Remote View

2y ago

A modest proposal: roundtable on defederation

I apologize if this has been asked before, but I'm wondering if it would be feasible to implement a new approach to defederation that offers the option of choosing between complete or partial defederation from another instance.

Currently, defederation blocks both the locally made posts on the defederated instance and its entire userbase. This can be excessive, and in many cases it may be better to block only the posts made on the other instance while still allowing its users to interact with the instance that defederated — user behavior may differ between their home instance and other instances. This partial defederation (or limited federation) would facilitate normal interaction without negatively affecting the content of a feed.

Problematic users could be managed on a case-by-case basis using bans, similar to how it is done for federated instances. Automated tools could simplify this process in the future. Complete defederation would still be necessary in extreme cases where no positive user interactions are expected, such as with instances that promote Nazism.

Instances are being forced to choose between a sledgehammer and nothing at all, and I think a compromise is warranted. I'm curious to read others' thoughts on how to solve this existing challenge.

EDIT: I added a rough sketch that outlines the proposal. On the left side is the system as it works now and on the right side are two possible scenarios for limited federation (1 direction or bidirectional)

49 comments

Splitting hairs, but I think rather than implementing a partial defederation, I think it would be better to set user rights for a given federation instance. Some federations you might want to allow view only access, access to a certain "tier" of communities, etc. Make the rights customizable so its as granular as needed by the server.
- While I like the idea of granular permissions in principle, I feel like it could cause confusion and frustration for users depending on its implementation. For example, if a user from instance A is unable to reply to a user from instance B, even though both are posting on instance C and are visible to each other. So while granular permissions would be powerful, they could also introduce unwanted scenarios that would be difficult for the average user to understand.
  That's why I think it would be good to start with a simpler system. Partial defederation (or limited federation) seems like a compromise which could strike a reasonable balance between controlling content on local instances while minimizing the impact on user experience across instances. That said, if permissions/rights were implemented in a limited or user-friendly way, they could also work.
- Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking and posted at the same time. I think this would be a very useful way to encourage federation while maintaining instance control.

Beehaw feels like it's ran by power tripping mods hiding behind toxic positivity and I'm not sad they defederated. I wouldn't denigrate anybody for preferring it but I personally like a little more freedom.
- I am not totally against or in favour of what they are doing and I can't even say what side I tip to. I feel very 50/50.
  I think it is in a "meta" way useful for the community, especially those of us (like me) new to the fediverse, to see it. However it goes, we can look and see and form opinions and learn. If it is a mistake, it's a mistake that is inevitable. The capacity is built into the tools and someone was going to use it.
  I only wish I knew how or where some sort of.. journalism?... record? was being kept so that things could be understood later by the people not here to see it. So that the same mistakes don't have to happen every 6 months.
- It seems like defederating harms the ones who do it, as it provides incentives for users who want to access both servers to go to a 3rd party. From kbin I can currently see both.
- At the very least this move highlighted a big problem with the Fediverse that needs to be ironed out. So I guess that’s good.
- EXACTLY

I'd suggest that beehaw's concerns could be met with a tool that lets you disable posting or voting from off-instance users unless they meet threshold criteria, whether it be account age or post history or manual approval. That would allow you to keep your content interaction controlled without the nuclear option of complete removal.
- The Beehaw mods explicitly said that the defederation was due to lack of good mod tools combined with lack of time to moderate manually, and that they didn't really want to defederate but didn't know what else to do.
  
  Yes, that is how I came to the conclusion I shared above.

This needs to happen. This is getting ridiculous
- The site grew something like twenryfold in the span of two days... Honestly I'm impressed at how mild the ridiculousness has been
  
  When you look at Lemmy as a whole though, the growth is significant, but the total is not that huge.
  The number of Lemmy users has increased from ~50K at the start of the month to ~135K today, so a bit under 3x. (For comparison, that's approx. 0.2% of reddit's active daily user accounts, or 0.008% of reddit's active monthly user accounts.)
  That we are seeing technical, trust, financial, and social/management scaling problems leading to defederation, servers being overloaded, etc. at this relatively tiny level of engagement is a bit worrying, but also kind of encouraging in a way. Better to encounter these things and address them early on, while the system is up and running.
  The good news is that there seems to be no shortage of people willing to help out. Lemmy is working for now, but these rumblings of future scaling problems need to be tackled. We have a growing user base, and there seems to be no shortage of motivation for creating a viable reddit alternative.
  EDIT: forgot to multiply by 100 to get % 🤦
- I have a feeling that given a couple of years, things will settle out a bit and be more like Mastodon.
  Could you imagine if your ISP/Gmail was so particular about what servers you could send email to?
  There will always be valid reasons to defederate, although I think the bar for that is going to end up pretty high and well-defined in the future, but it's sort of an organic process to get there.
  
