Thank you very much for sharing that history - that really helps me understand why people are not taking this seriously. If they “feel like” they have heard it all before, then they give their rote responses from the past, not realizing how things have changed.

And too there’s GIGO, where people that should have been banned were banned, but it’s still not a terribly persuasive happenstance to convince people who cannot handle the subtleties involved between the outcome vs. the method by which it was arrived at.

Google at one point was not evil, and people warning us not to put trust in them to make Android were solidly ignored. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of it was the same. And look at us now. FAAFO. Well, now we’re seeing firsthand some very few glimpses of how bad it could ultimately get, for those companies.

But for lemmy.ml we are still in the early stages, where people are saying “but they write the code” (irrelevant), and “they aren’t evil” (we have proof, NOW), and “the Fediverse is still too small, let it grow first” (a horrible idea - for one thing it won’t grow as much this way and for another if it did then having so many communities held hostage on that instance would be even more difficult to fix than now). Oh, and another one I hear quite often is “lemmy.world has problems too”, which I’m not even going to dignify with a comment about. But the big ones are “only the admins are bad - not the users” (partly true but not entirely and quite frankly… if YOU want to ignore all the warning signs then that doesn’t mean that *I* should be forced to stay behind with you as well - particularly when user-level blocks are NOT the same as instance-level ones); and “but some of the biggest communities are there” (I mean, so what, go back to Reddit if you want that but… okay it is a more fair objection tbf).

I doubt many places will defederate lemmy.ml right now… but on the other hand, I see preparations paving the way for that to happen by removing the existing roadblocks, most notably https://reddthat.com/post/20197120. Though that too will require more than a little effort reaching out to each and every single community group of mods to begin the discussion about moving their communities, one by one. This fight against authoritarianism will be long, costly, and may never truly be won - e.g. even if Lemmy.ml gets defederated, the users of hexbear, lemmygrad, and it may simply hide out as alts elsewhere? - but it seems to me to be worth fighting? Though I may need to find at least one instance that actually does defederate from those Big Three Axis powers to use in the meantime.

Thank you 🙏 for your own efforts in combating these (mal)practices.