Is there a way to shop around for a Lemmy instance based on how many instances are blocking it and how many instances it’s blocking? For example, I noticed that the lemmygrad.ml instance is relatively popular, but it seems like a lot of other instances block it. It also blocks a bunch of other instances. So, if there are any communities on there that might be relevant to me then I would be missing out. I guess I could just create an account on a walled instance, but I would prefer not to keep creating accounts. I’d like to just find one instance that maximizes my access. Is the answer to just run my own instance?

  • salarua@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Some folks think that defederation is a bad thing. OK.

    Here’s a little experiment you can try at home.

    1. Stop using GMail, Hey, or whatever email service you’re currently using.
    2. Set up your own mail server (there’s instructions on the internet).
    3. When the instructions say to use a Remote Black List just ignore them.
    4. When the instructions say to validate domains, ignore those too.
    5. When the instructions say to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just let those slide.
    6. Try to send / receive email
    7. Also try to read your inbox. For added benefit turn on all notifications for received mail.

    Voila. Now you have an unfettered email experience.

    And this, class, is why defederation is useful.

    Please send your comments to the overworked TA in the back of the room.

    Craig Maloney

      • salarua@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        probably not, but you’d get the same amount of horrible stuff as you’d get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i’m making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn’t block anyone, you’re exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don’t block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you’d see

        • zkikiz@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Edit: apparently lemmygrad is much worse than I realized

          The only caveat I have to this is that being communist shouldn’t be an automatic block. Lemmy.ml doesn’t block lemmygrad and I see no reason why it should, the posts I see are like “wow capitalism is fucking us up” not like “Tiananmen did nothing wrong and let’s repeat it x1000” so it really doesn’t seem comparable to proactively blocking Nazis. If you block “both sides” of a violent conflict like, say, the war in Ukraine, you’ve suddenly blocked everyone with a useful opinion.

          • scoobford@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I saw a lot of tianamen didn’t happen, CCP worship, etc on there for the first few days after I registered, which is a bit problematic.

            I wound up blocking them after a couple days, more because I don’t care about a tiny fringe movement (in my country), and don’t have any interest in their content.

          • Kichae@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            lemmy.ml is also run by communists, as are quite a few other instances, I imagine. No one’s really saying that communists should be blocked.

            But lemmygrad is specifically a vanguard edgelord site. Even those of us who are communists don’t necessarily want to deal witih /c/GenZedong.

            Plus, I left the instance I host for me and my friends open to lemmygrad, and I had people from the server create accounts and just bulk subscribe to communities there.

            It’s not the communism people are blocking it for.

          • salarua@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Lemmygrad isn’t blocked because of their views, it’s blocked because it’s a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don’t include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out

            • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And that doesn’t apply to liberals and every other ideology on this site? Every person has a political view which affects their opinions

              • salarua@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they’d get mass-defederated too. like i said, it’s not their views they got defederated for, it’s their behavior

                • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  To be fair it’s not like I know what lemmygrad does, I only joined yesterday, but it just seems like typical ‘tankiephobia’, I don’t exactly agree with MLs on everything either but some of what they get accused of is just beyond the pale. I mean generally if someone is a western liberal they don’t get endlessly accused of being a mass war crime apologist even though that’s basically what the ‘war on terror’ was.

                • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Behaviour like what though? Disagreeing? I don’t even know what ‘sealioning’ means, it basically seems like just saying ‘this person has different fundamental assumptions to me therefore they’re acting in bad faith’.

          • sarsaparilyptus@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Have you read Lemmygrad’s sidebar at all? They describe themselves as Tienanmen Square truthers, are openly pro-DPRK, and fully support genocide in the name of Communism. They exemplify everything bad people say about tankies and they take great pride in it.

            Wanting to cut out tankies and Nazis is NOT being a radical centrist who wants to “both sides” every issue, it’s just being a normal human being who doesn’t have bees in their head.

            • zkikiz@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Ahh no I access Lemmy via the mobile app. Thanks for the information, I’ll be blocking them.

        • jarfil@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Agreed that blocking is a security precaution… but this is not just an anti-spam feature, defederation in user communities can come from any motives, including political, religious, or whatever other views the instance owners find undesirable.

