In the spirit of being encouraged to speak my mind here’s a slight effort post:

Defederation does not do what you think it does.

The instance creator and admins are those with the ultimate power within their instance. The active users delegate them that power by interacting with their instance.

Defining “defederation” within the context of Lemmy as I understand it:

“the act of denying the ability for accounts within specific instances to interact with each other”

Anyone at this current time can create an account on most instances. One site on sh.itjust.works is defederated right now, but anyone here may also have an account there, who knows? The value comes from our activity and interaction within each instance.

Defederation is a narrow and a slippery slope because it doesn’t actually solve any problems. There are many instances which are doing things I think should be banned. I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.

We uphold an inclusive enjoyable community here by being active. Individuals with malicious intent are ostracized naturally by an active community. Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.

It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.

  • Gongin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    I think from our instances view point it doesn’t matter as much because as you said we have open registration. Having that open registration is what has led to us being defederated by other instances however with a longer approval process. So in the lens of the whole, they make use of that.

    As for the purposes of us defederating an instance it would be

    • bots/spams as others have said
    • legal issues as part of the federation is importing that content posted by that instance (so I think having references to that content could make us vulnerable to issues with it). Again not sure on this one but for performance reasons could see the implementation being as such.