Hey folks!

For anybody stumbling on this post from outside lemm.ee: I am the head admin of lemm.ee, a general purpose Lemmy instance, which recently turned 1 year old. I am writing this post to elaborate on how we approach defederation on lemm.ee.

Anybody who has been on Lemmy for a while has most likely seen several public defederation drama posts (most recently regarding lemmy.ml, but there have been many many others previously). As an admin, I have probably seen far more than what is visible publicly, as I regularly receive private messages on the topic, ranging from polite questions about federation, to outright demands that I immediately defederate, and even to threats and personal attacks over the fact that I have not defederated some particular instance. It is definitely a topic that will keep coming up for as long as Lemmy exists, which is why I feel it would be useful to condense my current thoughts about it in a single place.

Note that while I strongly believe everything this post contains, it is definitely a subjective topic, and there is no single right answer here. Other instances have completely different approaches to federation compared to lemm.ee, and that’s of course totally fine. The beauty of Lemmy is that everybody can choose their home instance, and in fact, everybody is free to spin up their own instance and run it however they feel is best. For an absurd example, if you want to create an instance which defederates any instance with an “L” in their name, then nobody can stop you!

Quick intro to the lemm.ee federation policy

Very shortly after creating lemm.ee, I wrote down a federation policy, which basically boils down to “we treat defederation as an absolute last resort, and we do not use it as a generic way to curate content for lemm.ee users”. This policy can always be found in the sidebar of the lemm.ee front page.

In practice, this has meant that we have had extremely few defederations, and that we mostly solve problems with other means. I am very happy with the results, as it means that lemm.ee has become a great entry point into the Lemmy network, with very few artifical limitations on who our users are allowed to interact with.

The benefits of federation

I hope that this part of the post is very uncontroversial, but I firmly believe that federation is the absolute strongest feature of Lemmy. While we all know that the concept of federation can cause confusion for new users, this is usually overcome extremely quickly (for example, using the common e-mail providers analogy to explain Lemmy instances). To me, it’s completely clear that the benefits of federation far outweigh the downsides.

For example, by splitting the Lemmy network between thousands of independent nodes, we ensure that:

  1. Any single entity is not a single point of failure for the whole network. Even if the biggest instance goes down tomorrow, their content will still be accessible through all the other federated instances.
  2. The maximum impact of admins is limited to their own instance. As a lemm.ee admin, I can ban a remote user from posting on lemm.ee, but I can’t completely ban them from the entire network.
  3. Private user data (such as ip addresses, e-mails, etc) are never shared between instances. No single malicious instance can harvest user data for the entire network, and extremely privacy sensitive users can always spin up their own instance if they don’t want to put their trust in any existing admins.

One thing which is probably important to note here is that I tend to view Lemmy instances as infrastructure, rather than as communities. I know that there are alternative approaches, as quite a few large instances are in fact run as mega-communities, but that’s not the approach I take with lemm.ee, because I feel like such an approach encourages centralization and negates some of the benefits of federation (if all communities related to one topic condense on a single instance, then that instance does effectively become a single point of failure for a large number of users).

In general, I feel like it should be a goal to encourage and cultivate decentralizing the network through federation as much as is practical, in order to maximize the above benefits.

The downsides of dedeferation

Conversely, defederation has a lot of downsides.

  1. It obviously negates all the benefits of federation mentioned above. Every time two instances defederate, the Lemmy network becomes less redundant, some communities become a bit more centralized, and the danger of malicious admins for those communities becomes much greater.
  2. There is a lot of collateral damage. The most common reason I have personally seen for defederation demands is related to moderation of either a single user, or a handful of users. For example, a lemm.ee user gets into some heated arguments with people from an instance with hundreds of active users, and then links this heated thread to me as proof that the instance should be immediately defederated. However, in this situation, there are hundreds of other users who were not even involved (or even aware of) the thread in question. By defederating, I would be making a decision to cut off every single lemm.ee user from every single one of those hundreds of innocent remote users.
  3. Ironically, defederation actually makes moderation more difficult. It was recently pointed out to me by a user on another instance that they are afraid they can’t effectively moderate communities on lemm.ee, because their instance has defederated several other instances, which means they would not be able to see posts from those instances on lemm.ee communities.
  4. It is extremely easy for malicious actors to abuse. In the year I’ve been on Lemmy, I have already seen two separate cases of users creating accounts on another instance and posting garbage, and then going back to their home instance and demanding their admins defederate over the content they themselves created. Basically, if an instance is known to use defederation as a tool to punish misbehaving users on other instances, then it’s actually quite easy for users to manipulate the situation to a place where admins have no alternative except to defederate.

