Ah yes, simply block every user from .ml it doesn’t stop them from influencing the discussions happening in your instance’s communities and the culture of your instance.

I feel like this is problematic … every user? That’s necessary or warranted?? That there are so many of them and that it’s hard to do undercuts the idea that it would be warranted. It’s just way too likely that there’s a diversity of users which makes this unwarranted. Which is exactly why defederation can be abused, especially when it’s done by large instances.

Part of the idea of the fediverse is community building and grassroots social media infrastructure. If there truly are problematic users, that’s what moderation and reporting is for. If you aren’t happy with your instance’s or community’s moderation, then you likely either need to help or move.

Otherwise, encountering people you don’t like … feels to me like it’s part of social media (to an extent of course). It’s not like you could block all the subscribers of a sub-reddit over on reddit(am I wrong on that?), and I fear defederation is too often weaponised by the overzealous. Blocking all users of an instance over “they’re influencing the culture” just smells off to me.

defederation doesn’t entirely suppress anything, it just encourages people to switch to instances that are still federated

Defederation might be part of that

As you say, it’s a very blunt tool and likely only able to create more civil interactions by creating a fairly strong echo chamber.

My perspective on “defederation” conversations, hinted at in my comment above, is that it’s a new “tool”, a new phenomenon etc. Nothing like it existed on reddit for example. And so it’s natural that there will be “unwise”, premature and overzealous calls to use it as though it’s the solution to many of our social media problems, when in reality it’s a relatively subtle tool best used in concert with active and relatively sophisticated community building and organising.

Which all makes sense to me. But what’s a little sad I think is that we have here a pretty good compromise between “absolute free speech is bad” and “censorship is bad” for social media, and instead of embracing it as an ideology we’ve gotten some loud voices eager to use it as a territorial weapon for drawing boundaries around spaces for everyone else without, AFAICT, much the same in the way of actually building spaces that suit people’s needs (though that happens too of course).

If one wants or needs a space that is shut off completely from what one would call “extreme” politics, that’s totally fine. Doesn’t mean all of lemmy world and half or more of the communities on lemmy should be cut off in a big “us and them” statement. Instead … you probably need an instance that caters to that world view. You may need to try to start organising it yourself if it doesn’t exist. Except, that’s harder than posting a “lets defederate” post.

Honestly I’m in favor of people talking even when it isn’t nice. I’d rather have angry words than no words, you know?

Because .zip may not have a community such as this and they searched fediverse and told was the result.