Fediverse

Specifically regarding the instance chooser point: I like the idea of a rotating cast of high uptime, low barrier instances, but in seeing current Lemmy cross-instance drama, I find myself wondering how best to navigate that.

For context, here's a bit about my own Lemmy journey: when I signed up after looking for Reddit alternatives, I looked through the instance list, saw a few that looked appealing, and ultimately decided on SJW because it promised that shit would, indeed, just work. I joined via the mobile site in a mobile browser, with no idea yet about any of the apps or a lot of things, I spent a while playing around. In the process, I Ducked around and found out that Beehaw had defederated from SJW due to trolling issuws. Uh-oh! What did that mean? Was there going to be a bunch of stuff I was missing? Worse, had I accidentally joined a Bad Instance that was going to make everyone immediately make assumptions about my values when the only real values that had factored into my choice were "pls make it work?" Were people going to think I was a troll?

As it happens, I did some further research and found that Beehaw was an instance that favored a heavily moderated, tightly knit community that was somewhat defederation-happy towards more easily joined instances because of trolling potential. Okay. Their prerogative, and I get it, but not anything that needs to make me change instances. Cool.

So anyway, there's been a whole lot of Controversy and Discourse about Lemmy.world and its main moderator recently. There have been defederations. Lemmy.world is one of the big, newbie-appealing instances, and in fact, the enshittification subreddit specifically links to Lemmy.world instead of join-lemmy.org.

So, how would we want to deal with a situation like this for rotating servers? Do we have best practices and guidelines in place for if a controversy emerges about an instance in rotation? Do we have some kinds of rules about moderation in eligible instances so that moderators who are found to be a problem through some process can be replaced to maintain the stability of the instance? What about rules for server sign-up policies? For example, reddthat.com allows sign-ups without email addresses, and I believe it's the instance I just saw get defederated earlier from a large instance due to that extremely open sign-up policy leading to trolls.

I know the Fediverse does support instance migration in some form, but it honestly seems a bit confusing to me as a beginner, and something I'd rather avoid. Also as a beginner, joining an instance and spending hours trying to get acclimated, only to realize you've picked a Bad Instance and need to move, is possibly even more disheartening than going through a long list of instances in the first place, IMO.

I definitely agree that the long list of instances that new folks need to go through is a barrier to entry, just noting an additional consideration for discussion.