I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

Be the change you want to see in the world. You don’t have to code in an integrated solution; all you’d have to do is set up an online poll, listing all of the other instances up for consideration (such a list can be pretty easily obtained - for example from https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list ), run a new poll on regular intervals, say, every 2 months, and let anyone who is interested vote. Then, you update the defederation list based on the results of the poll.

However, I think you’ll quickly run into the other problems I outlined which, unfortunately, can’t really be changed. You could require everyone who’s participating in the voting to also be contributing time or money to run the server, except that then you’re operating a plutocracy, not a democracy, so most likely, you’ll need to be giving up your time and money to make your desired server administration a reality.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to.

It’s because, despite claiming to have acknowledged the problem, you’re still making such an incredible false equivalency - comparing joining a new Lemmy instance to moving out of an authoritarian country - that you either completely misunderstand what you’re talking about, or you’re arguing in bad faith.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch.

You’d have full control over your instance, and could, if you built up a community, use any online voting method you wanted - of which there are plenty - to poll your userbase and gather their opinions.

However, ultimately, you’d be the one paying for the instance, and doing the work to set it up and keep it updated and running. What would you do if you attracted a userbase that had views that were completely counter to your own? What if you attracted the alt-right crowd, and what got voted into place was all hate-speech, nazi rhetoric, and intolerance? (I assume you disagree with these things…) Would you continue paying for and hosting the instance, just because that’s what was democratically decided, even though it’s no longer an instance that you want to participate in? Could anyone really fault you for not wanting to do that?

A better method might be for you to make clear your own opinions - either via a post explaining them, or via a pre-defined federation / defederation plan - and let people join your instance who agreed with those decisions. Which, incidentally, is how most instances currently operate.

One could also simply move to another country if desired.

That’s nowhere near as easy for the majority of people - especially those in authoritarian countries - as you’re making it out to be.

North Korean defectors are North Korean people who left North Korea to become citizens in a new country. In North Korea, it is against the law to leave North Korea without permission. North Koreans are also not allowed to change their own citizenship, so anyone born a North Korean must also die a North Korean. The punishment for leaving North Korea without permission is extremely harsh. People who are caught are usually sent a prison camp or put to death in public. Like many other crimes in North Korea, illegally leaving the country may not only punish the accused, but also his or her family up to three generations.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Anyone can start an instance. Make your own, and federate with whomever you want. Nobody’s stopping you.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

What? It’s nothing like that at all. Your instance isn’t a country; you aren’t stuck there. You can go wherever you want. You can read content on multiple instances.

It’s more akin to CNN deciding not to run a story that Newsmax is covering. You can have more than one source for your news.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

Instances are run by individuals, who in turn have the power to run those instances as they see fit. If you dislike how a particular instance is being run, move to a different one, it’s as simple as that.

Nobody’s being censored. Anyone can go to lemmygrad and read their content. They’re not even being deplatformed - nobody’s preventing them from posting anything their instance allows on that instance. It’s closer to curation than censorship… instances are free to curate the content they host. If you don’t like the curation of a given instance, just move to a different one.

Anecdotally, when I was a kid, we had an electrical issue wherein a short or something was causing wires to slowly melt through their jacket, inside the wall. It was triggering smoke detectors, but we couldn’t see or smell anything. Fire department came out and found it, but if we’d ignored it, it almost definitely would have been a huge house fire eventually. Definitely second this advice. It doesn’t cost anything to have them come look.

Yes, I, too, feel very real emotions like a desire to run water over my human skin. I definitely do not require microcontrollers to instruct me on when it is time to do so! Just like all completely normal humans. Of which I am one.

Shortly after we moved in, someone was taking a shower in our second-floor bathroom, the bottom of the shower cracked, and they didn’t notice. End result was an entire shower’s worth of water draining out the bottom of the shower, flowing about 10 feet inside the first-floor ceiling, draining down through the hole from a light fixture, across the kitchen floor, down through the kitchen floor into the basement ceiling, soaking into a bunch of exposed insulation, and making that insulation collapse onto the (concrete) basement floor.

“Hey, can you recommend a good free photoshop alternative?”

“DIE!”

Just like the good old Jraphics Interchange Format!

Plus as an added bonus we can have the ‘gif’ pronunciation disagreement!

I know, right? Fuckin’ wild! So, tell us which one you decide to get!

I get the sense that you aren’t familiar with ‘Bad Dragon’, maybe Google can help you. ;)

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

I dunno, man… Look up coprolite. You can absolutely polish them.

Just because it’s an edge case doesn’t mean 30% of your userbase won’t encounter it!

Ice storm in 1998 in Maine. Tame compared to some of these, but a huge part of the state was just covered in multiple inches of ice. We didn’t have power for 3 weeks (due to ice buildup pulling down power lines, or trees falling on them) and while the roads were plowed, they had inches-thick ice on them in most areas so we could leave the house, but it was like, 5-10 mph speeds, tops.

Article from last year talking about it

By the way for people that say that humans would obviously win we have already lost a war against emus before.

Also, a crusade against sparrows ended poorly for us, too, though it was an indirect loss.

There’s even a band called Red Sparowes that released an album called ‘Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun’ with song titles explaining this:

• “The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like a Mighty Storm, Suddenly and Furiously Blinding Our Senses.”
• “We Stood Transfixed in Blank Devotion as Our Leader Spoke to Us, Looking Down on Our Mute Faces with a Great, Raging, and Unseeing Eye.”
• “Like the Howling Glory of the Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous and the Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts and Clutching Our Innocent Awe.”
• “A Message of Avarice Rained Down and Carried Us Away into False Dreams of Endless Riches.”
• “‘Annihilate the Sparrow, That Stealer of Seed, and Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In.’”
• “And by Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent in Their Puddles, the Air Barren of Song as the Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, the Locusts Noisily Thanked Us and Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.”
• “Millions Starved and We Became Skinnier and Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter and Fatter.”
• “Finally, as That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was the Voice of Blind Idolatry; and Only Then Did We Begin to Think for Ourselves.”

That’s not what I asked you, though.

Having to be OK with them going into our bathrooms, not knowing if they could be a predator or not

Let me ask you something. You just outlined how much time, money and effort someone has to put into trying to transition. Hormone pills (and all of the problems that come with that), a change of wardrobe, a change in how they’re asking people to view and refer to them… Dealing with people like you, who look down on them for trying it… Hate from far right groups, persecution from some governments… General social stigma…

Do you really think someone is going to go through all of that, and more that you haven’t even covered here, just so they can walk into a women’s room to… do whatever it is you’re afraid they’re doing? Really? I think the chances are better that any random woman you run into in the bathroom is a predator, honestly.