I am still playing around with Lemmy like I am sure a lot of people are. I have accounts on multiple instances to see how things are and what not.
I understand why beehaw decided to defederate with .world, I just didn’t think much about the consequence of it after it happened. Today I was browsing the !anime@lemmy.ml from my beehaw account and looked at the same from my this .ml account and realized I am missing so posts… Any user from .world posting a discussion thread for an anime I watch from, I can’t participate in…
I could create my own discussion post about the anime, but now there are two posts going about the same thing. beehaw users would be able to see and participate in this now, but every other instance will see two posts. Duplicating the same thing and splitting the discussion unnecessarily.
I love the power, control, and principles behind Lemmy and the wider fediverse, its just something that is annoying me at the moment. Its amazing for taking care of spam instances (70k users with no posts? yea right), but when one large/popular instance spanks another, it can be problematic. Thinking of maybe self hosting (which I am no stranger to) as a way to avoid an issue like this in future.
Still like Lemmy and wanting to push through these “quirks”, but just wanted to vent a little.
Yes and no. Society has always been fractured in ways that limit discourse. Prisons, psychiatric institutes, universities, bourgeoisie, NCO/CO, municipailities, nation states. Homes. So a bit of separation is okay.
Arguably the digital space magnifies this effect. And fair enough. But then I would argue:
The internet is already defederated by default. Extremists already congregate on forums that are completely isolated. Facebook users are walled off from YouTube users, etc.
The Fediverse doesn’t exacerbate the separation that already exists. The opposite is true. The Fediverse is the one technology that is providing technical means for interconnection across groups.
First of all, good conversation. I’m enjoying it.
I’ve been around almost five decades, and I can say without a doubt that yes, there are and have always been divisions in society, but not this segregation into hate camps that exists now. Not on this scale - previously, only extremists would be so disconnected from society. Now, we drive them into their safe spaces.
Even milquetoast blue and red flag wavers are shooting each other regularly where before there would be some mild eye-rolling, and this coincided with the rise of social media, which, as you say, has always been segregated.
Understanding and moderation comes with only one thing - compassionate discourse. You can’t do that if you block ban entire segments of the community.
Did you read the article I linked? What are your thoughts?