I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist.
Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
I think a better solution would be to let individual users block instances they don’t want. Shouldn’t be much different from blocking communities and users. This is just a combination of the two
This is the way imo. I'd personally like to see the culture of the fedi shift more towards self-moderation by users, let the users decide for themselves what individuals, communities, or servers they want or don't want to see.
Yes, this would mean that you'd be responsible for thinking for yourself, but imo that added slight burden is worth the freedom that is supposedly the reason the fedi exists.
My masto server does this (beyond who defederated us because we don't wholesale block the same people they block) and it works just fine for me, I just banned the Nazi instance (cause duh), the wolf-gender instance (it's all they talk about and I'm just not interested, I'm sure they're fine people), the Loli-art instance (cause duh), and the futa-bot (it's spam, a lot of it, and I'm not into futa), and I'm gtg, just wish the reactionary instances that I'd be fine with weren't so cliquey as to ban my instance for allowing it's users to think for themselves, but c'est la vie.
That would be like counting stars
This would be good to have, but an admin should still be able to silence or block communities and, in the worst case, defederate.
Everything's early still and it'll take time until the right tools have been built.
I want both. I want admin to be able to defederate and I want to be able to block instances myself. A good example is that furry porn instance keeps coming up with new communities I need to block individually. I would rather block the whole thing.
I think that should happen too
This is a lot of work if you're just trying to browse the site. Instead of spending hours blocking instances after first checking whether an instance is mostly bots (and safe to block) or if it's just a single group of bots in an otherwise fine instance in which case you block the users, a general list like OP suggested would be more useful.
I don’t see how it’s more complicated than blocking a user or a community. Instances is nothing but a group of communities and users at the highest level
I really want this feature. In the meantime I wish that it would be made more clear to participants of each instance that each individual's subscriptions get fed into c/all of each instance. If you want to be a troll or view porn just remember that you've now exposed everyone else on your instance to that material and they may not want to see it.