cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or “how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme”.
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
To be fair to the large number of blocked instances on the Beehaw blocklist, most of them are from a starter blocklist that’s been circulated through the fediverse of “These are skinhead and child sexual abuse material instances. Block them before they even try to federate.” I think the only true defederation controversy is with Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works and that was a purely mechanical issue of “too much troll traffic all at once and no tools to surgically handle it rather than just burn down the whole thing”
I’m wondering what “over 400 blocked instances” means in practical terms. Most of us have no idea if 400 is a large or small number in relation to the size of the fediverse. Most of us don’t know how big those blocked instances are, or if they even exist anymore.
Mostly, as you explain, I don’t care about numbers if what they’re blocking is hatred and abuse. Maybe “over 400 blocked instances” is supposed to be a criticism, but to me, it sounds like the people running Beehaw are doing their jobs well.
That’s a fair concern. You can check the data for yourself on the awesome-lemmy-instances repository; alternatively I have made this tool to make the search more interactive and user friendly: defed.xyz.
Short answer to your question is: 410 is a lot. They are the second instance for number of defeds, only beaten by feddit.dk. Most big instances tend to have between 30 and 50 blocks, with the notable exception of sh.itjust.works which has only 5.
To give credit where credit is due, few of the instances blocked by beehaw actually run Lemmy and even fewer are active (2 or more monthly active users). This doesn’t change the fact that it’s a BIG number.
edit: pinging @Cube6392@beehaw.org as this partially answers their question.
It’s 10 times the number of instances that lemmy.ml blocks, if that helps.
Not really. How many users are on the blocked instances? How many of those instances have tried to federate with Beehaw? How active are the people on the blocked instances? How active are people not on those instances who do interact with them? A raw number of instances isn’t that useful to understanding the impact on the network graph
The problem with large blocking lists is that they can’t be easily audited. How do you know if there’s any legit website amongst 400 links?