this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Hmm? Do instances automatically block other instances if they don't block certain other ones?
I self host an instance. I haven't blocked anyone yet as I just sub to communities that aren't bigoted.
Nah, if you're using your instance as an essentially private one, you're not about to be blocked. If you're running communities on it that run counter to the basic ideals of other communities, you'll probably find yourself losing some federation however.
I run my own, and I'm not blocking anything yet because, honestly, I just won't be vising ones I'm not interested in. I'll probably block a few if I see things coming out of them that I really don't want to see, but at this point it doesn't affect anyone else.
Some decently sized Mastodon instances introduced a policy like this. "Unless you use my blacklist, you are defederated by default". In practice, it means that those few instances are an isolated clique that only talk to each other. In my experience, those cliques are toxic, so it's no big loss if you're not able to contact them. But of course I hope this behavior doesn't come to Lemmy.
I can see the issue but at the same time is scary. In the future this thing could be bad. Like who is drawing the line and where?
No one draws the line unfortunately, because no one controls the entire federated network. This is why it's important to have many medium-sized instances on the Fediverse and not one massive instance and a bunch of other tiny ones, so one instance won't get too much control and impose their rules on the entire network. But it's difficult to convince non-tech users of this concept since they are used to centralized social media and will just sign up on the biggest instance.
On the free speech and shitposting Fediverse instances, they get around this by screenshotting posts from blocked instances. I believe there are also some implementations that can bypass fetching authorization and fetch public content from instances that have blocked them. If something is posted publicly on the internet, it can be distributed further, so I don't see why they should use this halfway solution that fragments the network without actually increasing the instance's security (e.g. make the instance private and verify signups).