Actually that’s one of my main concerns with Lemmy and the Fediverse: Once instances gain the ability to block other instances, we will probably see the same segmentation issues that Mastodon faces already, where admins arbitrarily block other instances for slight deviations in policies or differences in administration. Many Mastodon instances are therefore way more restricted than for example reddit is (as reddit doesn’t censor views based on legal political opinions that one of the admins may disagree with). With the Fediverse groups of instances create their own filter bubbles, supporting extremist views even more than centralised social media, as all opponents have been blocked out already.
Until Mastodon decided to castrate hashtag timelines to four hashtags only per timeline, I used the instance from Purism, as Purism (at least back then) didn’t block other instances for non-technical reasons and it was up to the individual user to do (or not to do) so.
In my opinion blocking completely destroys the fediverse. How would you feel about your ISP deciding which views are acceptable and which aren’t and blocking websites according to their political opinion? In my opinion the only views that should face censorship are the ones that are illegal according to the laws applying to one particular instance, as the admin should have the ability to avoid getting into legal trouble.
I also don’t see an issue with Gab, as long as they adhere to the laws applying to them, even though I disagree with many of the views posted on that instance. As long as these are legal, everyone should be able to state their opinion and we should be open to discussions, as this is the base for any healthy democracy (not rejecting opinions based on political correctness).
Unfortunately I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and if we continue to censor legal views the Fediverse is doomed for failure. The only solution would probably be that everyone hosts one’s own posts on one’s own server (so you are only legally-responsible for your very own posts) and all these servers of individual persons would need to federate with each other (similar to everyone hosting a blog). But unfortunately that’s not really feasible as very few people have the ability to host a server running 24/7 …
Not listening to e. g. right-wing people is definitely not a solution and makes the situation even worse.
You can’t just ignore 20 % of the population (see AfD in Germany). This will only drive even more people to right-wing parties, since people start to feel that they need to support free-speech now, since they feel like opinions, other than from the left, are no longer heard in public. And thanks to political correctness (PC), many people actually feel like it is no longer socially acceptable to state opinions against PC topics (e. g. immigration), even though critical thinking about such topics is a very basic requirement for a functioning democratic society, and the only way to not feel excluded, when talking about controversial PC topics, seems to be to join a right-wing party, since they are open to critical voices against PC topics. To slow this trend down, we should be more inclusive to critical views on PC topics, engage in discussions to educate these people about different views and not simply block them away into their own filter bubble.
Btw. who says that left-wing opinions are always right/acceptable and right-wing opinions are always wrong/unacceptable? Is there a central authority saying so (which one?), is this caused by political correctness or is this just your own personal opinion? I’d say that left-wing extremists are as worse and as violent as right-wing extremists and neither of these extremes is good.
The only solution for fighting extremism (from left and right!) is not to block each other, but instead engage in discussions and education! You can’t fight illegal activities just by making them illegal, effectly putting them into the “underground”, where they then grow unnoticed (-> Gab) and you also can’t fight extremists by simply blocking them away. We will never reach a middle-ground with vibrant discussions if the only content available is from left-wing or right-wing extremists (depending on the instance bubble). But thanks to instance blocking we are actually creating these extreme filter bubbles in the Fediverse, where all people in a certain group of instances are only exposed to people with a similar opinion and as a result few people of this group of instances question the truth behind posts/statements that underpin the supposedly “correct” opinion.