The Future of Hack Liberty (and the Death of Federation)
forum.hackliberty.org
HACK LIBERTY IS CLOSING IT’S MATRIX AND LEMMY SERVERS! Please migrate your accounts, rooms, and services ASAP. Both services are going offline and they will not be coming back. I will try to keep the Matrix server online for a few more weeks. Lemmy has out grown the allocated resources and will be taken offline in the next few days. Read on to learn more about why we made the decision to kill these services. WE HAVE MOVED TO SIMPLEX Anyone that agrees to our Code of Conduct is welcome to join o...

From: https://forum.hackliberty.org/t/the-future-of-hack-liberty-and-the-death-of-federation/224

Problems with Lemmy

Data Replication, Moderation, and Abuse

All the data replication and moderation issues from Matrix also apply to Lemmy. This one of the underlying flaws of all federated services. Lemmy admins can be held liable for hosting illegal content that is being replicated over the federation. It also makes Lemmy servers easy targets to be taken down by malicious adversaries.

deFederation

Despite being “de-centralized”, there is censorship in the form of “de-federation”, which effectively removes “wrong-think” servers from the global audience on Lemmy. Even though there is claimed decentralization, a large majority of users congregate on the same few servers.

Censorship is hard, let the community do it!

Any posts that don’t adhere to the Lemmy hive mind are immediately down voted, which is effectively a shadow ban that anyone can do by clicking the down vote button. Post that have any kind of negative score (two down votes) will be removed from the default post feed filters. (Active, Hot). This “shadowban” works to make it so 90% of the Lemmy population doesn’t see your post unless they are filtered specifically for “new” posts.

Reddit and Lemmy are one big Psyop

The entire framework of both Reddit and Lemmy do nothing but help to promote group think and propaganda. Any posts that don’t adhere to group think will be shunned and hidden. Post “scores” are a manipulation tactic used to influence (you) into being biased before you’ve even looked at the post. Manipulating upvotes and downvotes is trivially easy for really anyone, and it’s abused by governments and corporations to create manufactured consensus and trick you into believing that the “herd” thinks a certain way. Of course, having a lot of upvotes appeals to the most pathetic of egos, and the psyop continues with more incentivized group-think posts in a never ending cycle of garbage user generated content.

  • Prison Mike@links.hackliberty.org
    2·
    2 months ago

    Same, this is sad news. I’ll probably end up hosting an instance myself on 1984.is but I wasn’t wanting to deal with the hassle.

    I access everything over VPN and access Lemmy primarily through Mlem — I’d forgotten that the “Hot” sorting even existed.

    Oh well, what else is new? Better to self-host your own services.

    • shortwavesurfer
      3·
      2 months ago

      To be fair, I definitely do see where they are coming from and can understand why they are going with SimpleX for chatting instead of matrix. I am slowly using matrix less and less for the exact reasons put out in the forum post and am considering killing my matrix account entirely in favor of SimpleX.