We do :-)

Lemmycat likes… BEANS! 🫘

It does get all manner of interconnected doesn’t it?:-)

Your account is on Lemmy.World, this community is on Lemmy.World, and pawb.social is a Lemmy instance, so I thought we were talking Lemmy.

I don’t know much about Mastodon specifically, although I do know that Mbin servers - primarily fedia.io - can connect to both Lemmy and Mastodon instances.

Changing the software in the drop-down to Mbin shows similar stats for instances running that: https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list shows those, and sorting by Active Users reveals that fedia.io contains ~82% of all users on instances running Mbin.

In contrast, virtually nobody is still running Kbin: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list - just one instance with 48 active users.

Btw the newer Lemmy alternative “PieFed” is growing: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, though fewer than 200 users total world-wide, so more something that we keep eagerly anticipating than something currently and fully “here”:-).

Anyway, perhaps the app just needs some time to be able to connect to that new instance? Rather than wait though, you may want to contact the developers - they could potentially add it right away and rather than resent the contact even appreciate your feedback and interest, maybe? :-)

Oh I hear you. Back on Reddit, I was not liking the idea of joining a place made for and run by supporters of Russa, China, and North Korea (I mean, software is just code, but still…), so I was ALL ABOUT Kbin!:-) Ernst let himself down - and with good reason, due to his job and his family and his overall life - and thereby all of us, by not sharing his instance admin duties with anyone else who could take over. Especially when he announced that he was going to the hospital (and then did not respond to anyone for weeks afterwards), THAT is when the spam started, I noticed, from communities where the mods had abandonded them. The big waves did not happen until later, but I noticed earlier waves even then. That much at least might not the fault of Ernst, but it became his duty at that point to shut those communities down, and yet he refused (or was unable to, either way), and so the spammers had a field day with his negligence. (Also, to be honest, the mods abandoning it really was his fault as well - I myself could not log into the server for multiple WEEKS at a time, and when we did get in it was so slow as to be practically even if not wholly non-functional. Mods only abandoned an already sinking ship at that point. And yes it did rally back a bit, and then sunk again, repeating a few more times before it finally went down and just never came back up again.)

It actually serves as quite the lesson for us all. Too bad it is at Ernst’s feet, but it is what it is - the guy was somewhat heroic I thought, for taking on the project of starting up an entire alternative codebase to Lemmy, and Mbin today is somewhat fantastic still! And yet… he was not perfect, nobody is:-|.

I am aware of quite a few examples of defederation - just go to any instance and search for that word and you’ll see many:-). But I’ve never seen one that did not cite a very specific reason, that without researching further I thought at least naively sounded reasonable to me. Also I’ve actually caused an example of defederation: see my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, which also offers several links to other petitions from instances that did the same quite awhile ago. Here’s an interesting one from Beehaw to Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works: https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (and then their response in return: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725).

But yeah, Mastodon has been going stronger than Lemmy for longer iirc, and I’ve heard that it it plagued by defederations, so I definitely need to preemptively agree with you that defederations for no reason are bad. It might be like talking about divorce: always bad, yet other things are worse sometimes, so sometimes the least worst choice, while other times perhaps done too readily, and either way a very very serious issue that should be given the most serious of thought. I’m with you there.

I also agree that Kbin.social was not right-wing: on the other hand I can kinda understand that one better, having heard similar thoughts before. The USA as a whole is more right-oriented than e.g. the EU that is more left-oriented, so e.g. for myself inside the USA, Bernie Sanders seems quite the leftist compared to every other politician I’ve even heard of here, and yet compared to those in the EU he would be considered centrist or even right-wing. i.e., much like introvert vs. extrovert, the standard of comparison is relative to where someone is located at, currently.

Even so, why should one instance defederate from another instance purely due to personal preferences like that? (precisely as you said) Reasons to defederate that are fully valid, imho, are when one side is not engaging in good faith argumentation. Which I don’t recall ever happening on Kbin.social. Therefore, the side defederating from it was likely to have been engaging not in good faith? So perhaps good for you to have gotten away from it then? (Though to be clear: conversely, the fact that Kbin.social later was sending out spam all across the fediverse is a perfect reason to defederate from it.)

