What would you do if your instance gets defederated?
I'm just curious, since I tend to get attached to my accounts but I also like having access to all information so I don't want to use a defederated instance. If, say, kbin got overrun by bad actors and was defederated by everyone else, is the only option to jump ship? Unfortunately I don't have the capability to selfhost or I would to avoid such problems.
What are your contingency plans if such a thing occurs?
If your instance gets universally defederated, yes I would suggest to change instances as soon at possible because that level of defederation only happens in extreme circumstances.
For now, you'll need to create another account on a different server form scratch as migration is not possible yet in in kbin and lemmy.
I currently have accounts with four different instances, and I expect to have more. I jump between them as the mood hits me.
I presume that if one of them is defederated by another instance, that will just figure in to whether or not I'm in the mood to spend time there at a given moment. And if one of them turns toxic enough to drive me away... it'll drive me away.
I don't think any of it's worth worrying about. The whole fediverse thing seems to be very fluid, and I count that as a good thing.
I think that it's not a priority at the moment but if/when there are clearer bad faith actors in charge of a popular instance, I think devs will tackle it.
Right now I have a Beehaw account, and a kbin account. I decided to go with kbin overall, but if kbin screwed the pooch tomorrow I technically have a back up to continue on largely unfettered.
That being said I'm 40 and I don't have time for this shit anymore. I'm at the point now where the moment the next medium-level-annoyance occurs I'm just gonna start deleting bookmarks and moving on with my life. Ain't got no time for this shit. I can get my news in a million other places without Reddit, Lemmy, Beehaw, Jigsaw, Yeehaw or what-the-fuck-ever-else lol.
Same. The beauty of the internet is the freedom of movement. You can have one account or many accounts across the internet, and it doesn't matter. You can go where you're treated best without tolerating the bullshit of a platform or instance if it does not suit you. Speaking of news, RSS feeds have been my greatest ally in sourcing decentralized information that I choose.
I'm hoping that the ability to migrate accounts across instances will become a thing in the future, for situations like that. It would help reduce the pressure to stay in one place because you've put so much time into it, which is one of the most unhealthy traits of social media imo.
My strategy has been to make multiple accounts on different instances, spread myself across different communities and not to put all my eggs into one basket or get attached to any one community.
I completely agree about the migration. I guess it would make some moderation a little more tricky - like if a user got banned, can they migrate? I guess migration would only be through federated instances? I would imagine that a migration would involve carrying around some data about corrective action that had been taken previously?
I don't think those are insurmountable questions, though.
I already have three different accounts - and at some point (when things stabilize) I'll most likely migrate my account to one of them, because I prefer a bit smaller "local".
I'm hoping import/export tools will come along soon(ish) - I don't want to add all my communities manually
By default all instances communicate with each other if people subscribe from one to another. If one instance doesn't want to talk to another instance for one reason or another, they can block it (defederate from it) and this stops the traffic between them.
An easy-ish way to explain it is to use the example of email. Gmail, Outlook, Proton, your private email server...they all are independent of each other but can interact with each other. That interaction is "federation". Kbin, Lemmy, and even Mastodon, PeerTube, et al can interact with each other even though they are independent of each other, yet alone not the same "usage" (i.e., link aggregators vs. microblogs vs video hosting...).
Defederation simply means ending the interaction. The instance will still operate as is, but will not interact with what it has defederated from. In the case of Beehaw, they still interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but not with the instances they blocked.
To circle back to the email example, if your private email server defederated from Outlook, you'd still be able to send/receive email from the others, but not Outlook.
Imo email is the perfect metaphor for this. You explain how email works and how even though Gmail looks different from outlook, both gmail and outlook users can interact with each other in the same email thread. Then, you say "now replace email with reddit/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram." I feel like I could explain this shit to my dad with this metaphor.
@Kwaker76 tldr defederation is disconnecting from the rest of the fediverse (or whatever specific instances you don't want to talk to). I think there are tiers to it but that's the gist.
Some people are salty but beehaw defederated from sh.itjustworks and Lemmy.world as a temporary stopgap until better modtools are available to prevent getting harassed.
If it gets defederated by instances I care about, then i'd migrate my account.
One of the things the Lemmy devs community need to work on is migration tools. Mastodon, for instance, has tools to migrate your account to another instance that would carry your followings and such. I'd expect something that at least takes the communities/magazines I'm subscribed to with me.
As I do not use kbin, i don't know if it has similar tools, but in any case, my response is the same.
Edit: there is a difference in migrating a microblogging account and migrating a threadiverse account that i'd care about, for instance. In microblogging, past posts do not care as much, it's a more ephimeral thing -I have autodelete my posts set on, for example-. On the other hand in the threadiverse, there may be more timeless meaningful posts that I may care about not being lost and want to take with me if I migrate instances. Because of that, I think migration in the threadiverse is more complex and i'd like the migration tools to reflect that too.
Lemmy, and I guess kbin too as I understand it's newer, are still in a very early stage of development (Lemmy is now in version 0.17 in my instance). The bump in users may bring interested to developers and there would probably be an acceleration. No idea where the priorities in development are right now though.
I have 3 differents accounts on different instances with the same username. Moving to another instance would be seamless for me, even though my post and comment history would be gone.
I have multiple accounts on different instances with different usernames. I wouldn't blink an eye if I lost my post and comment history as I keep a local copy of posts and comments I like and move on. Would love to see a transfer option, but there is something special about packing up and starting over again where no one knows my name or has some preconceived notion about who I am as a person because I wrote an opinion they did not like.
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