I don't like the approach of just adopting everyone else's blocklists, and cutting off access arbitrarily with a top-down approach. There are circumstances that sometimes warrant that kind of management, but I feel it requires actual investigation by the admin team.
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@sean I'm glad to hear this. What really bugs me are all the instances that seem to block based on random rumors and a complete lack of evidence.
If your researching the details yourself, relying not just on screenshots that are out of context but reviewing the whole thread, and most importantly, talking tot he accused. Well thats just responsible administrating.
Wanting to just not even have to deal with that is understandable from an administrative point of view, especially if you're running an instance full of people that a place like Gab or KiwiFarms would love to harass.
On the other hand, as someone running a single-person instance, I have the luxury of blocking whatever individual or community I want with virtually no repercussions, because I'm only responsible for just me.
@sean While I dont personally promote blocking at the instance level I do respect instances that do.
I think if you are blocking instances GAB obviously makes a lot of sense with even a 15 second look at their timeline.
The reason I dont personally block any instances is largely because of what happened when we were tried to decide this during the birth of Isolate GAB movement, we almost did block GAB and others.
Our LGBT community at the time came together an en masse begged me not to, which I found odd at first but their reasoning made a lot of sense. They want a way to be able to monitor high-risk GAB accounts for threats against their community. Mostly doxxing of members in their community which the disseminate among each other. Obviously they didnt feel safe simply opening a GAB account because that would expose their personal details to GAB and they didnt want that.
Later we even implemented the subscription feature for a similar reason. This way our users can subscribe to a GAB user without actually following them as a further mechanism of safety.
It really saddens me though that choice I made specifically in the interest of protecting our LGBT community from harm has brought us some hate from the community and even blocks ourselves.
To me that is a price I am happy to pay to protect those individuals though.
Overall it has made me think about fediblocks in a very different way too.
