Wander

This article is about mastadon instead of lemmy, but that doesnt really matter: https://ianbetteridge.com/2023/06/21/meta-and-mastodon-whats-really-on-peoples-minds/

I especially like this bit:

Mastodon is not a social network, which is where I think John and Dare start from. It’s a set of communities which may, or may not, choose to connect to each other. Those relationships are based on shared values and trust: my instance connects to yours because I trust you to moderate effectively, not allow spam, or whatever other ground rules we can agree on. Some communities choose to apply this loosely, and some more strictly (some communities, for example, won’t federate with others who don’t have the same expectations around moderation for everyone they federate with).

Maybe the lemmy software doesn’t offer that as a feature right now, but from what I undertstand it’s not an issue on protocol level. So it’s mostly a lack of user friendly configuration options?

Just because this software can be used that way, doesn’t mean you’re required to use it that way.

If I want to start a lemmy server and not let lemmy.world in, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Lemmy.world isn’t owed anything, they’re not owed to view content in my community, they’re not owed that I show their content to my users. And if my users are unhappy with that, that’s fine, it’s their choice to stay in my enclosed community or not.

Just because we’re running the same software and the same communication protocols doesn’t change that.

It makes perfect sense to me. You’re allowed to do with your own server what you want. That’s one of the advantages of foss.

There have always been private communities. Just because these ones are running on standardized protocols that allow communication between servers, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly required to be public and let everything in.