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.

  • Swarming@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    92·
    1 year ago

    I think I agree. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of going too far, too fast in defederating from servers which have people whose views some users here find objectionable. There are some cases where it’s fairly clear-cut, and I’d feel comfortable. Outright fascists and MAGA servers. Bot-farms. Ones designed to disseminate disinformation and fake news.

    If their users are interacting with us in ways which are hostile, disruptive, etc. then we should defederate, obviously. Though that will only go so far given open registrations.

    But this server is not, as far as I’m aware, intended to be of a specific political hue, nor primarily about politics. So, I think we should be cautious and careful, partly because I’ve seen ‘tankie’ used to describe such a wide range of views, often with very little in common between them.