Over the past few days , possibly longer, someone has been making new accounts and using them to post scat porn in various communities here. Like, gifs of poop coming from buttholes.
feddit.de defederated this instance over this spam. Really makes me sour towards Lemmy as a concept. Now I can't access all of the German speaking communities, just because one guy keeps spamming scat porn? And the feddit.de admin apparently only seeing defederation as the only option? Fuck that.
At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if we defederated the source instance of all this crap just to stop the bleeding - it was stated by Beehaw and clearly obvious now that Lenny’s moderation tools are lacking.
But what keeps you from creating a feddit.de account? What we really need is a client that can navigate multiple instances with separate accounts seamlessly.
I don't want to create multiple accounts just so I can access all the content, that is not why I am here for. Furthermore, I don't want to write an essay who I am and why I want to join feddit.de.
The fact that you can defederate is actually one of the big, important points of... well, federation. Freedom of association.
As other commenter said, you are free to join feddit.de (and any other instance). They are independent instances, like different webpages. If the content is important to you, and it is not accessible from here, just join them!
But let's not blame federated networks since this is exactly one of their sellong points.
Lemmy is being sold as a Reddit alternative. I for one want it to succeed at that. A fractured Fediverse however won't be able to entice anyone not directly affected by Reddit's changes to join, for the same reason why separate forums weren't able to survive once Reddit got traction.
Saying stuff like "it's a good thing admins from one instance can cut you off from all communities hosted on that instance, if you have your account on the blocked instance" doesn't track.
It is a reddit alternative, just not a reddit clone. There are a LOT of reddit alternatives, and this one is a FEDERATED reddit alternative. In the same way that mastodon is a federated microblogging alternative.
It does not change the fact that it IS a reddit alternative, but again, if someone feels lost or does not want it to be federated, they can go use lobster or whatever.
It is a reddit alternative, just not a reddit clone.
Semantics. If you ask people to switch to an alternative social media platform, it needs to be at least as usable as the original, otherwise it will see no adoption. Lemmy will never gain critical mass if reddit continues to be the better, more usable platform for 95% of all people.
Thing is, this is not a commercial alternative, nobody is asking people to come over here (and if they do it's definitely not the creators of the software). People pushing for people to join lemmy are either users who love this kind of platform, or people resented with reddit over their actions.
I agree that if I were to create commercial alternative to reddit, I should take that into account or it would probably fail. But it is not the case at all.
In my mind, your statement is analogous to "the pickup truck will never replace the car". It is not intended to. Lemmy and Reddit are similar, but different. There are those looking for a Reddit experience and those looking for a Lemmy experience. In the end, both will have a population of users.
Anyone can create and administer vs. Reddit's centralized control. Whether this is an advantage or not depends on your values. Many people have moved to Lemmy from Reddit recently because the folks that run Reddit have made some unpopular decisions and, because Reddit is centralized and closed-source, the only options are to accept the admins decrees or abandon the platform. On the other hand, if the administrators of a Lemmy instance make unpopular decisions, it is easy to move to another instance or create a new instance with different administration.
Whether this is an advantage or not depends on your values.
And herein lies the problem. The absolute majority of Reddit users did not care enough to switch platforms, just as the absolute majority of Twitter users didn't care.
What those people do care about, if they ever were to consider Lemmy to move to, is that it provides a similar ease of use as Reddit does. And currently, Lemmy does not.
Besides that, I don't see how this fits the analogy about cars vs. pickup trucks you have given. Pickup trucks can be used as cars, albeit not as optimally as your average sedan. But they serve another purpose, carrying stuff around, that makes them superior to cars. With Lemmy vs. reddit, all you really choose is who gets to moderate you. There is no different experience using either platform. The only difference is that, at least for now, Lemmy is a lot more difficult to use.