The UX of the Fediverse is really quite poor, which is part of why so many are flocking to the likes of BlueSky even as they leave Reddit + X + Facebook, rather than Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed(/Sublinks?) + Mastodon + Friendica. A major part of the reason where Lemmy at least is concerned is the lack of cross-instance moderation ability, which severely hinders people who are not all lumped together onto one single giant instance (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, put this onto the roadmap, but not until software version ~0.20, whereas the most recent version is currently only 0.19.7, so this won’t be for perhaps another half to full year before that eventually gets added? especially considering delay also from after the sourcecode is released until it is installed, e.g. Lemmy.World that has literally ~80% of all Lemmings on it is still on 0.19.3, and they were outright EAGERLY awaiting 0.19.6)

A bit of a tangent: I wonder if the more Threaded conversation style, where you follow “topics” rather than “users”, gives Lemmy the edge in terms of UX? Like, even if you cannot follow one person - although defederations seem more rare here in the first place - you will still get access to so much great content of a similar theme.

About your tangent regarding politics: I hear you, and I sympathize. If it helps, remember that (1) America is going through a REALLY rought time right now, like repeal of the 50-year-old protection to have abortions is literally a matter of life or death for a good half the population, and also (2) we are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns being waged against us from foreign powers as well as internally, and people are just like sheep, wanting to be lead, so the problem comes when someone arises who offers to do that but has a nefarious motive:-(. And yes, there are very many internet trolls who lack nuance entirely or in part - with those you cannot converse, you are right about that, and THOSE are good targets for defederation imho, not b/c of “politics” but b/c of “trolling”, the former being a mere difference of opinion but the latter being the most important criteria there is on the internet: lack of good faith in discussions. :-)

Lemmy.World (LW) is a nice place: ~80% of the entire Fediverse is there, and it has some of the best communities and least trouble connecting with those communities of all instances.

On the other hand, using LW goes against the entire spirit of decentralization that is one of the primary hallmarks of the Fediverse. So I definitely agree that you may want to explore some additional options. If you are adamant about being defederated from nothing, some instances to look at include Lemm.ee (the #3 largest instance after LW and lemmynsfw.com, see https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for more, and for best results sort by Active Users) or lemmy.today. The #4 instance sh.itjust.works is also quite nice I hear. #6 Hexbear.net is a troll instance and while #5 lemmy.ml pretends to be leftist it is actually tankie (I hate that term as it is pejorative, but they really truly do deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened, as in that anyone actually died in it, so it does fit). You may want to find a regional instance, like Discuss.Online is in the USA, or a language one like feddit.org is a German/English mix, or a themed one like Lemmy.zip is for “tech, PCs, and gaming”. Pay attention to the uptime stats, that’s an important one for me. Maybe for an app that can grab content in a manner that doesn’t always have to be live it could be less so?

Btw in the future, while I have never heard of that app name, in the webpage UI you can go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings “Import and export your account settings as JSON”. Choose Export, and then wherever you want to set up a new (perhaps an Alt?) account choose Import and give it that file. Messages sent to your old account will not follow you, i.e. there is no way to set up forwarding yet, but at least your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred. Even if you have to do this once from the web UI, this will definitely affect whatever app you use after that.:-)

Oh wow this is a lot. I should have just made a post about this - maybe I will!?:-P

On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.

You can read more about it here: https://pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).

I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.

You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)

No. People never listen:-P.

After today’s defederation of discuss.online with hexbear.net, and the post Could Discuss.online become the go-to USA instance?, I created the [email protected] community (anyone with an established Discuss.Online account and reputation want to help mod it?). The instance admins don’t want such controversial material like USApolitics, but AskUSA as a nice, friendly community to have neat discussions in is perfectly compatible with the mission statement of my home instance!:-)

I modeled the community name after [email protected] and made it a sister community, along with this one (any others that should be added?).

