There are also users on .ml that aren’t tankies. There are even tankies on other instances(!)

That’s the kind of content instance admins are and need to be concerned with on the topic of defederating instances. However most of the time it’s over whether some user in a shitposting thread was unfairly moderated.

Instances are servers that host communities.

Instances are servers that host user accounts.

Federated instances allow users from one instance to view and post in communities on other (federated) instances. If the instances are defederated there is no connection whatsoever being made between the users and communities.

Now, there are communities that have very strict and often very political moderation policies. Technically only the instance administrator has the power/authority to override communities, but only on the instance they administrate.

This can become an issue, especially when people who get moderated run to the admin demanding to talk with who is in charge. The netKarens get really mad if the admins back up the community, so they’ll start these instance crusades demanding defederation and such.

So as a result there are some natural divisions across the major instances based on how the admins tend to back up community rules.

So for a rough examples: .ml communities have zero tolerance for American Liberalism. Lemmy.world allows communities to be heavy handed against criticism of NATO or Israel. Blahaj.zone has zero tolerance for transphobes gatekeeping. My instance, sh.itjust.works, allows for combat footage and communities dedicated to documenting(harassing) the .ml instance, their admins and the lemmy devs (who admin .ml).

The average user need only pay attention to the communities they post in. The instance of the user is mostly irrelevant, nevermind the butthurt individuals who want a worse and fragmented Fediverse.

I get you. For me after my grandparents passed I realized I wanted to be a grandparent. So I gotta play by some of society’s stupid rules to see if I can see that through.

Careerwise: biggest thing for me was jumping into public service and working in local government–in America, no less. Now I work remotely and have a well-compensated union-represented government job with a pension that doesn’t require me to do management or have a medical or law degree.

I knew to steer clear of the Fed too, and that’s paid off in spades.

All in all though as a former kid and current parent: kids need their cool aunts and uncles, related or not, out there having fun not making them cousins. So there’s zero shame in having no rush or desire for trying to strike that balance.

I did a lot of the fun in my teens and twenties, and then realized I wanted a family and was lucky to find a career that fit.

It’s definitely a challenge to find a balance though so it can often feel like a trade-in. But if you’re honest with yourself it doesn’t have to be nor an unwanted change.

Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.

But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.

Americans have had to invent novel terms to avoid using the ‘s’ or ‘c’ word with politics. ‘Mutual aid’ is a term usually used to refer tk grassroots organizing of communities to cover basic needs like food and medicine.

Referring to a common internet scam as ‘mutual aid’ is doing more work to smear the term than anything.

MBFC does the opposite of elevate conversations. It’s quite frankly a poison pill for conversations. People will apply their prejudices and alter their interpretations based on the ‘bias check’, typically before or instead of any critical thinking or ant article. of any article.

The last time the MBFC bot was going the user pushing it was very clearly aware of this dynamic. They also knew it was lumping everything to website source, despite authors and opinion pieces, for maximum damage.

The first year after the api debacle in 2023 was rife with culture class of redditors tromping through anarchist and communist communities and instances and freaking the fuck out they’re allowed to exist.

Those instances have resulted in defederations or there’s been enough fatigue and migration that these days its really just down to like 3 chronically obsessed users variously spamming about it.

:|

So you say uou’ve heard complaints about Lemmy devs, who run the instance in question here, for four years.

That is a direct illustration of what I mean: from the start of Lemmy there’s been complaints of the devs.

As the Fediverse becomes bigger, this type of stuff isn’t going to be wanted by any entity especially not ones owned by Meta.

I was more responding to the person from threads with that line. But I was more identifying a convenient alignment than a conspiracy to act.

I mean there are Lemmy communities with discord servers dedicated to brigading tankies and falsifying interactions on places like .ml. One of those communities is on my instance and comes up on my feed constantly. But I will admit that I have not seen that effort from Threads.

But nonetheless, since it is a fair assumption any thread with the word ‘tankie’ in it is going to go off the rails: I am not suggesting .ml admins and their mods aren’t overblowing their interactions or bringing a lot of this onto themselves. They’re just as mired in bad faith as the next poorly run community or instance. I am just saying I am not surprised by it.

The fundamental source of conflict is that developers of Lemmy, who are also admins of .ml, describe themselves as marxist-leninist. Their very allowed existence is a conundrum for some, regardless of what they do.

So there is absolutely interest in the elimination of instances like .ml from the Fediverse, especially as things like Meta’s Threads moves in to centralize communities and standardize discussioms so everything can start aligning with thr valuation of their investment.

Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.

Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don’t see to warrant this problem being so persistent.

So to me there’s so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can’t handle each other.

I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.

The most support for China is basic materialist analysis: they’ve heavily invested in housing, high speed rail, electric car infrastructure, and green energy. Coincidentally: all rather related.

But that is generally the support associated with China: a materialist analysis, usually, if not always, regarding infrastructure.

How does one defederate from that which is not yet federated?