I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I’ve been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc… But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist. Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the ‘compatible’ users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
I think a better solution would be to let individual users block instances they don’t want. Shouldn’t be much different from blocking communities and users. This is just a combination of the two
This is the way imo. I’d personally like to see the culture of the fedi shift more towards self-moderation by users, let the users decide for themselves what individuals, communities, or servers they want or don’t want to see.
Yes, this would mean that you’d be responsible for thinking for yourself, but imo that added slight burden is worth the freedom that is supposedly the reason the fedi exists.
My masto server does this (beyond who defederated us because we don’t wholesale block the same people they block) and it works just fine for me, I just banned the Nazi instance (cause duh), the wolf-gender instance (it’s all they talk about and I’m just not interested, I’m sure they’re fine people), the Loli-art instance (cause duh), and the futa-bot (it’s spam, a lot of it, and I’m not into futa), and I’m gtg, just wish the reactionary instances that I’d be fine with weren’t so cliquey as to ban my instance for allowing it’s users to think for themselves, but c’est la vie.
I want both. I want admin to be able to defederate and I want to be able to block instances myself. A good example is that furry porn instance keeps coming up with new communities I need to block individually. I would rather block the whole thing.
Federation should would like PeerTube instead.
Right now, federation work by a user subscribing to a community and then that community will federate to the instance.
Instead it should be instance A that “follows” instance B. Now every community on instance B is available on instance A.
If instance A is not folllowing instance B, a user can follow individual communities on instance B, but the communities would only show on the users subscription wall, not anywhere else.
People have the tools to block users and communities. Use them, people.
Usually there are two reasons for defederation:
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A instance that has no intentions to co-exist peacefully in the federation and the problem starts with the admins. This warrants a permanent defederation.
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A instance that is temporarily overwhelmed by trolls or has grown too big to have any efficient moderation and thus poses a thread to the federation. This usually warrants a temporary defederation but can at times require a permanent one if the admins are not cooperating in getting things under control (by which it becomes a case 1.)
Your proposal solves neither and automated ban-lists like that have a much higher risk of silent abuse than a very public defederation that needs to be well justified.
I think that’s a simplistic view. We’ve seen people defederating or asking for defederation for the existence of a single community. Just because instance admins have different ideas of what’s tolerable doesn’t mean the rest of the communities at large can’t collaborate.
The point where admins would have settings to accept/review ban lists was to reduce the risk of abuse
If you are talking about the recent the_Donald case that this is not a matter of different opinions. That community on Reddit has a long history of not willing to co-exists peacefully and if an admin does not draw a clear line that such communities are not welcome on their instance then it is a clear case of the above 1).
I think some people reacted a bit too quickly to that sublemmy appearing though… Give admins some time to evaluate and resolve the situation before impulsively defederating an entire 6000-user instance.
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