(1) it’s basically a million times more apologetic than anything that I’ve ever seen coming from Lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.net. e.g. here’s an example where the mod says that he wants to kill the OP, then doubles down as to why he wants to shoot him, then finishes off with “I hope you die soon”. Yes, I’m absolutely saying that this Lemmy.World mod is 100% better than that.

(2) It explains the reasoning why she did what she did, and what was coming next. Overall, if you don’t like the way she mods, then don’t post in her community? Be part of the change… At least she was clear in her approach, so that people can make informed decisions.

(3) But the part that is perhaps most relevant here is how it was delivered 3 days ago. The interim time was spent by the admins crafting an amendment to the ToS, but this mod herself offered her thoughts immediately after the event. The word here I believe is “responsive”.

Here’s a good (imho) specific example of one part of her apology: https://lemmy.world/comment/13830560.

(1) irrelevant, bc I was discussing their fears, but really the admins can do whatever they wish, at any time, for any reason. We are free to cry about it, or leave, but it’s theirs to do with whatever they will.

(2) Fox News in the USA had to pay nearly a billion dollar settlement for their misinformation. OAN was shut down. More importantly, CSAM exists and people fear to have it on their servers, and regardless of the direct ethical implications there are some extremely strong legal ones as well. Piracy websites likewise get taken down constantly, even for “only” sharing links to where content is hosted “elsewhere”. I am sure that if someone legitimately wanted to know the direct answer to your question (not me) they could perhaps spend some time searching for the answer?

But again, aside from you changing the subject of this conversation, it’s irrelevant in the first place, bc the fear itself is real.

B-b-B-b-B-ut…!

Not according to the very mod who did the action, which you can read about here. The admins panicked over the (very real imho) threat of police repercussions, so they told her to stop such posts and comments (in retrospect, she wished that she had preemptively locked the post so as to be able to hand out fewer bans while still muting the topic for awhile), and then later the admins said to reverse course so she apologized, reversed the bans, and told people to wait on this updated ToS, which took time to draft and get consensus for. It was all extremely quick, including her apology mere hours after the event?

So yes the ToS itself took a few days to arrive, but the decision to stop handing out bans for the topic happened days before that, long before most of this upswell of resistance even had time to propagate much.

Nothing is ever truly “free” - e.g. you are “free” to fly, but you still need a plane (or helicopter, spaceship, hang glider, rocket backpack, or some other means of conveyance) to make it happen for you. And like, how would one even “speak” on the internet, without some device to send the electronic signals out? Plus there needs to be a recipient machine, to receive those signals, then further broadcast them literally around the entire world…

On Lemmy.World, people are “free” to discuss matters - so long as they do not violate either the community standards (if you don’t like those, make your own) or the instance rules aka ToS (same).

It’s their machines, it’s their rules. At least they offered a clarification here as to what, more precisely, they will be moving forward. In a more nuanced take where since “absolute freedom” is a ridiculous concept that never exists (even the sun will go out one day, due to entropy - everything, literally everything must bow to at the very least entropy, and every other physical rule of the universe as well), this rule clarification actually increases “freedom of speech”, by more clearly delineating what someone is allowed to say on Lemmy.World, so that they can type it all out and not be (as) fearful of it being removed and thereby (mostly) wasted.

Anyway, I thought I would offer that thought for consideration just in case.

Okay, but to be clear: the admins panicked against the very real possibility of police shutting them down, and took a moment to make certain that Lemmy.World can continue to exist to serve this or any needs of people across the world. The bans have already expired, the mod who did it apologized and said that no new ones would be forthcoming, the ToS have been clarified, etc. Yes there was “suppression”, but for like 1-3 days, and it’s already over?

Unless you mean that people should be free to advocate for future murders, and I would argue that there are other (e.g. anarchy) instances for that, but Lemmy.World is free to do as they please, and to restrict such on their own hardware.

I am saying that “suppression” seems too harsh a word here imho, when the ToS now clearly delineates the line between what is or is not allowed on the LW instance and thereby communities located on it. Isn’t that a success then, to define the parameters within which the instance is allowed to discuss these matters (again, by police, a very real external factor that definitely truly does exist - and can come down HARD on those who would want to FAAFO), so kinda the opposite of “suppression” then? Well, according to some manner of using the term at any rate - not everything is allowed, but definitely not nothing along these lines is either.

