Yup, as said already, exactly like that.

Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don’t need to care about exactly how.

I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.

It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based “Threadiverse” (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based “Fediverse” - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around “communities” (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That’s basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don’t use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.

Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That “machine” that you use, that “server”, in Fediverse terminology is called an “instance”. And it will have “admins” who run it, as well as “moderators” who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It’s the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that’s not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.:-)

Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you’ll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime “soon”). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and a couple of post flairs, and also hashtags too). Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.

And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain (“admin”) is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/“instance”) and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. “Free speech” is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.

If you mean the “how is your day going so far” type of posts, I don’t think those are meant to be deceptive so much as to generate engagement by placing the post into people’s subscribed feeds.

But if you mean the same identical post, that’s not great - perhaps you want to unsubscribe from communities that do or even allow such practices.

For Japanese speaking people there is Misskey - it is FOSS and uses ActivityPub.

Usually whenever I want to make a post, I think back to the comments I typically receive and think better of doing so, then don’t.

I’m sure this is happening elsewhere too, e.g. on Reddit, though balanced by a much larger user base (and ofc bots doing a lot of the actual posting, and sometimes the commenting as well).

I probably should comment less often too:-). Really, touching grass and talking with people irl is much more fulfilling.

Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. https://piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!:-)

Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.

Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).

Quality over quantity:-D

Thank you for sharing that data 😊

You are absolutely correct there, in that hypothetical scenario if they were to attempt to hide their traffic among normal instance activities.

To add a bit more detail to my previous answer, there were some prior discussions about this topic, citing some of the most popular instances of the entire Threadiverse having been targeted by their normal DDOS-like approach:

I do not know enough about the ActivityPub protocol to answer that. I did think that federation at least used to be the default many years ago but aren’t sure about the current status of that. Indeed detection and subsequent blocking will always be the cat and mouse game that is played but use of ActivityPub might at least delay the former part? And how would anyone find out, compared to e.g. if not a single person household then at least a small community instance just wanting to pull down all the content across the Fediverse to read up on?

Except iirc, they aren’t scraping “properly” (read: efficiently at least, setting aside morality for the sake of discussing this component in isolation), and are causing traffic troubles. If only they took the time to install an actual instance themselves then nobody would care in the slightest (again, ignoring the morality part, for now).

TLDR: they are being dicks about it, bc offering everything we have for free is not enough for them.

I don’t care for Mastodon - I want to discuss topics of interest not solely to follow individuals (while hashtags are inconsistent).

And for the strictly Threadiverse side of things, Mbin has a less compact layout than Lemmy’s far more polished look and feel. Other things also did not integrate as well - e.g. the difference between Upvotes vs. Boosts (I understood it - I came over from Reddit to Kbin.social - but still it is jarring).

Mbin isn’t “bad”, it’s just that I preferred Lemmy, although now I’ve left that too and migrated to PieFed that is even better!:-P Like, why when most images seem to be vertically laid out or somewhere squarish, does Mbin “force” such a horizontal layout? That plus how it leaves an enormous amount of room for a long title (which news articles tend to have but the more social media esque posts trend towards shorter ones) lead to a LOT of wasted screen real estate - overall it just seems like it was designed more for Mastodon and the Threadiverse side was almost an afterthought, or at least not as polished on that side (as Lemmy and PieFed are). And then like, you can see every account that upvotes something, but you are prevented from seeing anyone who downvoted (“reduces”) it? It is not a pleasure to see all those inconsistencies in behavior.

Overall it comes across as less “welcoming” to the Threadiverse side, or at least it feels that way to me. Although I do like the placement of the account names side by side with both the up and downvotes on Mbin rather than the Lemmy style - bc all of that is real information, like if some content received 12 upvotes and 10 downvotes, that’s a much more engaging set of stats than just “2” (net vote count); and I like seeing it all on one line whereas in Lemmy it is sometimes on the right side, other times on the left, and I hate how it swaps around back and forth depending on the length of other items. Then again, Lemmy’s search feature is just absolutely fantastic, and neither Mbin nor PieFed even begin to compare with it IMHO (at the time).

Nowadays the competition isn’t Mbin vs. Lemmy, which is rapidly falling behind in features offered, but Mbin vs. PieFed. Go to a PieFed instance like PieFed.social and the layout of the latter just blows me away! 😍 The icons are actually large enough to read without needing enlargement most of the time, the scrolling is so long, the titles accommodate both short vs. long, everything is just so exceedingly well-done, and the features behind it all are jaw-dropping for someone who is like more used to Reddit and hasn’t heard of them - people are more used to “features” like increasing Reddit profit margins, not existing solely to serve the user base.

