EU policy is so hit and miss because the EU Parliament mostly has our backs, and is introducing good legislation protecting consumers of corpo overreach (like the roaming directive). The EU Commission on the other hand has only the interest of the EU countries’ governments in mind, which makes many of its proposals rather shitty of the common citizen. Also tells you a lot about what the actual national governments stand for, when somebody else is doing more for the citizens than they are.

yeah it’s great isn’t it‽

baconreader here. best media display behavior, hands down.

I honestly think it’s ok to do this. Segregating instances that serve different goals in the Fediverse is not always a bad thing. As an example, the Mastodon creator having the same experience led to him implementing this very feature over there in the early days.

Yes, it does create inconveniences, especially now to all the new users that are already struggling with the concept of instances in general. I remember I did, and I was wondering, isn’t that looming threat of defederation, taken together with the decision paralisys when being forced to select a home instance enough to make the whole service unusable for most users?

But thinkig a bit further ahead, I’d honestly still MUCH prefer this to the other outcome, which is those other, offending communities inevitably ending up being banned because the one big, overly cautious, profit-driven company under which all non-federated content lives has to sanitize its content for the advertisers.

So, yes, it might be cumbersome for some users who expected to use the service by cross-federating, for example by creating an account here and then subscribing to something like noncredibledefense on sh.itjust.works. They did both in good faith, probably being driven here because the sensible policies and promise of the protected stewardship on Beehaw seemed like a good home base, but also subscribing there because it’s the best replacement community of the popular subreddit, and it sucks.

But to those we can say: The equivalent of a kiddy pool is not the same place as the deep ocean, so don’t expect to access both with the same account! So to alleviate that, just go over to those instances and create another one – I know I did just that right when reading this post, because I definitely plan on subscribing to communities over there as well.

And yes, it would be nice if a more long-term solution was found to the above-mentioned problems of federation. Conceptually, I doubt it ever will, and I also don’t buy the argument that federation of different instances is “just like email”, because obviously, problems like this don’t manifest with your email inbox.

But practically, these issues will be less impactful once things have stabilized a bit and the inevitable culling of instances sets it, eventually there’s gonna be a couple big, established “standard” instances (some of them maybe even run by profit-driven companies!) that people know what they stand for and what to expect when signing up, and the federation as well as the paralysis will not be so important anymore.

Just keep in mind that, for most of us, these are the very early days on Lemmy, and hiccups along the way are to be expected, it’s all (along with the whole Fediverse!) still very much “in beta” right now.

Ultimately, we’ll probably have to learn to getting a bit more flexible with our instances and accounts on them, just like alt accounts on singular websites.

No hard feelings!