Context

The main arguments for people to defederate are

  • “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
  • A potential federation with Threads (should Thread decide to implement it) would overwhelm Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed with millions of users (compared to the 40k monthly current active users), transforming those platforms into a threaded version of Facebook
  • Defederating preventively costs nothing

LW stance: https://lemmy.world/post/1274909?scrollToComments=true

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    16 days ago

    I have 2 possible theories on that:

    1. They want the federation to be all encompassing. Like a giant forum for corporations, governments and the common people. Sort of like a FOSS mall with a post office, community center and library included.

    2. They’re ran and/or owned ultimately by a Reddit or Threads type company.

    • PhilipTheBucketAEnglish
      112·
      16 days ago

      Someday I will write my master list of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories.

      I was going to say that I didn’t have one for lemmy.world, so that would be a good addition, but I realized that I do: LW is being run by the Russians, as a cheap way to get a solid foothold over a new sector of social media, and that’s why there was that moment in time where Youtube was giving out Russian-language descriptions for all the videos that got posted to LW.

      I have no evidence and it seems hilariously unlikely, but so does “Our Dutch sysadmin decided to host the server in Finland of all places, and then on top of that, Google decided to start handing out Russian-language descriptions when people accessed Youtube from Finland. And then, as soon as we found out about it, Google suddenly fixed it for us.”

      My theory would also explain why the admin team makes certain perplexing decisions like pushing so hard to make a safe space for the disinfo accounts and then forbidding anyone from calling them out.

        • PhilipTheBucketAEnglish
          22·
          16 days ago

          Practically the same country. I’m sure they share a ton of the same BGP routes, too, so it would be an incredibly easy thing to get crossed up on, when Google is doing their geolocation logic.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        16 days ago

        One of the admins shadow deletes comments. I called it out and was semi banned? Sometimes things go through and sometimes they don’t when I comment there by accident. Idk, I like a lot of the communities on there. I just don’t partake except for upvotes and downvotes.

        Also, it’s a decent theory.

        • PhilipTheBucketAEnglish
          3·
          16 days ago

          That’s very interesting. Can you DM me some examples?

          I’ve been seeing some strange failures in my own posts there just recently, but I assumed it was perfectly legitimate federation weirdness, which happens sometimes. I didn’t give it a second thought.

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            16 days ago

            It was in my Reddit PTSD days and I just rage quit. I deleted all of my posts and comments for the first few pages, lol. I think it was the reddit community, but it might have been the lemmyworld issues community. I thought it might be fediverse weirdness as well, but it was there and then went away a day later. That’s not how the weirdness works from my experience. I asked him why and he had a cocky answer like reddit admins of old so I rage quit. Which is funny now, it only hurt myself since I miss a lot of those communities. Their 3d printer community is fantastic.

            I saw the admin get called out for it a month or so ago and the leader said that he “does too much for the community” to let go and to email them if you have any issues. That’s the ultimate reddit, meta, x, etc., move to me so I just ignored it. That dude is their fixer imo.