If I needed to use use both Mastodon and Lemmy/PieFed with a single account, I would absolutely not hesitate to create an Mbin account, as I once did with Kbin. However, I do not, so I use PieFed that is more tuned specifically towards the Threadiverse content.

PieFed’s categories of communities / Topic areas does this. When I used Lemmy I never found anything remotely close to that, but perhaps the best was to (1) visit each and every community that you want to check up on individually, and/or (2) use New rather than Hot or Top… and then be prepared to block hundreds of communities that you never want to see content from, like sports or individual locations (cities, towns, stateships, regions, countries, etc.).

PieFed also combines all comments across all cross-posts, reversing the fragmentation effect from having too many communities split across many instances.

You all on Lemmy need to catch up!:-P

Reddit did this with multi-reddits. PieFed does this with categories of communities, Topic areas that are user customizable and shareable. Lemmy does not do this readily, although Blaze managed it… by making 50 different accounts, one per instance.

Depending on your method of access (like app or webpage) often there is a way to browse without an account. Though you won’t be able to comment, vote, or save anything (like settings). So really, to sign up on a new instance, you pretty much need an account to do all this - otherwise abusers would send so much spam everywhere, this is why accounts are mandatory.

Although once you have an account on one instance, you automatically get to see content from all of them. Make sure you are looking at “All” rather than just “Local” content.

When you are ready to switch, go to account settings, scroll to the bottom and choose Export, then in the new place choose Import and it will port over all your subscriptions, block lists, etc.

The world is what you make of it. It’s definitely not fair. One tip: narrow your experiences until you can stand them?

Honestly PieFed helps so much with that, it’s like night and day. Maybe switch to PieFed.World (or something) and check how those categories of communities change your experience completely. You don’t even need to make an account to start with that.

You don’t ever have to scroll your main feed again, until and unless you want to… there are whole entire days when I have not done so, and a wealth of content to be seen if only the right tool helps connect you to what you are looking for. Drop the largest communities and embrace the niche, if you are looking for quality over quantity. Blaze managed it on Lemmy but it took having twenty different accounts, whereas PieFed lets you do it with just one.

I don’t think the Lemmy software can do anything about it, as it places too much emphasis on manual labor on behalf of the moderators to keep up.

PieFed has some really neat ideas though, on democratization of moderation where users can set software preferences, thereby taking a substantial burden off the shoulders of the mods.

e.g. instead of relying on mods to remove posts, keyword filtering allows individual users to reduce exposure to topics such as “Musk” or “Trump” or “USA”. Or user icons are really cool - e.g. new user account with age <2 weeks, or highly contentious user with >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or potential unregistered bot account that posts >10x more often than they reply in comments. None of those cause “removal” of content except in the recipient’s personal feed.

Probably it depends which corners you look at.

A tiny niche subreddit I would presume would be more civil than a politics community here.

It’s also a lot easier to dox people IRL here. e.g. self-host something, get someone to click, and there you go.

And that’s just the people who even read the rules in the first place - many people, sadly, do not (or perhaps do and simply do not care? well, there is no functional difference).

I disagree, bc “exactly zilch” is fairly extreme. It can do something, perhaps it would not be enough but it could have a measurable impact. How would we know if we do not try?

PieFed has a number of features designed to democratize moderation - e.g. keyword filtering (allowing users to filter All, None, and even just Some content, of e.g. Musk or Trump or USA) facilitates individual end-users to curate their experiences so that mods don’t have to be as aggressive at removing things.

Another cool feature is the user icons - like a brand-new account on the Fediverse gets an icon next to their name, as too does someone who receives let’s say >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or a potential unregistered bot account that posts 10x more often but never replies to comments. These icons don’t remove content like a moderator would, just label it so you can choose to use that knowledge however you wish.

Another one is that people looking for a less controversial discussion environment can auto-hide or even auto-remove content from your feed - I have these turned off but if someone would be offended easily and want not to see things that are heavily downvoted, they have this option. Here it is the combination of the entire community and the end user deciding their personal tolerance threshold that decides what content appears in someone’s feed. There are also options to use “community members only” votes, to help separate drive-by votes from people who have not joined the community and were just scrolling All, e.g. for polls and such.

Oh yeah, PieFed has polls. Also flairs - both user and post. And categories of communities that are user customizable and shareable. It has a ton of new features, both related and unrelated to community moderation. Check it out!