It seems to me that a lot of users don’t think of such downsides when demanding defederation, or they just don’t consider them as important enough. In my opinion, these are all significant issues. I do not want to end up in a fragmented Lemmy network, where users are required to have accounts on 5 different instances in order to be able to access all their communities.

What’s the alternative to defederation? Should Lemmy become some kind of unmoderated free speech abolutism platform?

I want to be very clear that I do NOT believe in unmoderated social networks. Communities should always be free to set and enforce rules which foster healthy discussions. On top of that, instances should always be free to set and enforce rules for all of their users and communities.

In the case of lemm.ee, we have some instance-wide rules, and we will enforce them on all lemm.ee users, as well as all remote users participating in communities hosted on lemm.ee. For example, we never want to offer a platform for bigotry, so we regularly issue permanent bans for users who want to abuse lemm.ee to spread such hate. In practice, site bans have been extremely effective at getting rid of awful users, whether they are remote or local.

On top of site bans, Lemmy admins also have the option of removing entire remote communities. There are certainly cases where a community might be allowed on instance A, but not instance B - rather than defederating (and potentially cutting off a lot of innocent unrelated users), instance A can just “defederate” a single community.

Finally, a lot of issues can be solved through simple communication between instance admins. Often having a discussion with another admin results in pretty clear alignment over whether some user is problematic, and the user will end up being banned on their home instance.

Being one of the most openly federated large instances with such an approach, we have discovered several things:

  1. If we were to defederate over every rule breaking user or community on the Lemmy network, we would not be federated with any of the large instances at this point
  2. In the vast majority of cases, remote users who have broken lemm.ee rules have ended up banned on their home instance anyway - there is very little additional moderation workload for our admins from being widely federated
  3. If a user truly wants to spread some kind of hate, defederation wouldn’t stop them anyway, as they will just create accounts on any instance which they want to “attack”

The longer I run lemm.ee, the more sure I become that in the vast majority of cases of abusive users, the best approach is to simply hand out site bans.

When is defederation the only option?

Having said all of the above, I still believe that there a few cases when defederation is the best option:

  1. When an instance is abusing the Lemmy network - generating spam, advertising, illegal content, etc - either deliberately, or through inactive admins (this has been the most common reason for lemm.ee to defederate any instance in the past)
  2. When an instance is just causing too much moderation workload. So far, we haven’t experienced this yet on lemm.ee, but I can’t rule out that it could happen in the future.

Conclusion

I hope this post helps clarify my stance on defederation. Like I said in the beginning, I realize a lot of this is subjective, and there are no right or wrong answers - this is just the way we have been (and will be) doing things on lemm.ee. I intend to save this post and link it in the future when people bring up defederation requests. If you feel like I didn’t address something important, please feel free to raise it in the comments!

  • Universal Monk@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    I think this is a great way to go about things. I like how you are approaching this and I agree with all of your points. One of the reasons that this is gonna be my main instance from now on. Love it here. Thanks for all of your work!

  • ramble81@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Another thing to your point is most clients now support blocking communities or entire instances, so by doing this you’re leaving the power and the choice to the users to block as they want at a client level.

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      The problem with this, is that it only blocks posts. You’re still going to see comments, and posts and comments are still subject to vote manipulation.

      • ramble81@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        vote manipulation

        What is this? Reddit? Votes really don’t matter here.

        • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 months ago

          That’s just not true.

          Sure ok you might not see how many upvotes a user has received but that’s not how vote manipulation works.

          Votes influence what you see, and perhaps more importantly they influence what users perceive to be popular opinions.

