OpenStars

Example 1: when one side wants to bully the other, but the latter does not wish this, how do you solve this problem? Defederation it is then.

Example 2: when someone claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre did actually happen, that user gets blocked from all communities, including those they have never heard of, on lemmy.ml. This is not so rare - and this is straight from the Lemmy developers themselves, i.e. a feature not a bug. It does no good to pretend otherwise.

Example 3: when people refuse to label their kiddie porn properly, others must label it for them, or risk getting into trouble themselves, bc regardless of what some other website chooses to host, the federation model says that if your instance federates with it, then it is content that you are sharing as well. Though actually, I find the Fediverse mostly friendly in how it labels NSFW content, yet it refuses to label toxicity in a like manner - e.g. the brigading attempts organized on hexbear against other communities on different instances. If only a label could be affixed to Chapotraphouse, like "beware ye who choose to enter here...":-).

I find your comment extremely biased towards your own POV and desires, but overall there is much more subtlety and nuance in interpersonal connections, e.g. sometimes women choose the bear, and rather than say that it is "silly", it might behoove people to listen to why that choice may have been made?

One thing you can do there is to take advantage of federation and jump to an instance where you are not logged in, which will then display all of the comments. On the web UI, the multicolored Fediverse icon works fantastic for this purpose, as it will jump straight to the comment that you want to see (although the hidden ones would be below that, or perhaps you would rather go to the post itself).

e.g. for me, I am reading your comment at https://discuss.online/post/12642239/11643668, but the multicolored button would take me to https://sopuli.xyz/comment/12447782, which I do not have an account on hence nothing under that would be blocked for me there.

Unless they're too big to fail, and especially if they are too big to jail, e.g. Facebook, Google, etc. Or if they correctly judge the stupidity and malleability of their audience e.g. Reddit, X, etc.

For them, for now.

So what happens when pleasing the investors becomes the only priority?

I'm guessing they did it preemptively and as a gesture. Or perhaps some CSAM-containing instance took that name in the past:-).

Edit: yup, the first one: https://lemm.ee/post/851217.

Good point. There are enormous hazards with that though - especially for people in countries where the presence of CSAM on someone's machine that feeds it out to minors could potentially land someone in jail.

So perhaps it would be trivial for you, but not everyone is in that kind of situation.

In general I find that the comments that tend to contain the highest proportion of batshit insanity across the entire Fediverse - I'm talking reminding me of what it was like to argue with Magats on Reddit - are those from lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml. e.g., ignoring 90% of what I say while hyper-focusing on a single thing, which they manage to twist into sounding as if I said the exact opposite, while demanding that I provide proof of all of my points, and ofc offering none of their own proof in return, plus what "proof" is offered ends up supporting my own point rather than theirs... It's fucking exhausting.

And moreover it's relentless. So it would seem that my options are to either move to Lemmy.cafe - the only one who has defederated from all of the big 3 - or block such people one by one, or just put up with it, since user blocking those instances does virtually nothing. Also, they could easily create an alt, on let's say lemmy.world, to accomplish their anonymized downvoting fetishes.:-P

Do you recall if people are allowed to vote on your content after you've blocked them? Even if so though, those user blocks of instances (as compared to user blocks of users) would not block downvotes (they don't even block showing of content, plus notifications can even still be sent just by tagging the recipient's username), so someone who downvotes but never speaks up by commenting would go unnoticed.

Anyway, my own preferences aside, I'm trying to think of what would encourage people to post content more often, and reducing the overall level of toxicity present in the Fediverse seems like it would greatly help with that (even if that ends up being something that you have to curate yourself via blocklists, with mods and admins being unwilling and unable to keep up with such).

Lemmy: exactly - so you can either have all of downvotes or none of them, by picking such an instance, but there is really nothing in-between. Yet another example of "in-between" could be to show like downvotes from only members already subscribed to the community.

Mbin iirc doesn't allow downvoting at all and instead has its own system of "reduces", which does not federate at all with Lemmy, but instead acts as just another form of it. And yes those are publicly visible, which puts it ahead of Lemmy in this respect.

Piefed does the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting, even going so far as to hide the identity of downvoters from remote admins, who may need to know such things in order to ban someone who is being consistently abusive. I don't think this is a good experiment. Anonymous polling results would be awesome though, so it depends on which type of "voting" we are talking about here.

Mostly what I mean is that someone who posts content to the Fediverse has to expose themselves in order to do that. Whereas downvoting goes against that principle, allowing someone to do what looks to 99.99% of Fedizens as an entirely anonymous procedure.

Also, a viewer can block a poster whose content they dislike and thereby never have to hear from them again, but not vice versa - the recipient has no choice but to receive votes (up or down). Except, as you mentioned, by going to an instance that disables them entirely. Which does not help all the enormous number of members already in instances such as Lemmy.world.

Hence the roles of content creator vs. viewer are unequal, skewed in favor of the downvoters having more power than the posters. Which can inhibit content creation, and given how lack of content (especially niche) is the primary issue with the Fediverse, it seems like making the roles more equal would help.

Downvotes are an inherently unequal proposition, as they are now implemented. This allows everything from near and dear friends who respectfully disagree to randos with day-one accounts who don't even know what a community is all about, to brigading events organized in a larger community (possibly on Reddit or in Matrix or Discord or such). e.g. iirc I can user-block someone or even an entire instance, but in retaliation they can see my profile and downvote everything I have ever done, or have a bot do so within seconds of new material coming out. Which would affect its discoverability.

Potential solutions would be to make them no longer anonymous, and/or when you block a user or an instance then they can no longer downvote that content - just like a user-level defederation. As it is now, user-level blocks are extremely weak and even notifications can be delivered by simply tagging someone's username.

On old instance: Settings -> Import/Export Settings -> Export (as JSON), then on new instance repeat but Import (give it the JSON).

Also note that there is no single instance that is not defederated from something or another - e.g. lemm.ee that is famous for its inclusivity still blocks e.g. threads.net.

And several users of hexbear.net have indicated a desire to remove itself from the wider Fediverse (which probably won't happen, but I just wanted to point out that such matters are not always externally imposed, but sometimes arise from within).

We don't know who is being it... how would we even? Or someone gets banned, doesn't appreciate that, and retaliates. They do what they want, we do what we must.