2y ago

YSK: What other instances have the most notable Lemmy instances defederated with

What other instances have the most notable Lemmy instances defederated with

Why YSK: Choosing an instance with defederation policies you're most comfortable with is important to make your Fediverse experience smooth in the long run.

Here is a chart showing the defederation count of each instance.

Instance	Defederated with how many other instances
beehaw.org	405
feddit.de	101
lemmy.world	63
lemmy.ml	44
sh.itjust.works	4
exploding-heads.com	3

You can get it by going to the instance's instance list and scrolling/Ctrl+Fing down to "Blocked Instances". To find the instance list, go to https://your-instance.url/instances, for example, https://lemmy.world/instances

115 comments

This is kinda why I wish we had user-level instance blocking, there aren't any popular instances that match my preferred blocklist and I don't want to have to go out and request federation for everything I want to see. For example, the top sites I don't want to see are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, and exploding-heads, and while beehaw gets all three, they also block instances I don't find problematic like lemmy.world.
So I ended up on lemmy.world and manually block all the stuff I don't want to see, but it'd be loads easier if I could just ask not to be shown content from instances I want to avoid.
- Kbin allows user-level instance blocking, so that functionality should be feasible to implement in lemmy eventually.
- Couldn't this be accomplished by deploying your own personal instance? Or am I missing something.
  
  You're right, however it might not be that simple especially when considering costs.
- If you're on android, connect has the ability to filter whole instances.
- Beehaw federates with lemmy.ml
  
  I find the whole thing a bit infuriating actually. I get the reasons for all the other defeds and actually support them. Unfortunately they refuse to do so with lemmy.ml because it's one of the largest instances and their users usually don't start shit on beehaw?
- lemmygrad and exploding-heads I can understand but why lemmy.ml? It's a general purpose instance with no known bot/Nazi/Tanky/other fascist/etc. infestion.
  
  I thought lemmy.ml was run by the same people as lemmygrad. (And the Lemmy code creators)
  At the beginning (of the reddit exodus) the admins were definitely banning people from lemmy.ml for being "critical of the Chinese government" calling it racism. ("Orientalism" was their term.)
  I switched to lemmy.world that same day, and haven't really kept up with that instance since then.

I feel like it's more important to know why these defederations happened than how many there are. Well beehaw just screams their reason with their number but that's a separate thing.
- Way too complicated and tedious. Do you audit the blacklist of your adblocker? Doubtful.
  For the vast majority of people, a cliff's notes and prior experience with an instance's general moderation policy and trustworthiness will have to suffice. Not so different that choosing a social media platform or subreddit, really.
  In my experience, I think these numbers correlate nicely with how curated the moderation is and inversely proportional to the tolerance to objectionable content from a moderate POV.
  
  and inversely proportional to how tolerant they are to extreme views..... just to be balanced

Why is beehaw so high?
- When they defederated from lemmy.world, the stated reason was the open registration policy. Their registration process is handled manually. I suspect that they operate a much tighter ship when it comes to moderation. This has it perks and problems.
  
  I tried to sign up to check it out, but apparently the essay I had to write pledging my undying commitment to a community I had not even experienced yet was insufficient to be accepted. Their loss.
- They are trying to create a "Safe and friendly place".
- They started with a commonly shared fediverse block list a lot of mastodon instances and stuff start up with. Since they've also defederated some instances that allow child porn, some political extreme instances, and some very large instances they couldn't moderate the influx from.
  
  They also defederated from instances that have open sign-ups because they allow bots to join too easily. This included lemmy.world.
  
  Pretty sure there are no significant instances that allow child porn.

beehaw.org at 405
Jeeez, that pretty much cements my reason for moving over from them. Defederating lemmy.world and other big instances for moderation reasons was reasonable for the time being, but that sheer number overall shows the control they want over their instance, and so much is excluded as a result, a lot of it likely due to ideological misalignment.
- When moving over from that other site it was the first instance I tried, for no particular reason.
  They made me write a statement why I would want to join the instance (okay, you need to filter the bots, fair enough) so I wrote a nice little text to let them know. I guess I failed to write the keywords they were looking for, so they denied my application.
  That told me all I needed to know about the mods.
  
  I would have just closed the page the second they asked me to write an essay on why I deserve to be on their website, lol.
  
  Same here. I wrote a statement saying why I wanted to join. They had a community there that no one else had at the time, so I mentioned how I wanted to participate in the community there.
  Got denied like 2 weeks later, but it was during that time they defederated from lemmy.world. At that point I knew I was wasting my time waiting to see if I'd get accepted or denied.
  
  I didn't even get a response lol, they just never let me log in
- Last time I looked at the list, It's mostly an imported list of horrible mastodon/pleroma instances, not Lemmy servers, and seemed reasonable to me. Go take a look at a few.
- Why did we even defederate from beehaw?
  
  Lemmy.world hasn't defederated with beehaw, as far as I know. Beehaw has been down for a little following the lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works compromise to patch their software; that may be why you're not seeing beehaw content if you haven't been.

I think it's worth mentioning the amount of instances full of bots as well. I just started hosting my own instance and decided to check other instances' block lists to defederate from at least some bot instances. I now have about 50 blocked instances. (instances with 60k or so users each with no posts)
- Whats in .jugler.jp and in burgit.moe? If even the nazis dont whant to have anything to do with them then they must be really bad.
  
  Probably loli hentai which would be illegal in many jurisdictions.

Great post! I want to add to this, you can use this site to check what instance blocked who https://federation-checker.vercel.app/
Search with lowercase, for some reason did lemmy.world not show all the instances that blocked them only instances they blocked when L or W was in capital letters.

So is it possible for users in lemmy.world to see content from beehaw? Does this only limit beehaw users from seeing content on lemmy.world?
- Lemmy.world users can see behaw posts, but beehaw users can't see Lemmy.world posts. Comments cannot be seen by anyone outside their home instance.
  Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world, but Lemmy.world did not defederate from beehaw.
  If you look at a Lemmy.world community through beehaw, you will only see posts from before defederation, or posts made by unaware beehaw users.
  
  What do you mean by comments cannot be seen by other instances?
- Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure it goes both ways.
  
  You are wrong. Defederation only goes both ways if both instances decide to defederate each other.
  Beehaw and Lemmy.world was one way only. You can see all of beehaw's posts, but none of your interactions will leave your home instance.
  The comments under a post will only be from Lemmy.world users, however.
  
  Well that sucks, is it possible to transfer our account to another instance then?
  
  It was my understanding that defederation was a one way thing? So if instance A defederates instance B, A will not see anything from B but B could still see things from A?
- I can't get past your username, you degenerate
  
  Thank you

That's a far stick up ones ass there at Beehaw.
- meh. to each their own.
  That's the whole point of the fediverse, at least from my perspective. embrace the smaller communities as much as the big ones. same with open vs closed. they all serve their purpose and minimizes a homogeneous environment that allows niches to exist, much like the early internet.
- They don't like federating with instances with open signups
  
  There are plenty of open instances on their federated list, ones that aren't bot farms though

Maybe consider altering your links so that they point to the /instances pages of each site so that people can go directly to the list of federated and defederated instances for each. Likely there are people who haven't yet discovered that page.