I really like that you are codifying policy like this.
The "instance is mostly made up by bots" is obviously a great call but your wording makes it sound like <50% bots is cool, >50% bots is not cool. haha
The hysterics over the as yet purely hypothetical prospect of Facebook/Threads being on the fediverse, along with some worrying signs of censorship, have caused me to to flee lemmy.world. Here’s hoping FMHY will be a better fit for me.
It became the largest instance and the one to absorb most of the attention-seekers that expect to be treated as "customers", despite the instance admin (of lemmy.world) emphasizing they're all volunteers working for the community.
I would have preferred to have a no-defederation policy (except for maybe threads due to EEE fears), but as long as it is not swung around constantly, I am okay with it.
The two that are blocked are political circlejerks that I personally dislike anyways. I am hopeful there is not more.
We want to use defederation as a last resort and hopefully when users are able to block instances themselves we'll be able to use it even less frequently. I dislike defederation personally as well, and like Nbats stated here, if the community's opinion of those two instances change and the instances themselves make their communities safer we'll refed.
Good. Hell, once the user-instance blocking thing comes out, give people a list and instructions to block those political instances, porn ones, etc. etc. I always like it to be on the user level, rather than some over-arching force telling me what I can and can't view. Freedom to make the decision for yourself should be a large priority.
There is probably some need for a default block list that the admin can set though... Otherwise new users would probably not have a really good time.
Yeah instances that post illegal content and bot instances would probably be on a default blocklist.
If Lemmy supported user instance blocking I would agree with you, but until then this is the best option available.
Defederation means we have disconnected our instance from another, and our users will no longer be able to see communities, posts or comments from users on the defederated instance.
It should be noted that it's a two way street, no? They won't see any content from here either?
Also, I thought single community ban from other instances wasn't possible yet? I remember the vlemmy guy saying that before going MIA.
Yeah good point, I just added that it goes both ways. As far as blocking single communities go I don't have all the details but I've been told we've done it for one so far.
Is it possible to list blocked communities in the /instances page? Or at least list them in a post? Just so users know what's being blocked.
No not yet but I think there's plans to make it possible.
I see. Thank you!
I've been hearing different answers on this lately, particularly regarding Lemmy.world and Beehaw. Beehaw defederated LW, but not vice versa. The result is that no one on Beehaw can see any posts on LW, but users on LW are seeing some posts on Beehaw. It doesn't seem to be a complete cut to all communication.
But that's still something worth bringing up - Here is the list of instances that block FMHY, and are (somewhat) effectively isolated from us here:
https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=lemmy.fmhy.ml
The only one that's significant is feddit.de. From what I can tell, it's because FMHY has open registration
This is probably outdated since feddit federates with us, I even joined some of their communities.
https://feddit.de/instances says we are blocked. I think it's still possible to view and interact with feddit communities from our instance, but those interactions do not propagate to the feddit server.
Yes, very cool. And about Threads, I will probably block Threads myself just because it's a twitter clone, it doesn't need to be on lemmy. But people should be able to make that decision themselves.
I think preemtive defederation/blocking from Threads is the most logical decision for every instance since we are talking about a known hostile company, not something new testing the waters that nobody knows how it will behave, it's Meta being Meta (even if they are trying to hide it behind the "by Instagram" slogan).
I just hope this is done as an absolute last resort, and doesn’t become common practice.
Yeah I don't see it happening at all outside of circumstances like this where the community as a whole is really pushing for it.
So what does deferedating from them do for us? I wasn't seeing their content anyway because it wasn't popular enough to end up on all.
Does it have any practical effects for fmhy users?
I personally joined this instance because so many other large ones have massive federation lists. So if the only effect of defederating is to send a message, then I'm not sure I'm for that.
Yeah they haven't become a huge issue for us yet, but they have for other instances, and most of our reports of "racism" have come from things posted to exploding. Deferedating isn't to send any sort of message, its just to prevent having issues with them in the future.
and their users won't be able to see anything coming from ours.
That is not true, beehaw defederated from sh.itjust.works, but we can still see posts from beehaw in our feed. Granted, if we comment, nothing gets sent back to beehaw, only members of sh.itjust.works will see those comments.
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