Mostly that’s true but not entirely. The common analogy is that the Fediverse is a bunch of pirate or free trading ships passing in the night, each passing messages from one to another until they all have all of the messages - “federation”. However, some captains have some bad blood between them and other captains and refuse to pass messages from them along - “defederation”. And for good reason I need to add, bc if outright illegal material were to make its way onto your “ship”/computer then you could be in big trouble, like literally with the FBI or other equivalent governmental agency in other countries. Or imagine that some captain decides to send out a virus - not all of these captains are apparently ethical!
In practice, any captain of a ship can decide which messages they want to pass along to share with others vs. keep private solely for themselves (their own internal set of users). And likewise they get to decide which messages to receive too - like none from a particular source, or maybe only some if they are structured a certain way. And then on top of all of that, Lemmy.World in particular has decided to edit certain messages to filter out banned keywords that they deem offensive to their users.
So like an irl example is that a few years ago a bunch of people/captains decided to create Alt-Right instances, and these spewed forth violent rhetoric and pedophilic content throughout the Fediverse - which in addition to being not nice was highly illegal. So rather than allow that to get us all in trouble with the FBI, in response all the other captains/instances decided to block/defederate from them. In theory I suppose you could spin up your own instance - becoming captain of your own ship - and you could choose to receive to those messages (but again, be careful about content that is literally illegal!). Although actually I think those instances may have shut down in the meantime, deciding to switch to the likes of Truth Social, so they probably are not around anymore to be federated with even if someone wanted to. Still, to be on the safe side, every instance I’ve ever seen has defederated from them, I guess in case they ever decide to come back.
So one practical way that this affects you personally is that Lemmy.world has decided to defederate from hexbear.net, a known nest of trolls (they enjoy a highly contentious argumentation style, but they don’t stop that even outside of their communities where it is consensual, and it is this refusal to consider consent of people outside of their echo chambers that makes them trolls). So no, this content in particular is not “everywhere” - it is blocked quite often from many/most instances.
If you truly wanted to experience the Fediverse with as few filtering of messages as possible (although remember that not all of it is offered in good faith), then you may want to make an account on lemm.ee rather than lemmy.world. But otherwise lemmy.world is a great instance - it is where ~80% of all the people on Lemmy are located.
Fantastic explanation, thanks for taking the time to post that! I’m fine with not having to sift through a lot of troll content and angry argument from people who just want an argument. There’s still a fair amount of “So WhAt YoU’rE SaYiNg Is [something I was not saying]” but I guess that’s inevitable. I think Lemmy.world is great.
Mostly that’s true but not entirely. The common analogy is that the Fediverse is a bunch of pirate or free trading ships passing in the night, each passing messages from one to another until they all have all of the messages - “federation”. However, some captains have some bad blood between them and other captains and refuse to pass messages from them along - “defederation”. And for good reason I need to add, bc if outright illegal material were to make its way onto your “ship”/computer then you could be in big trouble, like literally with the FBI or other equivalent governmental agency in other countries. Or imagine that some captain decides to send out a virus - not all of these captains are apparently ethical!
In practice, any captain of a ship can decide which messages they want to pass along to share with others vs. keep private solely for themselves (their own internal set of users). And likewise they get to decide which messages to receive too - like none from a particular source, or maybe only some if they are structured a certain way. And then on top of all of that, Lemmy.World in particular has decided to edit certain messages to filter out banned keywords that they deem offensive to their users.
So like an irl example is that a few years ago a bunch of people/captains decided to create Alt-Right instances, and these spewed forth violent rhetoric and pedophilic content throughout the Fediverse - which in addition to being not nice was highly illegal. So rather than allow that to get us all in trouble with the FBI, in response all the other captains/instances decided to block/defederate from them. In theory I suppose you could spin up your own instance - becoming captain of your own ship - and you could choose to receive to those messages (but again, be careful about content that is literally illegal!). Although actually I think those instances may have shut down in the meantime, deciding to switch to the likes of Truth Social, so they probably are not around anymore to be federated with even if someone wanted to. Still, to be on the safe side, every instance I’ve ever seen has defederated from them, I guess in case they ever decide to come back.
So one practical way that this affects you personally is that Lemmy.world has decided to defederate from hexbear.net, a known nest of trolls (they enjoy a highly contentious argumentation style, but they don’t stop that even outside of their communities where it is consensual, and it is this refusal to consider consent of people outside of their echo chambers that makes them trolls). So no, this content in particular is not “everywhere” - it is blocked quite often from many/most instances.
If you truly wanted to experience the Fediverse with as few filtering of messages as possible (although remember that not all of it is offered in good faith), then you may want to make an account on lemm.ee rather than lemmy.world. But otherwise lemmy.world is a great instance - it is where ~80% of all the people on Lemmy are located.
Fantastic explanation, thanks for taking the time to post that! I’m fine with not having to sift through a lot of troll content and angry argument from people who just want an argument. There’s still a fair amount of “So WhAt YoU’rE SaYiNg Is [something I was not saying]” but I guess that’s inevitable. I think Lemmy.world is great.