I dont like tankies or tories any more than the next person, but breaking federation is just wrong.
I dont want to have to make a separate account just to get around that, mainly because this is actually already my account for getting around that!
Its quite easy to block a community at user level, if needed, and we are not the target of any spam, but now we users have lost the option of the ability to interact forever with a corner of the threadiverse, which i think is not cool.
If its just me thinking this way, fine, i’ll just maintain several accounts, but i would hope its not, because its feeling like instances are gettinh pretty triggerhappy with the block button https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/tree/main
After a second thought, I’ll keep the blocklist free of political instances, even though most I personally disagree with. In terms of any large ones which are grey areas of legality (loli and stuff like that), yeh I’m protecting my own back by blocking them.
That does mean the blocklist is only 1 atm, I’ll keep an eye on what other big instances are blocked by other instances and keep the blocklist updated by doing that. Realistically a lot of the ones I would want to block will be so small I wouldn’t notice them so that list will be kept fairly thin I imagine. (I’m not gonna be like beehaw or even feddit.de who have fairly large blocklists)
I get the frustration of having stuff blocked which might feel restrictive, so I’ll try and keep the blocklist as small as possible but I do still think some should be blocked.
Blocked instances can be found here https://feddit.uk/instances
The one blocked atm is https://burggit.moe/
I think it should be fair if a community is illegal or starts to attack our communities with spam and brigading, but that’s it
It’s not as easy as that.
The problem at the moment with lemmy is that the moderation options for communities are pretty basic. So a community moderator can only delete posts or comments, block individual users or block any posts apart form moderator posts. So if a community is the victim of a coordinated attack from another instance, there’s not a lot that the mods can do to defend it.
There will be instances created just with the intention of disrupting communities that they disagree with. If community mods can’t defend their communities, defederation may be the only option.
Also defederation is a two way street. An instance might decide to have a no censorship policy, but that might lead to it being defederated by other large instances.
I tend to agree that blocking some political subs etc is perhaps not the best, since every user on the instance will suffer, but please take a skim-read of the banned Beehaw instances - you will find something you do not want on here. Tom as a server owner also will have a vested interest in blocking some of this content that passes through his infrastructure.
Because the content is actually hosted on the server, I definitely think there’s a legal and moral cause to block some of these.
Sure, let Lemmygrad in, that’s fine, but a lot of those links are staying unclicked for me and I’d probably want my server clean of it.
From my cursory inspection of how things are working, all the the content is replicated between instances but things like images are just links, the UI and the back-end provide a means to upload an image but what that is doing is uploading an image to the user’s instance and then putting the link in the post. Pretty standard stuff for a link aggregator. The important thing here is that the image itself is not replicated around the fediverse, but stays where it was uploaded and is linked to. Of course, thumbnails seem to still be locally generated as you’d expect.
So the legal issue is diminished by that, but not illuminated. Something like loli hentai that is illegal in the UK won’t be hosted on these servers even if posted on a federated server, though I’m not saying it wouldn’t be reasonable to defederate from that instance on other grounds than legal liability. However the thumbnail is a very low resolution image of illegal content, and I don’t think lemmy has some kind of “grey list” where content is still available through your instance but nothing of consequence gets replicated locally, thumbnails not generated, etc. I’m not sure what the legal situation is surrounding outlinks to illegal content not thumbnails thereof. Furthermore I don’t know what kind of protections platforms have when it come to liability for user-generated content, like the US Section 230, but I don’t think there is much.
It might be better to host the actual servers for this instance outside of the UK as a result, that could very well be the case anyway.
Anyway IANAL and I’ve only done some cursory poking around into how lemmy handles the replication of content between instances so there are almost certainly things I’m overlooking.
breaking federation
Federation doesn’t imply that everything is open to everything. It can’t do, there are too many people that just can’t be civilised to each other.
If federation is to work and build enjoyable and productive discussions, then people’s behaviour cannot be completely free. And the work to notice and block individuals will largely be done on an instance level. You can’t have every instances maintaining a blocklist of every undesirable account across the entire ‘fediverse’
If instances are not able to keep on top of bad users then unfederating those instances is the built-in check. Hopefully that will not be required too often.
There are plenty of instances whose entire purpose is to facilitate discussion that is fundamentally distasteful. They are free to do so, but we should feel no obligation to allow that to happen through our site.
I’ve no problem with maintaining a minimal blocklist in as far as we are a small site and are less likely to face problems, but we should be prepared to block where not doing so makes the experience worse.