          I think each user should be able to pick what kind of blocking experience they wish for themselves. There should be as a bare minimum a way to set either an instance, or a client app, that can interact with instances that are defederated among themselves (without acting as a bridge, obviously).

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.oneOP
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          1 year ago

          If instance ‘A’ has already blocked instance ‘B’, what does it matter to ‘A’ whether or not any other instances have also blocked ‘B’? Would the admin have to go far out of their way to block the instances that don’t block ‘B’ or is there a way to do it automatically?

          • salarua@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            they would have to go out of their way, but it’s bad practice to block because of guilt by association. most instances have internal federation guidelines that are somewhat looser than their own rules, but still include a baseline level of decency. so an instance that doesn’t allow nsfw content would federate with an instance that does (even if they wouldn’t allow images to federate) as long as they don’t go all freezepeach or harass everyone

      • darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party
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        1 year ago

        It’s a fraction of the work of an email server, if you’re not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work

      • Thomas@lemmy.douwes.co.uk
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        1 year ago

        depends, If you ignore all the outgoing things, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Your outgoing emails will always go into spam or disappear completely.
        If you follow all the outgoing things but ignore the inbound mail checking, you will get quite a bit of spam. I run my own email server and instead of blocking bad incoming emails I just send then to the spam folder. I usually receive about 2-4 spam email a day, usually it’s just marketing crap or it’s a single link with some cutout of a wikipedia article to avoid spam detectors, and sometimes it’s trying to extort you. I find it fun to read them sometimes, one time I got an email saying I missed a payment for my domain name but they got the amount of VAT wrong AND the maths on the subtotal. Some of them are comicality bad. but not quite the flood you might expect. If more people where on my email server or if I signed up to any shitty website I came across I’m sure it would be a lot worse though.

    • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What a ridiculous false dichotomy, obviously subs which are just creating outright machine spam should be blocked but the current policy is just creating complete echo chambers where the orthodoxy of the admins isn’t challenged.

  • Ada@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    tbh, there is no such instance. Not blocking any other instances is often a reason to be blocked by other instances.

    An instance that blocks no one is in effect a “free” speech instance that prioritises the right to be bigoted over the need to provide safe spaces for folk. And that means that instances that value the need for safe spaces over “free” speech are going to block the instances that don’t block anyone else as a means of creating and maintaining that safe space.

    • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
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      1 year ago

      Hmm? Do instances automatically block other instances if they don’t block certain other ones?

      I self host an instance. I haven’t blocked anyone yet as I just sub to communities that aren’t bigoted.

      • Andreas@feddit.dk
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        1 year ago

        Some decently sized Mastodon instances introduced a policy like this. “Unless you use my blacklist, you are defederated by default”. In practice, it means that those few instances are an isolated clique that only talk to each other. In my experience, those cliques are toxic, so it’s no big loss if you’re not able to contact them. But of course I hope this behavior doesn’t come to Lemmy.

        • AnagrammadiCodeina@feddit.it
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          1 year ago

          I can see the issue but at the same time is scary. In the future this thing could be bad. Like who is drawing the line and where?

          • Andreas@feddit.dk
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            1 year ago

            No one draws the line unfortunately, because no one controls the entire federated network. This is why it’s important to have many medium-sized instances on the Fediverse and not one massive instance and a bunch of other tiny ones, so one instance won’t get too much control and impose their rules on the entire network. But it’s difficult to convince non-tech users of this concept since they are used to centralized social media and will just sign up on the biggest instance.

          • Andreas@feddit.dk
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            1 year ago

            On the free speech and shitposting Fediverse instances, they get around this by screenshotting posts from blocked instances. I believe there are also some implementations that can bypass fetching authorization and fetch public content from instances that have blocked them. If something is posted publicly on the internet, it can be distributed further, so I don’t see why they should use this halfway solution that fragments the network without actually increasing the instance’s security (e.g. make the instance private and verify signups).

      • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
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        1 year ago

        Nah, if you’re using your instance as an essentially private one, you’re not about to be blocked. If you’re running communities on it that run counter to the basic ideals of other communities, you’ll probably find yourself losing some federation however.

