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by egypturnash 1097 days ago
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?

The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice.

Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience.

Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...?

(As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)

1 comments

At least as big an issue for Lemmy and Kbin is community migration. A server that hosts a popular community shutting down is a very real risk, and simply telling users to switch doesn't scale. (No, not everything needs to scale, but it would be better if that did.)
I just did a quick search, and users have opened issues asking for both user and community migration on both. So they're certainly aware of it. When it will be added, I dunno - it took a while for Mastodon to get user migration, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that community migration is a larger problem than user migration.

Here's an issue for Lemmy user/community migration: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057

And here's one for Kbin: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/382

Lemmy seems to have a lot more contributors than Kbin, but who knows, maybe someone will dust off their god-tier 100x PHP skills and Kbin will get it first.