- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
Seems like a way of bullying community leaders into running their instances how Fedi Garden feels is appropriate. Which is intrinsically against the nature of the Fediverse, in that instances are meant to have their own autonomy.
Fedi Garden’s position in this space is to be a directory, not a dictator. This feels like an overstep.
The nature of federation is that you can make your own instance with your own rules independent of a single walled garden and still participate with the other members. Create your own index if you don’t like this one.
And that is exactly what Fedi Garden is going against here. This is not letting each instance to decide who they want to federate with and who not. They’re telling instances to defederate threads.net or else… That’s forcing their values onto others and bullying them to do as they say. That is dictatorial.
They only list instances that share their principles. The only “forcing” being attempted here is the two of you insisting they need to list instances they don’t want to list. The point of federation is that you can start your own list if you don’t like their policies.
Sure, but Fedi Garden is seen as the de facto “primary” hub for this sort of information. There’s a certain power dynamic at play in this sort of situation that is being weaponized.
It’s like if LemmyWorld decided “We’re exclusively a furry community now”, after being the “main” Lemmy instance. Sure, they’d be within their right to do so, but it does a disservice to the Fediverse at large when things that can be seen as critical parts of the Fediverse’s social infrastructure are suddenly slanted in any one particular way.
You cannot prevent power centers from leveraging their influence, but with federation you can route around it.
If it helps bring perspective. I’ve never even heard of Fedi Garden before this post. I did a lot of puzzling over choosing instances for Lemmy and Mastodon when I first joined and never saw a link to them. I’m not sure why they’d even be seen as a trusted list for a new users, since at joining the user also doesn’t know anything about them or their values, reliability, or reputation.
Plus, once you’re in the Fediverse you then learn you can just change instances. Once someone points out that [other instance] can talk to Threads users the individual can just switch or stay depending on their preferences.
Fedi.garden also has their own autonomy. They have the right to make whatever rules for their website they want. If you don’t like how they run their list, then don’t use it. Make your own. If people like yours better, they’ll use it instead.
I think communities/sites etc. on the fediverse should live and die by their decisions. They can make this decision if they want, time will tell if its the correct one or not. That is the nature of the fediverse!
It’s funny to me how many big flare-ups and popular issues have been about defederating or controlling other instances but we’ve not really had a single popular event where users work on anything together to benefit community.
Individuals have made tools but there’s not been calls to action and mass cooperation events for anything beside silencing unpopular groups. No community design discussions devising and implementing tools or features, no group efforts to catalog or document or display useful data…
I don’t know if it’s just that people here haven’t considered the possibility of doing something positive or that outrage about others is just so much more compelling