Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
The problem is that this really harms broader outreach efforts. If the fediverse is only tolerable with the right block list, then most people who try to give it a shot will just be turned off immediately. And that’s not even getting into the potential security issues associated with malicious instances.
Malicious instances could still be defederated though.
The problem is that users also need the option at user level.
The biggest security risk with the fediverse is arguably the ability to serve individual users malicious content from your instance or another host you control. Defederation is the best defense against that.
And in no way does adding user options to block all users from an instance change that.
Why are you arguing against users having additional controls?
Because the existence of those tools are being used as am excuse for not doing the thing which actually helps. In addition to the whole first half of my comment where needing the right block list to make the fediverse tolerable is not a sustainable practice.
I think you’re confused.
There are reasons to defederate. Malicious instances are one example.
There are many reasons not to deferederate, like users on a particular instance being assholes to a specific user or group of users.
A user cannot, today, block users from an instance. They can block individual users, they can block communities, but individual blocks can be easily worked around.
A better option is for that user to have the option to block an instance (and its users) that others are fine with interacting with.
You are trying to rework that into something its not.
Edit: Ahh, the no reply just downvote. Says everything. Goodbye.