In the graph above I’ve arranged the 28 Threadiverse instances with at least 200 monthly active users (MAU)—orange instances running Lemmy, green Piefed, and red Mbin—on the basis of which instances they defederate.
Each instance has its MAU count listed below it, sourced from the latest MAU figures at Fediverse Observer, with adjustments made to the totals for Piefed (due to undercounting by outdated instances, as noted here; I used @Vicinus@piefed.zip’s suggested estimate of 7,200 Piefed users) and Mbin (due to tardigram.com having a duplicate listing).
After adjustments, there are an estimated 43,287 monthly active Threadiverse users (35,184+7,200+903), of whom 87.84% are on the 28 largest instances. The percentages listed alongside the MAU figures correspond to each instance’s share of the total MAU count.
Defederation data was sourced from Federation Checker. The tool doesn’t support Mbin instances, so I left fedia.io in its own category. If any defederations are missing, feel free to let me know. Ideally such a chart should also include community blocks to better illustrate which instances block what, but that data doesn’t appear to be as easily searchable.
I also noticed cases of some instances being listed as being defederated by another instance, despite not appearing on the defederation list for that instance (i.e. reddthat.com and lemmygrad.ml are listed as being mutually blocked, despite neither having the other on their block lists). In testing that federation, I noticed that !wholesome@reddthat.com did not federate to Lemmygrad while !memes@reddthat.com did, so clarification on that matter would be helpful.
While I’ll update my generalized chart as needed to correct errors, perhaps at some point an automated federation mapping tool similar to the one feddit.de formerly hosted could be developed to more completely illustrate instance federation.
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Come to think of it:
I still remember when Lemmy was fairly new. Before $20M for the client API killed off all third-party Reddit apps, enshittifying Reddit to such a point that people left for the Threadiverse in droves in protest (and looking for something that didn’t require either Reddit’s Web interface or the official Reddit app). When /kbin was still experimental (as opposed to dead), when Mbin and PieFed didn’t exist yet, but Lotide still did (although it was more or less a zombie).
Back then, federation was optional on Lemmy. As in, Lemmy servers weren’t federated with anything by default. The admins had to manually add every single last Fediverse server, be it Lemmy, be it /kbin, be it something else, to an allowlist to allow it to federate with their server.
Lemmy servers actually had public lists of servers they federated with (as opposed to lists of servers they had defederated, available on third-party websites).
Not being federated with any given Lemmy server was the default back in the day. Most Fediverse servers were defederated from Lemmy servers because the admins of the Lemmy servers simply didn’t know that they existed. If you were lucky, then the admins occasionally checked their server logs, discovered Fediverse servers that they had never heard about, checked them and then added them to the list.
It was only a while later that a new Lemmy version switched to federating by default, simply because the above was tedious and impractical.
As others informed me, Hexbear still uses the allowlist system. While it seems like they’re pretty good about adding instances that don’t defederate them to their whitelist, six instances with over 50 MAU that don’t defederate them are effectively defederated from them due to not being on their whitelist.
Well that’s a confusing graph.
Well it means I need to have multiple accounts 😈
Since defederating is essentially an explicit block list and is directional, my assumption is that the groups that are circled have defederated from the things they’re pointing at. I could be wrong.
Map needs a key/legend.
The red circled stuff seems to be only one possible option, but isn’t visually very distinct, and the red circle shouldn’t be broken like that, just make sure the lines are all visible.
Apologies for the confusion; didn’t want to make it overly cluttered, but in retrospect I see that a legend would have been useful. I’ll incorporate suggestions in a revision.
Yeah I cant understand it at all.
Yeah, as someone who is struggling to understand the concept of federation…this doesn’t help me at all.
I guess what its saying, if you’re on lemmy.world, you can’t access content on lemmy.zip?
If I’m reading it correctly, lemmy.world cut ties from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net while hexbear.net and beehaw.org cut ties with lemmy.world. lemmy.zip appears to be connected to everyone.
Yeah, .zip gives its users full autonomy to block instances/users as they see fit, which is why I’m on their instance.
I am on all instances 😈
Why would they do that? I’m unaware of internal issues in Lemmy at this point?
Ideological differences. Lemmy.world is liberal, while lemmygrad and hexbear are hardcore communists (aka tankies).
I believe its not the hardcore communism but the style of users on those instances. hexbear users were brigading communities of other instances, and their moderators did nothing. they earned it.
