Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I'm not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.
I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the 'wrong' server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.
I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I've only just noticed that the edits/updates I've been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it's similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we're defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I'm just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I'm no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.
- Pawb version: https://pawb.social/post/43513
- sh.itjust.works version: https://sh.itjust.works/post/89693
I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don't know that the server they're joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.
I'm not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I'm sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the 'wrong' server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It's not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it's really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.
Thoughts?
We have a clear set of policies that set out what we will and will not tolerate. While sh.itjust.works is a much larger instance, we've seen a large number of users who've shown racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tendancies towards our users and other users within threads.
The current problem seems to stem from reports not actively being federated to the offending instance for their admins and community moderators to deal with. The alternative to that is they're simply going ignored.
Either way, we unfortunately only have two tools at our disposal:
There's simply no way right now to silence or otherwise "quarantine" instances that are experiencing an influx of 4chan and man-child trolls.
Edit: Also, to be clear, we try to use defederation as a last resort, and only in circumstances where the situation either requires vast amounts of attention (lack of moderators) or where the instance is "freeze peach" (no moderation), either of which is detrimental to the community.