I’ve been on the Fediverse since 2016, and I still get a little mixed up by how things work.
One of the interesting things as a newbie is seeing how the relatively small existing population of the Fediverse reacts to the influx of new faces. The article sort of outlines an example of, as far as I understand it, exactly how the federated sites are supposed to work, but actually being faced with it is causing a little bit of trepidation and rethinking of old behaviors. Not really good or bad, just interesting.
Any new platform is going to have a learning curve, some more than others. But it’s going to be as confusing or tricky as you want to make it. If you want to join and read every small detail about the inner workings, that’s fine, but you may find blood leaking from your ears rather quickly. Just jump in, and get involved. That is the best and easiest way to learn. Yes, you may make some mistakes, or have to ask questions. But if people mock you for this, then you know the place you have joined isn’t for you. As it’s full of idiots.
Choosing who you federate with and then moderating abusive people that slip through anyway is going to be very important.
Choosing who you federate with
If instances get stricter about federation, I really hope small instances are still allowed to federate with the large ones. For example, I’m running my own Lemmy server just for me, and had no trouble federating. That’s what I really like about the fediverse - my little server is essentially treated no differently to the massive ones. That’s really the point of the fediverse.
It’s very unlikely that big instances will start blocking small ones. It can certainly happen, but I think most people running Lemmy instances are more likely to want to federate. If they don’t they’ll probably run one of the forks that explicitly disable it, so you’ll never know that they exist from your instance.
I don’t really understand the whole “choose who you federate with”, federation is a server-to-server thing as far as I am aware, and banning whole servers results in some of your users becoming unable to reach all of theirs, incurring a penalty on both sides. I don’t think blocking users based on whoever hosts their account ever makes sense in the general case (it’s a weak argument to prove someone “guilty by association”), and is incredibly unfair (the statement being made is that all users on that instance, without exception, should suffer the consequences of the actions of a few).
Unfortunately there isn’t a finer grained tool. You can ban users, but if the instance they’re from has open sign ups the banned user can just create a new account and return to harassing people on the server. This is the reason that Beehaw defederated with the two earlier this week. They tried everything they could before then, but the tools just aren’t there yet to not punish the whole instance if the instance’s admin isn’t willing to meet part way.
Yup, that’s dramatic. The fediverse still has a long way to go.