No hexbear was never federated. They started discussing whether to federate and writing moderation rules, sent them to other admins for input, and .world preemptively put hexbear on their defederation list. .world basically said it was ideological differences, they posted all the parts of the draft hexbear rules where they were explaining that hexbear was communist/anarchist and anti-western, and that was just a self-evident reason to preemptively defederate.
It’s a question if history is real and if it matters or not.
A big contention is about the historical and political reality of Ukraine (spoilers in my instance .tld)
The “anti western” communists claim that the USA publicly bragged about doing a regime change on Ukraine, like before they did it, and the CIA affiliate even published the money they supported the organizer of the euromaidan protests with on their own website. Besides trained him. They also claim there were Nazis and that there are newspapers reports about this. They even unironically want to rehabilitate Stalin and the state violence of the great purge that passed about 10% of the population through a gulag! Imagine doing this in the USA today with all the MAGAts and corrupt officials and landowners in order to reeducate them and prevent a counterrevolution!!! Clearly they are insane.
And these are all lies because that is what Putin says and Putin is evil. So the good liberals of .world rightfully point out that all this is nonsense and Ukraine has always been neutral and the revolution of dignity must not be impinged by dirty commies. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia. The liberal socialists agree that this is a time where we need to band together and return to normalcy, because obviously we can’t have all this aggravation and it’s better to be inside the tent pissing out, no matter much fun it is to be on the outside pissing in.
This is all besides the question of ideology, collectivism and all that unamerican crap lol.
My personal opinion: You cannot have rational discourse with insane people in an insane society. It also means lemmy has failed as a global medium for meaningful political discourse. While the communist instances (the original developers btw) are pretty extreme and hostile, .world managed to monopolize much of lemmy and enforce (neo)liberal majority opinion on lemmy.
Obviously this is all satire. Nobody is planning a global war on democratic socialists or something.
OK I think I get how to read this, once I understood the concept. Very nice work.
Maybe it would be a little clearer if the lines where boxes overlap were just slightly offset – it would help see and distinguish them. For example if the blue box was moved down by just a little more than the width of the red lines, instead of being directly on top of them. If that makes sense.
I’ll consider doing that for the revision; thanks for the feedback!
I could have sworn that hexbear defederated from jlai.lu. there was a whole spat between our instances a while back.
Ok, I’ll be the one to ask: What happened that 6 instances with 13% of the population combined blocked the porn instance?
As many instances were already blocking the original lemmynsfw.com, I suspect most do it as a means of moderating the feeds of new users who might not want to see porn. An alternative to this (as mentioned by @Cricket@lemmy.zip) would be blocking access to its communities (versus the instance itself) by default, allowing users to see replies from fedinsfw.app users and unblock the communities should they wish to. In either case, I think user retention is better served by limiting access to such content to those who are specifically interested in it.
For Multiverse and apparently Blahaj specifically, they defederate it over CP concerns due to it hosting a ‘Fautbait’ community.
An alternative to this (as mentioned by @Cricket@lemmy.zip) would be blocking its communities (versus the instance itself) by default, allowing users to see replies from fedinsfw.app users and unblock the communities should they wish to.
Hey thanks for tagging me, but let me clarify because that’s not exactly what I meant. Lemmy.zip doesn’t block any communities by default (as far as I can recall, at least). It blocks a couple of instances by default, and each user can remove those blocks if they wish. This is different from defederating from those instances because defederation cannot be controlled by users, only by admins, but it’s still an instance block, not community block.
Very proud of lemmy.zip! Joined very early on cause the name sounded cool lol, and apparently a lot of others also did. If i remember right we had a vote on defederations and the only major one to happen(or maybe the only one, idk) was exploding heads which was a nazi instance with CSAM on it so that was obvious, even that was mainly cause of the CSAM. I really like the approach of users being able to block instances and communities rather than the instance deciding for me. I still have ml and hexbear blocked tho cause they banned me after i stood up for trans rights or something lol
I’m feeling the same way. I’ve bounced around a few places since joining. I started on midwest.social which was great for a while, but I think the instance grew more than the dev could keep up with. I started seeing connectivity issues and problems displaying content so I reluctantly migrated to .world to see what joining the largest instance would be like. The technical issues went away but I couldn’t figure out why I could no longer see /c/piracy until I realized that they’re a bunch of pushovers that defederated from dbzer0 based on some liability bogeyman. So I found myself on Lemmy.zip where I can police my own content and have no technical issues.
