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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology
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People don't dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it's a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It's a flawed system. I don't know what a good solution would be, but it's definitely an issue.
I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.
Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon 'defederated' from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.
The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it's growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.
People have been conditioned to never answer their phones when an unknown number calls because of a few bad actors that severely abuse the system and none of the network operators want to take responsibility for the actions of their users (and they are profiting from this lack of moderation).
Imagine if ISPs and services like Cloudflare didn't counter DDoS attacks.
happens with email servers all the time
It's just like when email blew up. Email is a federated system as well. These are basically the same arguments I was hearing in the late 80s, early 90s about email. It's too confusing, nobody will ever use it.
Most servers did zero authentication for incoming emails. When spammers suddenly struck huge ip blocks were banned including innocent bystanders. Any "home" machine was often port blocked from running a mail server.
They developed tools and techniques to mitigate problems and now nobody cares where your email is.
The tools for this area known and the devs are working on it. Early adopters experience some friction.
That's basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don't do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.
Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.
Ultimately if you don't want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.
Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.