          Upvotes for “genocide joe” comments are a good example. A few people can make an idea seem like it’s mainstream.

      • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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        4 months ago

        I like how connect handles this, all posts from said instance are blanked out wit a message ‘blocked due to a server ban on name of server. Click to view anyway.’ or something along those lines.

        This effectively shields you from those comments, but also makes them accessible should you choose so.

  • JakenVeina@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Yet another proof that I stumbled into the best instance from the beginning.

    • kyle@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Honestly same. I saw that lemm.ee was the second largest and had an active admin, felt like I would dip my toes in and I would change if needed.

      Never needed to, stuff like this gives me confidence in the platform.

  • LedgeDrop@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I wanted to thank you for creating and promoting an agnostic platform, like lemm.ee.

    I’d started exploring Lemmy on beehaw, but was confused and frustrated why I couldn’t do “simple things” like downvote (spammy) topics (especially, outside of beehaw channels) . Then beehaw started to do more and more defederations. Although, I respect the transparency the admins have in their communications, I’m not interested in their curated form of Lemmy. As an adult, I can make responsible decisions. Fortunately, the federated nature of Lemmy allows me to easy “pack-up my stuff” and go elsewhere.

    Thank you for providing me with a place to go!

  • Foni@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I want to tell you that this type of policy is what made me create the account in this instance. Also thank you for the great work you do, I think it is not recognized enough

  • rihatsu@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Thank you for bringing both your technical skills and your steady handed approach to moderation to Lemmy. I signed up on lemm.ee a little over a year ago because at the time it was the largest instance with an open sign up process that had a reasonably neutral stance on moderation. So far it is my only Lemmy account, and I doubt I’ll ever need to make another.

  • SherlockHawk@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I like your take on defederation, I always believe that having a moderate take on most issues is the correct approach.

    • Azzu@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      “Moderate” should not be a criterion for choosing anything. Rather you should choose the approach that has the best score when comparing reasons for and reasons against it, i.e. making a rational decision based on the available evidence.

      The reason your “middle of the road” approach doesn’t make sense is because if you really decide like that, one side just has to get more and more extreme for you to “sympathize” with their side, since suddenly the middle will shift in their direction. You can be easily manipulated that way.

      • SherlockHawk@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        There are very few situations where the choises are black and white. In most cases we are talking about shades of gray. I think that this us vs them mentality on the internet is pretty dumb in most cases.

        • Azzu@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          I was not able to express myself clearly enough that you understand what I was talking about. Should I try again or do you not care?

          • TassieTosser@aussie.zone
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            4 months ago

            Right winger: We want to kill all gays.
            Left winger: Every human being should be treated with respect.
            eNlIgHtEnEd cEnTrIsT: Well maybe some gays should be killed.

            • SherlockHawk@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              How did my comment about moderation devolved into american politics, I am not even american. I am european.

  • Godort@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Honestly, now that users can individually block whole instances, there isnt really much need for defederation outside of special cases where an instance is especially hostile or home to illegal content.

  • kostas@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    These three points you make here completely validate my decision to start to mainly use this instance.

    1. One thing which is probably important to note here is that I tend to view Lemmy instances as infrastructure, rather than as communities.
    1. I do not want to end up in a fragmented Lemmy network, where users are required to have accounts on 5 different instances in order to be able to access all their communities.
    1. Communities should always be free to set and enforce rules which foster healthy discussions. On top of that, instances should always be free to set and enforce rules for all of their users and communities.

    These adress the majority of issues I have had when trying to switch to using lemmy in the beginning.

  • wer2@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Thank you for your hard work. I am glade I support this instance.

  • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I’m glad that, when I arbitrarily chose an instance to create an account on, I ended up on one that I agree with on this so much.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s sad that people devote any time at all politicking instance admins to the point that writing something like this seems necessary. You’re experiencing their vision for a community when you join it. If you have another vision fuck off somewhere else.

    The effort extended for such small communities is the brain rot of human in-group/out-group drives. I truly cannot imagine the thought process of someone sending you personal threats over who you federate with.