You got temporary banned from the lemmy.ml memes community and permanently banned from the hexbear vegan community and divisionsbyzero mycology community.
Oh i thought it was a perma ban. Also how can i check this? Cause i got banned after commenting about trans rights but i guess that wasnt why i got banned, tho the memes community ban might be that. 2 years is still insane tho. As for the other, yeah i was anti-ai in an ai community and not a vegan in a vegan community, but the way that is phrased is insane.
you then can filter it by your name, you might need to use lemmy.zip/modlog
The expires: 2 years ago might mean the ban ended 2 years ago
Now that i check i see that i got banned from like 20 ml communites, and for st least 1.5 years but i think it was 2(idk how the modlog thingy rounds it). Reason i thought i got banned completely is because they banned me from every community from ml that i had ever commented on.
Hexbear blocked you for being pro trans? I find that hard to believe.
I disagree with them on a lot but they are a very pro trans group of people
i’ve been blocked for being pro trans in many communities.
because I’m not pro-trans enough. so i must want to kill all trans people. or so their logic goes.
it’s not really often a reflection of the instance or the community, so much as one really really angry user or a few, who have decided you’re the scum of the earth for voicing an opinion they don’t agree with 120%. you know, toxic nutbag users.
extremists often thing anyone isn’t as extreme as them is committing a hate crime against them.
anyway, i haven’t been banned anywhere since, since i blocked the instances from which those types of folks tend to come from. and they overwhelmingly come from a few instances, and making a post in their instances basically paints a target on your back and they stalk you across the fediverse because well, that’s the type of user they are. they could just… block you. but you know, that would be too simple, they need to feel like they have punished you for not agreeing with them.
I really like this but I can not figure it out. Would you be willing to make the data available?
The MAU numbers for instances were sourced from Fediverse Observer and calculated as a percentage of 43,287 for the percentages, but here’s a table of the defederation data:
Lemmy Instance Defederates lemmy.world Hexbear, Lemmygrad sh.itjust.works Beehaw, Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmy.zip N/A lemmy.ml fedinsfw.app feddit.org fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad hexbear.net lemmy.world lemmy.dbzer0.com Lemmygrad, Feddit.org lemmy.ca Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmy.blahaj.zone fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad programming.dev Hexbear discuss.tchncs.de Lemmygrad sopuli.xyz fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmygrad.ml fedinsfw.app lemmy.today N/A slrpnk.net Hexbear, Lemmygrad feddit.uk N/A infosec.pub fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml reddthat.com N/A jlai.lu Lemmygrad beehaw.org sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world, Lemmygrad, Hexbear pawb.social Hexbear, Lemmygrad thelemmy.club N/A feddit.nl N/A Piefed Instance Defederates fedinsfw.app Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.social Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.ca Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.zip N/A Mbin Instance Defederates fedia.io ? What the hell are Hexbear and Lemmygrad and what did they do that everyone’s blocking them?
To add an annecdote, hexbear has this handy link to an image: (nsfw) https://hexbear.net/PPB
Ask yourself why a discussion platform might keep this image quick-link and you may understand why everyone defederates from them.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear (I think) are instances filled with “tankies”, which means that they can’t shut up about how awesome authoritarian regimes that present themselves as communist, like China, and some others, like Russia, are, despite all the crimes against human rights those countries’ governments keep committing (according to tankies, the governments they support don’t actually commit any atrocities, it’s just “lies spread via anti-communist propaganda”, which they also use as a excuse for silencing anyone presenting criticism about their favourite regimes). Please keep in mind that lots of communists don’t see countries like China as communist, despite the countries calling themselves that.
As these instances have lots of tankies, they tend to have toxic communities. Their users also tend to hate trans people for some reason, and sometines try to harass people because of it, which is a big no-no to instances that want their trans users to feel safe, such as Blåhaj Zone.
The second “hexbear is anti trans” comment I’ve seen in this thread
I spent a lot of time on hexbear over the last year because I had never run into tankies before. They are definitely problematic, way too ok with killing humans to achieve goals, and willing to lie to win a debate in an ends justify the means sort of way, but they arent anti trans in any way that I saw. If they are lying about their pro trans stance they are putting a ton of effort into it and theyve succesfully tricked me I guess
They only like trans people when they agree with them. See: Hexbear attack Blahaj every time
Lammygrad are Marxist Leninist, Hexbear are dirtbag leftists. That makes them the natural enemies of center-left and centrist instances like .world.