Like, surely you’ve seen the veritable FLOOD of posts and comments in just about every community imaginable across the entire Fediverse lately, alternately either promoting this guy as a hero or decrying him as a terrorist? That’s not “suppression” in my book - again, the jury nullification matter was, days ago, but that’s already over? The nuances here are important, b/c we cannot have true freedom without being responsible to keep this place alive & kicking & not shut down.

Hehe, this seems to apply (to the person you were responding to, not you btw:-)

The amount of times I am tempted to write “okay but this isn’t an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure…” is too damn high!:-P

So very many people clamoring to speak, yet refusing to listen:-|.

It’s their computers, their network storage, their internet hosting costs - they can do as they please. So too can you, e.g. move elsewhere, or even spin up your own instance. This shit gets expensive though, and people have irl jobs as well - this is VOLUNTEER efforts on their part!?!?

Be the change that you want to see in the world. And then watch as others are similarly not impressed.

Fwiw, I for one am impressed though, at the speed with which they got all of this done. I am not advocating that people use Lemmy.World - in fact I think they should not, but for other reasons of decentralization rather than this - but I do appreciate their efforts on behalf of keeping the entire Fediverse alive and going (as opposed to e.g. the police being able to shut the server down, which may or may not have happened but anyway it’s a legit fear that they were reacting against imho), which enriches us all.

Society is breaking down, thereby leaving us open to someone claiming to offer to restore “order & authority” and “the rule of law”.

Exactly how the conservative Alt-Right used “bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThO” and the situation in Gaza where “BoTh SiDeS sAmE” to win the recent USA election. It worked then, why wouldn’t it work again now, to make “free speech” illegal?

Well, huge caveat: I have no idea if this will happen, I only worried about the possibility that it might, hence starting my comment with “I would not be too surprised to find that…”

And to break out into a meta-discussion: damnit, now I’m hedging my words again, reiterating over & over again the caveats and bounds outside of which I did not mean to extend my words into territory that I never said, yet I seem to feel that others will undoubtedly accuse me of having stated (almost as if I had done so directly?) nonetheless - just like I used to have to do with Reddit. I really hate how one cannot seem to say anything genuine on the internet without being accused of all sorts of crap. I think it’s b/c you cannot have adult discussions with children (of whatever physical age) around. Meh, it is what it is. This is “social media” and meant just for fun & casual conversations - we will never solve anything of substance here though:-).

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I think you’re spot on.

I think you just answered your own question:-).

Follow the money / incentivization trail. If such media blitzes were not happening, then the people behind them aren’t doing their jobs properly and they should be causing more, according to “that way” of thinking, imho (or perhaps we’re too small, and yet here we reflect what is being discussed elsewhere too, so even if only by trickling in from the outside, such trends should still be visible here?).

Before you go too deep, the mod responsible apologized, the ToS were amended, and this is all being discussed out in the open. The 24 hours mutings are already rescinded, and no new bans are said to be planned as a result of discussing the topic moving forward (as you said, unless it looks to be planning something in the future, which is just a whole other thing entirely). i.e. in the face of this huge event the admins PANICKED, but ultimately everything is already calming down and returning to a semblance of normalcy - and that whole process took less than half a week! This is nothing at all like spez’s take-it-or-leave-it Reddit.

That said, it’s good to take advantage of decentralization anyway, and yes the anarchy instance (that you mentioned below) looks awesome (I enjoy much content hosted on it and greatly respect its admin and their overall contributions to us all here:-) and I think you will be happy there. If this event caused you to question your priorities and what you hope to see moving forward into the future, then that’s a good thing to increase your future happiness level:-). Though I wanted to point out that in that case it’s less “Lemmy.World = bad” and more that you are finding a better fit for your needs. LW is what it is, and it’s not Reddit, even if it is not anarchy either. I for one find it absolutely fantastic that both can exist on the Fediverse side by side together, enriching all of us, each according to our own needs and desires:-).