        I run my own, and I’m not blocking anything yet because, honestly, I just won’t be vising ones I’m not interested in. I’ll probably block a few if I see things coming out of them that I really don’t want to see, but at this point it doesn’t affect anyone else.

  • 7eter@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    U might want to take a look at the federation map. It might be a bit overwhelming but in the settings on the bottom left you may chose blocked and allowed in order to get some insights on who federates with whom.

  • balderdash9@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I don’t have the answer but I share your sentiment.

    One thing I hated about reddit is the mods would ban you for participating on certain subs. For instance, I got banned from r/WhitePeopleTwitter for commenting in a r/Conservative thread. (I was actually disagreeing with someone, but that’s neither here nor there.)

    The Fediverse feels like a worse version of that phenomenon. Entire communities are blocked off from each other by the admins of the instance. I fear that Lemmy might become a disjointed group of echo-chambers. Some might argue that reddit already is.

    • RoaringSilence@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think that your concerns will happen. As the fediverse could be easy replicated and it is no problem to run an own instance federating with whatever you want AND be part of the rest.

      My guess is that we will see more instances with different tastes if I may call it this.

      By using tools like kbin you are also free to assamble the fediverse you want without the need to follow a single instance only.

      • jarfil@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        By using tools like kbin you are also free to assamble the fediverse you want without the need to follow a single instance only.

        Is there an app version of that?

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.oneOP
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      1 year ago

      Lol yes, I got banned from one of the communism subs for an honestly inoffensive reply I made to a post on the cum town sub. Go figure.

      Anyway, it seems like the answer is to just run your own instance, but I wonder if a small home server might have trouble communicating with other instances, leading to even worse access.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m on https://lemmy.world. Apparently the people running it also run a mastodon server with 160k I think? users, so this might be good.

    So, something like that works for a “normal” acct I think. I doubt there’s a way to avoid making alt accts if you also wanna explore alternative topics and lifestyles.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
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    1 year ago

    AFAIK, yes, the answer to have control on which instances are blocked is to run your own instance, that’s actually what I did.

    For a way to search the number of instances that block certain instance, I don’t think there’s something like that yet.

    • DudePluto@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you turn your server off does that make your communities and account history invisible until you turn it back on?

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.oneOP
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      1 year ago

      I’m assuming that what you’ve got is a small personal instance. Does it have any trouble getting content from other instances?

      • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
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        1 year ago

        Yes, it’s a small instance I’m only intending to use it myself, maybe some other friends later.
        I’m doing it in a VPS with 1 core, 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD (it’s the smallest one).

        The only problem I had was because the documentation is a bit outdated, after fixing a single configuration everything has been smooth, I can easily subscribe to any community from any other instance and I can interact no problem.

        • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
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          1 year ago

          You still have the issue that you only get comments made or updated after initially subscribing? Like the first time you go to a community all the posts have no comments, and you only get new ones after that point.

          I’m thinking about maybe making a bot user that automatically subscribes to every community it can find just so I can have everything synced.

          • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, this is expected behaviour. The feed that grabs the last 20 posts doesn’t include comments, so you’ll only get comments from that moment on.

            • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
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              1 year ago

              I understand you can’t just go asking servers to send you every comment ever in its history all at once, but it would be nice if it could request like, one post’s comments.

              Like my server could remember the date that it “discovered” a community, and if I open a post that was made before that, then request the comments. There might need to be rate limits for such requests. But it would be nice

  • Knighthawk 0811@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    can an instance have only 1 community for support and then have no content of its own? I believe that many already do (or near to it). This would likely be the recipe for blocking the least and being blocked the least.

          • Knighthawk 0811@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            loads of people are making their own and doing pretty much this. I’m planning on giving it a try sometime over the summer. should be a fun project that I can actually keep using for a while. maybe even make my own notes or something.

            I might explore options to make private content just for myself

    • Swyper@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Instance owners would block that kind of instance based on the activity of its users instead.

      • Knighthawk 0811@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        they certainly can do that. I wonder if we’ll get to that point where there are SPAM instances that every other instance will need to deal with