In my opinion it comes down to a disagreement over capitalism. One side wants to destroy it, the other side wants to moderate it.
Can someone give me the gossip on fedinsfw.app and feddit.org? What are they? Why is db0zer defederated from feddit.org?
FediNSFW is a Piefed instance dedicated to NSFW content. Some instances defederate it due to that, while (as @Grail@multiverse.soulism.net mentioned) Multiverse and apparently Blahaj defederate it due to it hosting a ‘Fautbait’ community over CP concerns.
Feddit.org strictly enforces German anti-semitism laws on criticizing Israel. As a result, dbzer0 accused it of being Zionist and defederated it. I don’t think criticism of Israel should be removed, but I also prefer to be on an instance with wider federation, which is why I switched my main account from dbzer0 to Sopuli.
Cool, thank you for the explanations!
Thanks for the work, really interesting graph! I think it *might be easier to read if the rectangles were ovals or some morph between rectangle and oval, so that the overlapping groupings are a bit more distinct.
What’s the beef between beehaw and lemmy.world?
Not so much beef as in beehaw could not manage the torrent of content coming their way from world
According to beehaw there’s no beef, it’s just too many users for them to effectively moderate
Block the “default”. That’s actually pretty clever. Not because you dislike those people, but because it’s the default and requires extra effort to not be a part of.
Things that pop out to me:
- The Internet was made for porn, both in users and less defederating.
- The main blocks really are mostly the Triad (grad, hexbear and ml) which I get. I personally don’t mind tankies despite the instance I’m on, but they can sometimes echo Russian propaganda that’s demonstrably false. Communism as a concept is ok, though.
The Beehaw thing predates me, I heard they’re nice people, though. I also agree with the sentiment that more fringe groups and random porn might scare away newbies, so I get why things are the way they are.
What’s the number and oercebt next to the arrows though?
The number is the number of instances within the box blocking the instance in question, whereas the percentage is the percentage of overall Threadiverse users that those instances represent. For instance, at least 64.01% of Threadiverse users (the actual figure is higher as the 12% of users on smaller instances are not accounted for) cannot access Hexbear communities or interact with Hexbear users.
The instance I’m in is definitely the odd ones out, we got no one here😅
102 monthly active users, so if I expand the limit to 100 next time it would be included. Ideally all instances would be represented, but when doing it manually in a chart like this, at some point I have to draw a line.
Yeah, I understand, it would be ALOT to record.
am I reading this right, that blahaj blocks federation from pawb?? that doesn’t seem right
blahaj is in the black box (has defederated fedinsfw.app), in the blue box (has defederated Lemmygrad) and in the red box (has defederated Hexbear). No one on this graph has defederated pawb. The graph is a bit confusing on the first look.
What’s with feddit.org?
The admins of feddit.org are afraid of german police coming for their servers and therefore ban content that is possibly illegal in germany quite liberally. Since german courts are sometimes weird this includes some Pro-Palestine content that could be interpreted as Anti-Israel (e.g. the chant “From the river to the sea…”). That topic in particular pissed of the dbzero community which then defereated feddit.org for being “Zionists”.
I mean, it is kinda. Anticipatory obedience makes you complicit.
Yup. Anticipatory obedience isn’t the way to go!
Well, if you have to personally liable for the shit a bunch of internet strangers say, you might think differently. That is one boon of being a mega-corp. You are somewhat immune to SLAPP-lawsuits and the like.
deleted by creator
DACH under feddit.org removed my German news article on Israel. Apparently even German state media is anti-semitic.
When I posted the same article on German language reddit I got a message that my content had been deemed inapropriate at least.
?
According to the modlog the article was simply moved to !nahost@feddit.org as you can see here
Also The Guardian is not german state media
You’re right. I had the article confused with an NDR one I posted a few months back on the other site when it was new. Where can I see the modlog? Sync app didn’t show anything, it just went to the crosspost.
Yea, some apps don’t support showing the modlog. You can alternatively just go through the web-ui like here
so ban all discussions about palestine then instead of policing Palestinians voice while letting zionists spread all kind of propaganda in your instance
There are a lot of threads here about this. Feddit.org wants to keep in line with local laws in their jurisdiction, dbzero thinks that this is a pro-zionist stand and genocide-denial.
If feddit.org was not Zionist they would remove justification for Zionism a genocidal supremacist ideology
Wow, infosec.pub is based!
