One of the things it took a while for me to get acclimated to with the #fediverse is the fact that sometimes people will be engaging on conversation with others, either individuals or instances, my instance has blocked.
In the case of my current instance, I'm quite sure there's always a good reason for that, but in ANY case, if you don't run your own instance, you're a guest in someone else's house. It's their rules. If you're not happy with that, find another house whose rules you're cool with our start your own.
With great flexibility comes great power and responsibility :)
@feoh And it's worth emphasizing that this is one very good reason instance owners should not be so quick to block instances.
We need to push back on normalizing it.
Instance blocking should be a last resort on the #Fediverse but occasionally people have pushed to promote it as something to be routinely applied.
@volkris I'm REALLY not so sure about that. Let's say I'm an instance owner, and I'm Jewish. I shouldn't have the right to block instances where anti-semitic speech is allowed? Or I'm queer and feel super threatened by some of what some other instance is posting that they might find acceptable?
To me, the beauty of this community is that every instance is a snowflake - a tiny society with its own rules, norms and acceptable behavior. For this system to work, and for people to be able to participate, I think they should be allowed to wall off types of speech they feel threatened by.
If you want to be on a REALLY permissive instance where goose stepping scumbags are allowed to strut their stuff? Great. You made that choice. And it's the community's choice to curb stomp them too. All things are permissible when you make your own rules :)
You have every right to block whatever instances you want. It's your instance so do what you want.
However, realize that in doing so you're putting up these walls that not only block content indiscriminately, block even good content, interfere with even good conversation threads, and most critically to me, you disempower your own instance users, yourself included, to make decisions for themselves and choose where they participate through your instance.
Again, if you weigh all of this and still choose to defederate, then that's your right and up to you.
But it's not a choice that I think should be made lightly.
Personally, I'd want us to be empowering users to participate in the content they choose while avoiding the content they choose, rather than making decisions for them with sledgehammers at the instance level.
and it turns out to be some ongoing vendetta between a bunch of (often queer, neurodivergent) people they know nothing about
and you've just acted on the side that just happens to have better reach being able to poison the well for you first
so it inadvertently ends up furthering systemic silencing of already-marginalized people
defederation as a last resort, absent clear and reliable evidence of ongoing admin endorsement of something that crosses the line for you, is a good starting policy to buy more time to verify claims, consider the other side's position and minimize collateral damage
Yep, and so that's why I always emphasize #Fediverse interfaces working to give users more ability to tailor their experiences exactly as they wish.
You bring up the interest old computers, and that reminds me that I often think of it as dealing with Venn Diagrams.
Oh the poor instance owner that's looking to serve the tinkering overlap userbase but dealing with anime-lovers vs anime-haters :)
(just to choose a relatively tame example)
I think there's so much more Fediverse clients can do to let users choose for themselves what content they want in their feeds, and what they want to block.
@volkris That's a good point. I definitely see value in that. On the other hand, I'm a white cis-gendered neuro-normative. I'm disabled but that's not immediately obvious.
So I don't need to live every day of my life in fear of being hurt or killed because of who I am.
So, as with everything, lots of shades of gray and difficult decisions :). Were I to run my own instance, I would personally be rather reluctant to instance block, but I also respect and support the decisions of the folks who are running this instance so I can enjoy my community of folks who like to tinker with old computers :) Trade-offs!