this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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What if an instance were able to block specific communities on other instances without defederating?
Users can already do so, what would instance-level block bring?
Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?
Say you have an instance with a "no-NSFW" rule, for people who don't want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn't have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in "All".
That will break federation in a very bad way. Imagine you're on such instance which doesn't want NSFW content, but you subscribe to a NSFW community. Admins block it and you don't even know it, you just don't see your community anymore. What do you do? Create another account elsewhere? The whole point of federation is to use one single account EVERYWHERE. Otherwise it's no different then Reddit and Hacker News - just two random online sites and you have to create a bazillion of accounts everywhere.
Admins should not block anything coming from outside instances. Admins should never defed. Instead you, as a user, should have all the tools to moderate your own feed. If you give away your rights and freedoms, you'll lose them forever and you'll be abused on Lemmy the way you were on Reddit.
If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don't have to sign up to one that does something you don't like.
Besides, you don't seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn't for the ability to defederate, we'd have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn't matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.
Do you people even understand what is the point of federation and Fediverse? Because it seems you don't and I'm tired explaining... In short, you should use Reddit instead.
How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It's not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It's about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin's ability to go "I see you're not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you've taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.". Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.
Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don't trust, for example because it's a known source of spam. It's actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.
then the question is why the hell did you make an account on an instance that doesn't want to interact with NSFW content (presumably it's in their rules) when you want to interact with NSFW content; like I don't see why you'd do that if you knew the rules beforehand
Do you understand what the point of federation is? The point is to have one single account to interact with the whole Fediverse. It shouldn't matter where you register your account, all Fediverse should be accessible to you.
that's not the point; the point is to not have a single group dominate the site and to make it easier to avoid bad actors (bigots + fascists, because there's a lot of that online) by just blocking the instance they live on
the "one single account" thing is a bonus, but definitely not the main reason for federation
Lolwut?
This seems silly. Just have new users default to having the "don't show NSFW" setting enabled.
He's one of the "I don't want to see something so neither should anyone else" crowd.
Incorrect. I'm fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don't want to see.
However, I'm allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn't allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don't need to all block the content they don't like manually. It's my instance admin's choice, and my choice to go with their instance.
This was perhaps a bad example. Though there's the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person's NSFW is not the same as another person's NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.