Like with many free software projects: you’re free to run a server that complies with your preferences, and let others join along.
FOSS empowers users. That can be to reach each other, or not to. It’s the users’ choice, in this case the instance admin’s, on how to apply those freedoms.
In practice, running anything but a tiny server for friends requires moderators, and moderators don’t like having to make tough decisions. You can join the small subgroup of servers that will only take the bare minimum of moderation actions, but you’re likely to end up getting defederated from large servers for offloading your users’ moderation to them (plus the “anything that’s not illegal goes” servers usually end up attracting douche bags that got banned everywhere else for being unlikable people).
There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.
Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.
That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.
I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.
Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.
Like with many free software projects: you’re free to run a server that complies with your preferences, and let others join along.
FOSS empowers users. That can be to reach each other, or not to. It’s the users’ choice, in this case the instance admin’s, on how to apply those freedoms.
In practice, running anything but a tiny server for friends requires moderators, and moderators don’t like having to make tough decisions. You can join the small subgroup of servers that will only take the bare minimum of moderation actions, but you’re likely to end up getting defederated from large servers for offloading your users’ moderation to them (plus the “anything that’s not illegal goes” servers usually end up attracting douche bags that got banned everywhere else for being unlikable people).
There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.
Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.
That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.
I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.
Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.