Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don’t want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead.
We’d be able to curate our own browsing experience so much better without admin/mod drama influencing the rest of us.
Edit: Alright so maybe not exactly replace defederation, but it should still be an option available to us, and in general should become the default action before defederation IMHO.
I have deliberately sought out an instance that only defederates illegal content and meta, so that I wouldn’t end up in some admin’s filter bubble.
Naturally this means my instance is also federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, and while I manually blocked some of their more obnoxious propaganda communities I haven’t found either of their instance’s users overly combative or brigading in random comment sections like others here are claiming.
Though I must concede that most news relating to Russia or China usually have a good handful of their tankies defending them in the comments, which can be a bit annoying at times. Having the instance of accounts shown is very helpful in those situations to know if they are someone arguing in good faith or just spewing propaganda.
Overall I much prefer my Lemmy experience this way though. It makes for more varied discussion and points of view and helps to avoid getting stuck in an echo chamber.
