Another data point in favor of supporters of Dead Internet Theory .

Also, this is one more example of why it would be better if instances charged a little bit from everyone: spammers will rather run things from their own machines (or some illegal botnet) than paying something with a credit card.

As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that’s because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.

But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.

Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.

If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.

You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it’s mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.

That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.

“real” decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.

Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.

Lemmy is an half-measure.

There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.

Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.

Then you defederate from it too.

Okay, let me create an account on mastodon.social and use it to scrape content from every other instance.

Better yet, let me create an account on “i-want-privacy-in-a-public-internet.example.com” and access the federated timeline directly, then I can go and push the content from everyone into this discovery service.

What are they going to do? Unless they go to the point of asking for physical evidence behind the person asking for accounts and/or only give invitations to people they already know, and *completely shut down their own servers to the outside world, they will never be able to avoid data leakage.

And if they do get to do any of this, then what is the point of using anything based on ActivityPub? They will be better off by just using any of the existing group chat servers like Discord (or Matrix/XMPP if they still care about FOSS.)

Yeah, that’s exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!

If everything is “decentralized”, you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else’s relay.

Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.

You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than “decentralizing” everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.

I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the “Mah privacy” crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.