this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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"make another account somewhere" isn't really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they're not saying you have to make an account on that person's server, they're saying that you can make it on a different server, that's the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It's not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can't do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
Mastodon, Kbin, the new Lemmy 0.19 release allow on a per user basis to block entire domains, so I don't see how this is a "you can't do anything about it" situation. Just let users decide.
Lemmy 0.19's instance blocking does not filter users, only communities, in addition it does not solve the problems of content polution because it does not limit interaction from blocked malicious users in any way, just hides them (it only really works under the assumption that they're not malicious users and the blocker is just throwing a fit). For these reasons it is not and cannot be seen as an a replacement to defederation.
Also as I already said users are 100% free to decide, they decide by choosing their instances. If you don't like it you're free to host your own or move to a more open protocol like Nostr. The idea of federation was built around the idea of communicating with certain instances and blocking others, not about users individually choosing the servers they connect with, Some servers do operate democratically but in the end the fediverse is designed around servers so servers have every right to choose.
Also I'd like to address the "defederation will kill the fediverse" claims I've seen floating around. It won't in fact it's a dedicated feature of activitypub and has been in use since forever, instances are able to block ones that go against their values either due to the way those instances are operated or the users they allow on them. This is how it's worked since the beginning and almost certainly how it will continue. Some users don't like this and believe that they should be able to access stuff no matter what, failing to realize that they do not own the server their account is hosted on, accessing content on other servers via activitypub requires the content be copied over to your home server, and if the admins don't want that they can block that server, you don't really have a say in it because it isn't your server. So either host your own where you do own it, or move to a more open protocol which exist for the purpose of user freedom and anti-censorship.
What do you think it's about? Because from my perspective changing instances is kind of the entire defining feature that separates it from commercial platforms.
Federation is about being able to communicate with other people even if they use a different platform.
It's about connecting communities and having fail saves, not bullying.
what bullying
I feel like that's exactly how it was billed to me, find somewhere that federates with who you want, and if that changes, you're free to move
The choice of email providers is not about which one can exchange mails with GMail.
Some of the time it is though. Like Gmail has a pretty large list of IPs it won't deliver email from. When self-hosting, it's something you really do have to worry about.
The reason most people don't worry about it is that most people only use a handful of free emails and organizations that provide email addresses for their users spend time worrying about it so users don't have to.
So erecting artificial walls is not positive then. Good we're on the same page.
No. I definitely prefer email with good spam blocking. I'm not criticizing Google for blocking mail how they do. It's pretty necessary. Which is also something you learn fairly quickly if you try to self host.
Google isn't blocking, it's moving suspected spam into the spam folder and users have the option to whitelist any false positives.
Blocking Threads completely with only "then fuck off" to the users is not what interoperability is about.