, it does both because both are coupled into the same instance, so it's even compatible with it.
It stops bad faith actors from trying to pollute communities to slur entire instances, like lemm.ee or blahaj, because of their problems with their userbase, by simply stopping it from being an issue. Administrators don't have to worry about policing communities or users if they don't want to, they would be able to better choose whom they are catering to without bad faith backlash elsewhere.
Almost nothing of the current structure changes, except that dedicated instances have the functionality they don't need disabled. Both can still block each other to their heart's content, and if your problem is having more "splits" - that is literally what federated instances are, there can always be more ... Maybe your problem is with the fediverse and its distributed nature? You are making it out to be as if there is only ever a big bad group of toxic users and that all administrators always completely agree on all bans to make your argument work. At that point, just create your own reddit clone.
I addressed a few of your points in the parallel thread with @[email protected] (actually, it seems like you read it as you commented below)
As I stated in one of the comments
I had a second look, and instances not allowing sign up are either going to shutdown (lemmy.one) are false positives (https://bookwormstory.social/signup) or are single-person instances:
Your vision is possible now, but it seems like almost no one wants to implement it.
Why would people want to implement something they don't know the benefits of? That's what my comment and increasing awareness is all about, in a thread about an outcome that could have been prevented by the idea.
If admins goes missing like the feddit.de ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
If admins just want to shutdown without willing to transfer the instance / domain like the lemm.ee ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
Using instances with non profit like https://fedecan.ca/en/ (lemmy.ca and piefed.ca) seems a better way to mitigate that risk.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem being solved. Expecting all instances to become non-profits and manage even more responsibility exacerbates the problem and inhibits the fediverse growth. Non-profits also have their share of pitfalls and is an entirely different beast.
lemm.ee told you the reason they were shutting down - not enough people to keep the place running and burnout. I can't force you to see how minimizing and distributing responsibility helps those issues if you don't want to. Less responsibility, easier for people not to ditch projects or end them.
That has nothing to do about what they decided to do afterwards. I thank them for not transferring the instance domain to a completely different party without user consent, and people would have disagreed with that so it's best everyone found their own solution. It would even have put their account information at risk.
Lemm.ee had the option to close their registration at any time. But registrations are only one source of user management.
In a scenario where Lemm.ee would have become a content instance, but kept their federation policy, they would still have received all the reports about posts on the communities they hosted, wherever the reported user comes from.
Lemm.ee was the instance with the most active communities after LW, there's no way to avoid a certain level of responsibility.