“If people don’t do what I say and defederate from this instance because I got banned from a community by a power tripping mod, then these hundreds of websites will inevitably die for it because it means they’re all fascist for some reason…and I will dance in their ashes!”

I want you to understand this is what you sound like when you talk. Get help.

The charter does matter. Because it’s a community driven document.

Yeah, that means functionally nothing.

And, no, my argument is really that you have no power here and the rules are, beyond the functional purpose of insulating the people who run the instances from any kind of legal accountability, largely meaningless in a physical sense. A document like the constitution means something because there are institutions that exist to enforce it. Lemmy doesn’t have that. Community rules and policy are more like weather vanes, pointing towards general guidelines of behavior. They’re not laws. There are no legal proceedings around them. And they apply differently from average commenter, to community moderator, to administrator. Also, you didn’t really say WHICH part of the charter you feel was violated. Just that the charter was violated. It’s like if I said my constitutional rights were violated by the police and someone asked me which ones and I said, “oh, you know, just generally speaking.”

When majorities in the community realize they’re being punked by the likes of you, the response will be to shun you and your instance with mass defederation.

I don’t know what punked means to you, but it means one of two things to me. Neither of which applies in this context. Regardless, yes, instances can defederate from one another. This was always allowed.

Lemmy has these problems partly because the interface design copied from Reddit incentivizes incivility and bad behavior.

There’s some foundational premises here that I don’t think would hold up under scrutiny. Yes, the interface is similar to reddit’s. I don’t know if you think that the structure of the interface hypnotizes people into being dicks, or you think that the interface attracts ne’er-do-wells because it reminds them of reddit and they’re drawn to it like flies are drawn to shit. In either case, I’m not sure if there’s enough argument there to really engage with.

Under circumstances like this, I believe mass defederation is exactly the right outcome. Lemmy is rushing head first to irrelevancy. Then ya’ll can go off and do your own hate thing, like UnTruth Anti-Social or Gab or whatever. Good luck with that.

I’m sorry you had a negative experience. Maybe you should start your own Lemmy instance in which you are better able to enforce your own ideals for the community. Y’know, really swing that ban hammer liberally. After all, banning people who dare question your very narrow, but functionally limitless authority is one of the few joys in life of your average internet forum moderator. Might as well live a little.

You got a particular clause you feel is being violated? Asking because I’ve read the document and I don’t see any parts specifically about mods not being allowed to be dicks. Not that it really matters. The “charter” in question is worth the paper it’s printed on. Federated instances are autonomous. Whether they federate with other instances or don’t is up to individual site governance.

Is that what the FediVerse is all about?

This is what forums on the internet have been about since, well…forever.

Cool. Somebody should let Richard Stallman know, I guess.

If it’s not OSI approved then it’s not open source.

OSI as an organization did not invent the concept of Open Source software. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of the term. There are other organizations and individuals that disagree with their definition.

I think it’s one of those things where on a micro level, it’s conceptually fine, and a lot of people say that’s how they want to use it. But I’ve seen reddit basically get destroyed from pivoting away from the desktop experience to focus on catering to predominately mobile users. The consequence of this is that you have shorter comments overall in threads, less incentive to reply to people who are actually trying to have real discussions, shorter lifetimes on how long people engage with a particular post, and, at the risk of being ageist, a younger userbase with a natural interest in shortform engagement and more superficially appealing content. Right now on lemmy communities like Beehaw, a solid post can have days worth of discussion in the comment section. On reddit, if you’re commenting after 8 hours, that train’s left the station. Obviously, I’m biased and have a strong interest in quality of posts and the discussions attached to them over the sheer quantity of new material hitting your feed. And, of course, part of that is a consequence of user volume, but the fact that mobile is the de facto standard tool for accessing the site magnifies all the problems I mentioned to pathological extremes.

Hot take: I think lemmy is better as desktop only, as it encourages a greater degree of depth in terms of conversation. Mobile apps are basically just there purely for monetization by the developers, and they encourage users to engage with their communities superficially (upvote, post an emoji, doomscroll, repeat forever).