Didn’t want to further derail the exploding heads vote thread, so:
What are the criteria that should be applied when determining whether to defederate from an instance? And should there be a specific process to be followed, and what level of communication if any with the instance admins?
For context it may be useful to look at the history of the Fediblock tag in Mastodon, to see what sorts of stuff folks are dealing with historically in terms of both obvious and unremarkable bad actors (e.g., spam) and conflict over acceptability of types of speech and moderation standards.
(Not saying that folks need to embrace similar standards or practices, but it’s useful to know what’s been going on all this time, especially for folks who are new to the fediverse.)
For example:
- Presence of posts that violate this instance’s “no bigotry” rule (Does it matter how prolific this type of content is on the target instance?)
- Instance rules that conflict with this instance’s rules directly - if this instance blocks hate speech and the other instance explicitly allows it, for example.
- Admin non-response or unsatisfactory response to reported posts which violate community rules
- Not sure if there’s a way in lemmy to track incoming/outgoing reports, but it would be useful for the community to have some idea here. NOT saying to expose the content of all reports, just an idea of volume.
- High volume of bad faith reports from the target instance on users here (e.g., if someone talks about racism here and a hostile instance reports it for “white genocide” or some other bs). This may seem obscure, but it’s a real issue on Mastodon.
- Edited to add: Hosting communities whose stated purpose is to share content bigoted content
- Coordinating trolling, harassment, etc.
For reference, local rules:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
No Ads / Spamming.
No pornography.
it looks like some people are realy itching to get instances defederated from sh.itjust.works. It’s all they talk about.
People you don't like exist. They probably don't like you either. Life goes on and the world at large doesn't care.Please stop making up problems, we will run into real ones soon enough. Instead, how about we stop worrying about “Nazis” or “Commys” or whatever over at other instances and try to enjoy watching this instance grow for a change.
edit: some formatting.
Defederation is a normal part of life in the fediverse, and this instance already defederates from the start. Healthy fediverse instances have clear standards for what instances they do and don’t federate with.
Normally those are defined by admin; in this case admin has now stated a desire for the community to make rules decisions. So, reasonable and normal to discuss. And reasonable and normal for folks to have disagreements about.
This instance is already paying the price for lax moderation in having been defederated by beehaw, which regardless of how much you or I personally care about the content on beehaw does notably impact the user experience for many folks. And the more this site “stops worrying about nazis” the more that will happen. (And the more users will get fed fed up and migrate to instances with clearer moderation practices.)
Not referring to you or anyone in particular, but it feels like a lot of the folks in this conversation had never heard of defederation before a couple weeks ago and are acting like it and the fediverse generally are a brand new idea. Defederation for Lemmy in many ways has higher stakes than it does for Mastodon due to being structured around communities and not just individual user – but that’s all the more reason to have clear standards for it.