EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.
Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don't have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren't, given how many instances have defederated them.
Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don't speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.
You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.
We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.
I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there's anything I left out.
I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude's intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.
I really don't care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn't had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?
It's a single event. Anything else?
Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse's mouth.
It's going to be hard for TheDude to run the server and also his real life if he constantly needs to be addressing hypothetical questions from users who joined within the past 24 hours.
That's why I'm here.
Now that I know who you are, I have checked out The Agora and a lot of what you are saying has a bit more context. It seems I posted this in the wrong place and misunderstood the community structure here.
Thank you for your time responding. Once I spend a bit more time looking through The Agora, I may end up asking another question or two.
Ok I'm sorry I'm at work and had to step away for a bit.
Yes, the Agora is the platform for community input and decision making, and I'm one of the moderators.
No problem at all, happy to help.
Who are you? A few posts back, when you responded "anything else?", I checked to see if you were a mod of this community or admin of the instance but I don't see you in either list.
He's a mod of the Agora, our (very new) democratic decision-making platform.
Ah, thank you for filling me in.