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.
nice to hear that about open federation. I feel that the real benefit of the concept of federation is decentralization - and de-federating like beehaw did just ruins that.
Instances that defederate are at a disadvantage though, because it hurts their users. There is a natural incentive to stay federated. Defederation is really a nuclear-scale moderation tool, and it’s one of the founding principles of the fediverse: independant administration. If you don’t like some administrators, vote them out by joining an instance that better matches your needs instead.
In any case, the admins of these instances are collaborating and have stated that this is a temporary measure untill better mod tools become available. I’m not worried at all.
But no doubt by, some communities are going to be just so at odds, that it’s probably best if there are mechanisms to keep them separated. And you know what? That’s just fine.
I really hope that we’ll get the option to migrate accounts from once instance to another soon, like Mastodon has. It sucks that you can wake up one day and no longer be able to interact with your communities. Without migration options, you’re kinda stuck.