  Hope so
  
  Could you imagine if your ISP/Gmail was so particular about what servers you could send email to?
  I can imagine if gmail does that because gmail does
  ISPs can block websites but its rare
  
  uuuummmmm it does
  Cory Doctorow @pluralistic @doctorow
  28 Apr 2022
  TFW your self-hosted email server of 20+ years stops working because Gmail no longer accepts email from it. #DKIM
  https://nitter.kavin.rocks/doctorow/status/1519673852862771200#m

I'm out of the loop, could someone explain what happened?
All I know is that Beehaw defederated (or was defederated by) someone because of trolls?
- Beehaw block lemmy.wolrd and sh.itjust.works
  https://beehaw.org/post/567170?scrollToComments=true
  
  The comment I read made it seem as some kind of pitiful faction war but it's pretty understandable, maybe it could even have a positive impact on Lemmy as a whole

deleted by creator
- Not necessarily. There's a Mastodon setting that would have worked here, it lets users from your community interact with another but doesn't let users from that community come into yours.

"A Modest Proposal."
Wait, this isn't satire? ;)

I disagree. I think you should either federate fully or not at all.
Why should we let instances browse and comment in our communites without reciprocity?

I like that idea. I had to create an account on 3 different instances to be able to interact with the communities I want because of instance blocks, it would be nice not having to juggle them all the time.
- Yeah people are not going to migrate over if they hear they can't interact with everyone. "Be careful which instance you sign up with because other instances may have blacklisted you, but I can't tell you which home instance to use because it might get overloaded."
  
  Things will settle. There will be a lot of split communities at first, but in due time it will be more consolidated.
  So in more exclusive instances they will have their own communities on a matter if their users need it, but I expect the more general ones to be the go-to for the majority, even if in different instances.
- Same

I would even say that at least 3 tiers of defederation are nessesary:
Remote instance users can interact with local instance by posting and commenting on local instance, but remote communities are blocked on local instance
Remote users can see posts/comments from local instance, but not the other way around and commenting and posting is disabled both ways
Full defederation as it works right now. Neither instance can see content from the other.
- Remote instance users can interact with local instance by posting and commenting on local instance, but remote communities are blocked on local instance
  This feels like the lose/lose option? The major reason sites defederate from another is that users on that remote site cannot be meaningfully moderated. This is usually because there's too much traffic coming from a poorly moderated instance, and there are too many uncooperative users showing up from there.
  It's not the group objects that are the problem, it's the users.
  Remote users can see posts/comments from local instance, but not the other way around and commenting and posting is disabled both ways
  There's no reason to disable posting. When you access a "remote" community from your local instance, you are in no way actually on that remote site. You're not directly interacting with anything remote. Instead, that remote content is mirrored on your local instance. You interact with the local copy, and then the servers sync the content.
  Defederation merely shuts down this syncing.
  You could, conceivably -- though I'm not sure if this is something that ActivityPub allows -- have a federation mode where you push out content to a remote site, but merely do not accept update from it. This does nothing to foster the community locally, though, and is probably at least as alienating as being able to see a discussion other people are having in a view-only mode where you cannot interact with anyone at all.
  It really just seems better to me to find another community built around the same topic. Or, if you find yourself on an instance that's being defederated by a lot of other sites, pick up and move to another instance, because it's probably signalling that something fishy's going on on your current one.
  The defederation tier that's currently missing is "silencing", which basically enforces subscription approvals from silenced websites. So, you click subscribe, the mods see that someone wants to subscribe to the community, they check out your profile, and then, finding you're not causing problems for others, they approve your subscription.
  Also useful would be the ability to set communities as 'Local Only'.

Imo de-federation literally breaks the WHOLE fucking point of all of this.

It sounds to me as if the problem is one of technology and manpower; both need to be enhanced. Voting to bell the cat won't help if it's impossible to do!

I think this discussion is extra important with the recent and ongoing influx of new users, many of whom don't have a clue what criteria to use when choosing an instance. Plenty of new folk who have no real affiliation with whatever taint their instance might have due to its admin.

Yeah, it is a bit of a flaw of the system in my opinion. While I do like lemmy so far, I do have a long list of things I want to point out in a longer post later this week.
As a user you are at the mercy of your instance to be randomly cut off from your favorite communities. Of course you can sign up in multiple instances, but that kind of defeats the point of federation

Meta: I think that the world would be a vastly better place if more people spent more time and effort focused on themselves and their own actions rather than on other people and their actions.

49 comments

EXACTLY