I’ll add to the bias. I created both a kbin account and a Lemmy.one account when the migration happened. Preferred kbin’s look and feel, then changed over to mbin when Ernest started having issues. Haven’t looked back, mbin is great.

This should be the top post. This is the part with the meat and potatoes.

it’s a combination of multiple issues.

lemmy federation has improved significantly over the past years, so if this was happening with lemmy instances today, especially online ones involved, this would be much less of an issue.

the original user posting this stuff was on a kbin instance. kbin/mbin still do not support federating bans of users. kbin is basically dead, mbin is tracking that here. when this was originally removed on kbin this never federated out to other platforms.

the next problem is that the original instance is no longer there, so attempting to address this with community bans from lemmys side is not working anymore if the user isn’t known to the instance anymore, as it can’t be refetched from the source. if the instances that the related communities are hosted on purged this user in the past they wouldn’t be able to federate out a community ban anymore.

another problem is that lemmy is typically configured in a way where it creates a local copy of thumbnails if no thumbnail url is provided by the source, which is what lead to a local copy of this material. in the end i consider this only a secondary issue, as while most people would rather not have this stored on their servers at all, if you allow media uploads you can never be 100% sure about the content uploaded to your server. this is therefore typically something where providers are expected to take action once they become aware of it. some providers are also taking preventative measures like scanning uploads, comparing to hash databases of known csam, etc. had the original instance ban or community bans been performed properly this would at least have removed public access to the stuff, as the media filenames are randomly generated and not guessable.

it’s generally not impossible to prevent stuff from returning to your instance once you have taken it down properly, but in cases where federation didn’t work, which could be for a wide range of reasons, including your instance being misconfigured during maintenance, your instance being defederated from an instance involved in the removal, and others, it may require local action. if i ban a user then no new content form that user is going to come to LW until they are unbanned again. this includes manually fetching posts or other content, so if i purge an old post of theirs the post wouldn’t be able to come back until the user gets unbanned.

sounds useful! hope we fill that niche

The only positive thing I ever heard about lemmy.one is that they federate with Beehaw. At the time I was already skeptical of that being a good thing since Beehaw has harsh opinions on moderation and had already said they wished to exit the Fediverse. So I dismissed lemmy.one back then as being one of those unremarkable and poorly managed instances, and it seems I was largely right. It is still sad to see an instance leave like this.

I don’t disagree with the sentiments behind these statements, but you’re basically asking a fish to leave their large school to join a smaller school because it will benefit the species as a whole if the species is divided into multiple schools rather than one giant school. While it might be true that the species is safer that way, it’s much more dangerous for the individual fish to be in a smaller school than to stay in the large school.

In other words, it’s safer for the fediverse for users to diversify, but is safer for the individual to join a “too large to fail” instance. If a user’s instance goes belly up and they lose their account and everything associated with it, it’s functionally similar to the entirety of Lemmy going down as far as that individual user is concerned, because unless you’re a serial lurker (in which case it doesn’t even matter what instance you’re on if you’re not contributing) who wants to invest years in a social media site just to lose your account? Most folks are going to leave rather than start all over. And most folks are going to make the decision that is in their best interests over those of some website. I know every time I see another instance get shut down or defederated, I’m relieved I decided to sign up via .world, even if it’s sluggish at times.

You can transfer all your subscriptions and blocks. What you cannot transfer is your imaginary internet points that aren’t summed up by default in lemmy anyways.

Switching accounts over is a big issue for sure, but even bigger is when entire communities are lost. Those are much harder to switch over, both due to scale and moderation concerns.

Oh that is kinda sad.

Fair point