Hey all, I recently left reddit like many of you. I have a question regarding lemmy and the fediverse on the history of banning and defederation. I have noticed several posts calling for varying communities to be disconnected. were these removal requests as prevalent before the mass migration? Usually I am all for communities existsting in their own spaces, barring illegal content. I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
Personally, I prefer individual users being empowered to easily block instances over instances blocking stuff “for” the users in most cases. Issues:
Users from other instances can still require mod actions. Moderation time is limited. Defederating from more problematic instances can be necessary if they cause more trouble than can be easily dealt with.
It is important for instance owners to achieve a coherent “front page” which includes the wider fediverse. I’m unsure if it is possible to ban individual instances from the frontpage while still allowing users to specifically visit them as they want.
Some instances are legally ambiguous or even contain content fully illegal in some countries.
I did for some research. Basically, all the top-defederated instances on this list are so for good reasons, often even legal reasons: https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blocked=100
Note that if you click on an instance, it will show you the various admin reasons for why people defederated.
The one I saw someone asking to be removed (exploding heads) seemed to be more normal discussion with a big extra dose of edgy humor magazines and swear words. This includes various slurs and straight up racism. This very much falls into the category of “I don’t want those here, but I’d prefer if users can still visit them” for me.
However, Lemmy.world admins have compiled a post about the issues these users bring, including harassing DMs to users. See for yourself: https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/107898/Lemmy-world-Admin-Response-to-Defederation-from-Exploding-Heads#comments
Specifically, admins and community moderators of that instance were the problem. This seems like it would quickly fall into the “unfeasible to moderate on a case-by-case basis” category. Therefore, the nuclear option of defederation may be necessary.
Thanks for sharing that site. Very interesting. As someone who enjoyed lurking on r/conservative and r/conspiracy (just to see what’s going on in their echo chambers) I am imagining I might need to join a different server if I want to rubberneck those types of instances.
You could always just view their instance without logging in, no?
FYI, that list is generated by kiwifarms software. You should not be linking to it directly