Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
And once again what stops the user from blocking them theirselves? People have the ability to block individuals and whole subdomains, why not do it theirselves?
What percentage of people have to be posting hate on a specific topic before a certain server decides to defederate them? I’m in no way advocating hate speech but what happens if you have a large server with just two instances causing trouble? The owner believes in free speech and doesn’t want to block anything but there are dozens of other instances on that server that are behaving normally, with thousands of people using it daily? Do you block that server to your entire user base because of two instances? Do you make all of the other users on that instant suffer because of that? Or do you leave it up to your own users to make their own decisions?
Regardless of how this goes in the end I think the instance operators should have clear and open policies before people decide what servers they want to join to begin with.