It depends. Defederation for good reasons is good, defederation for bad or false reasons is generally bad.
As an example, having a strict and democratic defederation/federation policy has contributed to Hexbear having the most active trans community on Lemmy, and it’s a good thing that there’s an actively protected trans space free from bigotry.
At the same time, defederating from instances for political reasons under the guise of other reasons is generally a bad thing.
It’s largely context dependent.
I mean, “bad” in this case is completely subjective. There are large trans communities on other instances (blahaj being the most obvious one) and they have their reasons for defederating from Hexbear.
Hexbear defederated from blahaj, not the other way around. Either way, Hexbear remains the most active trans community on Lemmy.
I understand why anticommunist instances like Lemmy.world defederate from Hexbear, I just don’t think it will help Lemmy.world in the long run, as Lemmy itself by nature is going to attract Communists due to its structure.
Well that’s definitely your own experience on federated platforms, but I wasn’t speaking to that circumstance. I made a mastodon account and criticized our government’s massive funding of Israel in spite of our lack of critical infrastructure and healthcare and got spammed with “Israel has a right to defend itself, and you 're a trumper if you think otherwise” type comments by people that post one response and then immediately block you. Which is laughable and couldn’t be further from the truth. That is the perpetual echo chamber I was referring to from my personal experience.
Are positive, liberal LGBT communities echo chambers
Could be, especially if there aren’t a multitude of sentiments there. That doesn’t mean all sentiments must be present of course.
Are they not allowed a collective space to hang out without having to explain themselves all the time
I don’t think anyone said they aren’t allowed to have such a space.
You’re in an echo chamber if you curate your home feed to only show one opinion and then never change it; it doesn’t matter what the opinion is
How did you take this as an attack? An echo chamber is the exaggerated idea of hearing only a single opinion, as curated to your own beliefs. It doesn’t matter what the belief is.
Obviously no one is 100% in an echo chamber, but it’s also obvious that everyone is guilty of confirmation bias; and tend to prefer seeing their own opinions online. I never said anything about my own feed or accused you of being in an echo chamber. I just explained what one was because you implied that it’s impossible to be in a liberal echo chamber
