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There's nothing ironic about this, the whole point of a federated system is that instances have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

by kibwen 3y ago

resolutebat 3y ago
The irony is that one of the main drivers for the Reddit blackouts is/was the lack of moderator tools in the official client. However, if there's demand open source contributors will sort out the tooling soon enough, while the closed-source official Reddit app is unlikely to improve anything soon.
unclekev 3y ago
> have the power to decide who's a part of their network. Former Reddit mods are going to love this feature. Now when they are power-tripping or they don't agree with another instances users views on a topic, instead of just banning the users, they can ban entire instances/communities from participating in one fell swoop.
- solveit 3y ago
  Reddit mods already have bots that do this for them. Subscribing to/commenting in the wrong subreddit will get you banned from a whole host of subreddits.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    That's the reason I got banned. I posted in one anti-covid sub a study that refuted one of their pseudo science ones and got banned from 8 or 10 popular subs, most which I didn't even join, and warned if I ever dared post there I would get banned from reddit. And yet there is no reddit feature where you can see where you are "banned" from. It's ridiculous. I didn't even care but a lot of stuff hits r/all and you can easily go into those groups and comment on something. Banning should mean you can't enter or post in a sub, but it doesn't. That's how glaring "reddit features" are and how awful some mods are as human beings.
- kibwen 3y ago
  As opposed to Reddit, where admins have to forcibly intervene when subreddits frequently brigade each other. For all its foibles, the fediverse approach is solving actual problems with Reddit.
none_to_remain 3y ago
I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  This. I don't want 10 user accounts in 10 places to access the stuff I want to access.
- malermeister 3y ago
  The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable. I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc. Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?
  - skissane 3y ago
    Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites? Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      > Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track. > Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites? Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider. > Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it? Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.

There's nothing ironic about this, the whole point of a federated system is that instances have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

by kibwen 3y ago

There's nothing ironic about this, the whole point of a federated system is that instances have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

resolutebat 3y ago

The irony is that one of the main drivers for the Reddit blackouts is/was the lack of moderator tools in the official client. However, if there's demand open source contributors will sort out the tooling soon enough, while the closed-source official Reddit app is unlikely to improve anything soon.

unclekev 3y ago

> have the power to decide who's a part of their network. Former Reddit mods are going to love this feature. Now when they are power-tripping or they don't agree with another instances users views on a topic, instead of just banning the users, they can ban entire instances/communities from participating in one fell swoop.

solveit 3y ago
Reddit mods already have bots that do this for them. Subscribing to/commenting in the wrong subreddit will get you banned from a whole host of subreddits.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  That's the reason I got banned. I posted in one anti-covid sub a study that refuted one of their pseudo science ones and got banned from 8 or 10 popular subs, most which I didn't even join, and warned if I ever dared post there I would get banned from reddit. And yet there is no reddit feature where you can see where you are "banned" from. It's ridiculous. I didn't even care but a lot of stuff hits r/all and you can easily go into those groups and comment on something. Banning should mean you can't enter or post in a sub, but it doesn't. That's how glaring "reddit features" are and how awful some mods are as human beings.
kibwen 3y ago
As opposed to Reddit, where admins have to forcibly intervene when subreddits frequently brigade each other. For all its foibles, the fediverse approach is solving actual problems with Reddit.

none_to_remain 3y ago

I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.

londons_explore 3y ago
This. I don't want 10 user accounts in 10 places to access the stuff I want to access.
malermeister 3y ago
The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable. I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc. Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?
- skissane 3y ago
  Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites? Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    > Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track. > Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites? Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider. > Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it? Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.