They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.

This is the best way of putting it, the whole thing about people complaining about defederation. Honestly fuck the people who are like this, who do you think you are asking for the whole world when you weren’t entitled to it in the first place. You weren’t entitled access to Facebook content from Reddit or vice versa. It’s the same here.

I know that part of the reason people like that came her in the first place was because Mastodon and the OG fediverse services made that empty promise to them in the beginning (also saying a lot of shit about freedom and free speech) so those are the people that have been attracted. It really needs to be said loud and clear that this isn’t the case or intention, and catering to people who want the world when they don’t deserve it, is not the goal of the Fediverse or decentralization.

Decentralisation could very well lead to specialised instances for niche interests or fringe groups. I mean, exactly this has popped up during the first two Twitter migration wave.

And still, you’ve got countless people who want mastodon.social to be exactly the way they want it to be, regardless of what anyone else may want, or what’s possible on such a big instance. Because that’s where they are, and they are not going to move elsewhere.

You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.

Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.

I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.

Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.

You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.

The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.

Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.

It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.

On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.

You can read more about it here: https://pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).

I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.

You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)

Defederation all by itself isn’t bad.

Immature and irresponsible instance admins who use it as a tool to act out their personal conflicts are.

I’ve been looking for a new instance to join due to various reasons. Ended up setting up and account somewhere and spending 2 hours manually copying over various settings only to find my Moshidon client won’t even connect with that new instance. Normal people are just going to quit when that happens.