Made some time at work, don’t tell my boss…
Think of lemmy instances as countries: when you visit a country/instance you’re expected to abide by their local rules, whatever they may be. And when users from other countries/instances interact with Australia/aussie.zone they’re expected to behave in line with our rules.
Not agreeing with the population of a country/instance doesn’t mean you can’t visit it. If/When you visit, you can’t expect them to adhere to your rules at home… or to apply their own rules consistently… just like the real world.
Defederation of an instance will only be done when:
**Legal **- the instance is generating content that may raise legal concerns for Aussie Zone. For example porn.
**Technical **- the instance is generating content that may cause performance/security issues for Aussie Zone. For example large volumes of automated traffic or malicious traffic.
**Trolls **- an instance whose users predominantly interact in bad faith with communities outside of their instance.
I don’t believe lemmy.ml meets either of these, their “quirky” politics are largely self contained on their own communities from what I’ve seen. If they’re crashing aussie.zone communities and posting outside of our rules, please report them.
To address some comments in this thread (paraphrasing):
we should defederate instances with bad admins or admins heavily moderating alternative views to their own
So far as their actions do not trigger any of the defederation criteria noted above, they can do as they see fit.
no incentive to create alternative communities
If there is no incentive, then it can’t be a large enough issue to enough users.
pro-authoritarian bias
Given how simple it is for a user to block an instance for themself, I’d rather allow our users had the option to decide this for themselves. Some prefer to engage with people from an alternate perspective, for those that don’t they can block the instance.
TLDR
Not defederating lemmy.ml at this point in time, if their user behaviour outside of their instance changes in future my stance may change too.
Taleya@aussie.zone 3 hours ago
it seems “defederate” has become the new default move whenever people encounter users that, well, Exist While Having Different Opinions To Them.
The only defensible one I’ve seen was hexbear because they’re full on batshit “this has gotta be a russian psyop” insane and intent on abusing everyone else.