this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I wish the fediverse is able to contain all the ideas, all the political positions and that disconnecting/blocking an instance is only used for behaviors like spamming. Not giving every political stance the opportunity to be a part of the same world fuels extremists.
Beehaw and other instances can kick all the users with far-right beliefs. That's fair. But Lemmy users shouldn't be blocked to listen to or even interact with them, in their own instances, if they wanted. Don't help creating political ghettos.
I'm not super over how the fediverse works mechanically; I was under the impression that users could create their own instances and interact with who they choose to?
Take my reply with a grain of salt because I'm also very new to this. From what I understood, although you can create instances and interact with everyone, other instances can choose to cut ties (blocking) with your instance. For example, beehaw blocked lemmygrad.ml which can be seen at https://beehaw.org/instances (on the bottom of this page there's a link in "Instances"). So, if your Lemmy account is on Beehaw, you won't be seeing lemmygrad.ml posts. I don't even know if it's possible to comment on them (maybe someone can elaborate on this).
That's correct, yeah. It's basically the equivalent of the instance being blocked by a firewall as far as I understand.
Basically, but it is not seamless. The biggest hurtle is that when you stand up a new instance, you will only see posts and comments from after the instance was created. This is the way most federated social media works. The rationale is that it would be too burdensome (for both ends, the massive established instance, and the small upstart instance running on a budget VPS), and prone to DOS abuse, to request the entire history from every instance in the network. The initial experience on a new instance can be a little barren. After a while, when it has discovered other instances in the network and had time for new posts to roll in, it starts to be natural. This doesn't happen automatically though. Actions must be taken (following a user, subscribing to a community, etc) for these connections to be made. The first actions must be deliberate, but it eventually begins to snowball with user activity.
When I started up my Mastodon instance, I had a bunch of friends, some situated on the network already, some newbies joining in, all follow each other and recommend other accounts to follow. Within a day, 400 instances had been discovered. Months later, it has discovered over 12,000.
How would I be blocked from "listening to" (that's never what's going on) psedo-Nazis in my own instance?
Sorry, I didn't understood what you meant. Especially the parenthesis part.
That's the unimportant part.
Let me be clear. I'm asking, "How would I be blocked from listening to and interacting with anyone in my own instance?"
Oh no no no. Sorry, it was probably my fault since english is not my native language. I was referring to theirs instances! in your example, the neo-nazis instances.
In other words, I was trying to say that I agree with instances (like beehaw) being able to block what they consider to be toxic instances, but I'm against removing instances from the lemmy fediverse if that's even possible. Like, removing them from the network.
Well, you're in luck, that is exactly how things are.