Yes, because you don’t want to provide them your content for free, so they can continue building engagement on your behalf.
The way federation works is that everything is replicated across all federated servers. If an admin team does not want to have to moderate specific kinds of content or users who are deemed detrimental (but not necessarily illegal) they have the ability and right to defederate.
Also, I’ve blocked servers but it doesn’t block users. Defederation does though.
Yes.
What you’re describing is basically the way Twitter works, and there’s a reason vulnerable folk have migrated away from it in large numbers
Twitter is not federated…
Yes, and thus you have one giant mega community in which every bigot can access anyone and everyone else. Which is what a Fediverse without instance blocks would be like
The OP is not against instance blocks.
Their question was literally “do we still need instance blocks”
What? The question was literally “Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end?”.
Defederating = instance block
Defederation is done by the instance administrator and affects all users. Instance blocking is done by the user and affects only them.
Yes. I think it’s especially important for attracting (or perhaps more accurately, maintaining) new users to the fediverse.
Defederation should always be an extreme measure. Usually it’s just the self-righteousness instinct trying to performatively obstruct other people. I usually find these discussions repulsive because of how people speak about each other (bitching about “tankies” or whatever and demanding that they be ideologically cleansed).
If we have more power to curate our own feeds, then there should be less defederation.
Usually it’s just the self-righteousness instinct…
I love¹ telepathic people who can read other people’s minds and post on their behalf.
¹ This is sarcasm. I hate the delusional who think they’re telepaths.
Enjoy your feelings of hatred then, I guess. Don’t worry though, defederation will win and you’ll be safe inside your silo bitching about how there were once people who said things you disagreed with whom you hated and continue to hate, and that hate is all you ever communicate.
I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but in general I think defederation is against the free software ethos.
Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.
There’s obviously going to be exceptions for illegal content, or actively trying to disrupt the lemmy network (by DDOS, flooding, etc) but I feel that’s where the line should be drawn.
Like with many free software projects: you’re free to run a server that complies with your preferences, and let others join along.
FOSS empowers users. That can be to reach each other, or not to. It’s the users’ choice, in this case the instance admin’s, on how to apply those freedoms.
In practice, running anything but a tiny server for friends requires moderators, and moderators don’t like having to make tough decisions. You can join the small subgroup of servers that will only take the bare minimum of moderation actions, but you’re likely to end up getting defederated from large servers for offloading your users’ moderation to them (plus the “anything that’s not illegal goes” servers usually end up attracting douche bags that got banned everywhere else for being unlikable people).
There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.
Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.
That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.
I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.
Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.
does bigotry count
the user of the free software in this case would be the server owner.
Yes. As an admin of an instance who really doesn’t want child porn on my server, I’m gonna defederate the shit out of any instance that doesn’t take care of such content in a reasonable time. And in my opinion, loli is child porn, so defederating there as well.
Other than that, anything that’s illegal in my jurisdiction.
And the last category, spam and bigotry. Basically anything that puts too much work on my plate - if I get dozens of reports a day for users of a single instance (and I agree with the reports), I’ll defederate, because no one’s paying for my time.
So these are some valid reasons for me to defederate. There are probably more.
edge lords, tankies, paedophiles, and alt-righters should always be defederated from
defedding pedos make sense but defedding the others you mentioned are a very slippery slope into making an echo chamber
something something paradox of tolerance
The feature only lets you filter posts, not users from that instance.
Instance admins should defederate as often as they feel is necessary, and users should learn to avoid relying on instances that do it too much.
Just give me the tools, as a user, to block instances. Not just the way it is done recently but truly block an instance and all it’s posts and users. I want to be able to black hole an entire instance and all things related to it.
I want to block Threads in this way. Nuclear option, I want nothing to do with it.
Yes. Instance and user defederation are best when used together.
Yes.
Hell yes
Instance owners are responsible for the content that is mirrored on their instance through federation, so they definitely should.
Responsible in what way?
Legally responsible, for one.
I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance’s infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.
Ayy, hello there Kayn (Im just a random guy from filen discord).
Oh hi! Small world, eh?
