Yes. Instance and user defederation are best when used together.
Every instance should be able to federate and defederate from any other instance for any, all, or no reason.
Instance owners are responsible for the content that is mirrored on their instance through federation, so they definitely should.
Ayy, hello there Kayn (Im just a random guy from filen discord).
Responsible in what way?
Legally responsible, for one.
I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance’s infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.
Instance admins should defederate as often as they feel is necessary, and users should learn to avoid relying on instances that do it too much.
Wow! Someone who gets “choice” and “freedom of association”!
Just give me the tools, as a user, to block instances. Not just the way it is done recently but truly block an instance and all it’s posts and users. I want to be able to black hole an entire instance and all things related to it.
I want to block Threads in this way. Nuclear option, I want nothing to do with it.
Connect does that, it’s glorious.
When you block the instance, it’s only visible on your client. The fact that they still are federated and content from them is mirrored on your local instance stays unchanged. So they still should defederate with such instances.
So defederating is only useful as a way to save storage space?
Yeah, pretty much.
To combat spam and blatant fuckery, absolutely. Openly hateful places have no business on the general internet.
But anything else is better left to user discretion IMO.
By that standard it seems to me like most of the internet should be shut down, particularly establishment outlets that are more than happy to tell you who to hate.
Yes.
Hell yes
In general I think people are too eager to block and defederate for little to no reason other than disagreement. There are exceptions but as far as a normal conversation it’s an overreaction and the antithesis of federating anyway. We already have plenty of siloed walled gardens that are echo chambers.
The way federation works is that everything is replicated across all federated servers. If an admin team does not want to have to moderate specific kinds of content or users who are deemed detrimental (but not necessarily illegal) they have the ability and right to defederate.
Also, I’ve blocked servers but it doesn’t block users. Defederation does though.
Other than the obvious criminal instances (CSAM)
I think still yes, when a problem is abundantly clear, but borderline cases can more easily be left to individual preference.
Yes. As an admin of an instance who really doesn’t want child porn on my server, I’m gonna defederate the shit out of any instance that doesn’t take care of such content in a reasonable time. And in my opinion, loli is child porn, so defederating there as well.
Other than that, anything that’s illegal in my jurisdiction.
And the last category, spam and bigotry. Basically anything that puts too much work on my plate - if I get dozens of reports a day for users of a single instance (and I agree with the reports), I’ll defederate, because no one’s paying for my time.
So these are some valid reasons for me to defederate. There are probably more.
Yes, this is still necessary.
It wouldn’t make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.
Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I’d simply stop using Lemmy. The “all” feed would be utterly unusable.
Also, admins need control over what’s in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.
This is where I’m currently at with “not technically nsfw but I don’t want people thinking I’m like that” trying to block anime communities centered around not-technically-nude pictures.
Yeah as an instance admin sorry not sorry I defederated most anime things like that. You want that? You host it. I don’t need the feds knocking down my door.
Lol wtf? The feds are going to knock down your door because of anime pics of people that aren’t even nude?
The feds will knock down your door because a kid you headshotted in CoD called them. Anime is one of the more understandable reasons if we’re being honest.
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Honestly if the feds are going to even take the effort to move personnel to your house and knock your door, when it’s quite unlikely the server is hosted physically at your house in the first place, you could take the opportunity to offer them cheap consulting on technology, international cultures (anime and stuff) and federation.
Heck, you can aim at their ego. “I tricked you, right guys? That means I’m pretty good.”
