VLemmy Chat

I'm in favor of defederating as well. I'm a very hardcore free speech/expression advocate, but this is where my line is personally.

Being connected with those communities invites problems on multiple levels, from being exposed to those things without inviting it, all the way to possible legality concerns depending on the content they share.

It also is a huge reputational risk for instances that are willingly federated to instances that allow that content. I can already imagine news stories about communities that host that content and all the other ones that chose to stay federated with them.

The Fediverse already has enough trouble seeming approachable from a technical perspective and Lemmy itself has somewhat of a stigma about hosting extremists like tankies. I don't think we need to do things to potentially add to reasons why people wouldn't want to join up.

Those instances are still legal depending on where they are hosted and still accessible for the few people that want to access that, nasty as I think it is. We don't need to help others have access to that kind of content.

By defederating with them, we might offend an extremely small minority of users, but by staying federated, we will alienate a massive majority of users. The benefits vastly outweigh the risks IMO.