> completely obliterated the federation
The developer decided to implement instance blocking, not the other way around.
The developer decided to implement instance blocking, not the other way around.
It was sad, to have witnessed such a bright future unfold, interesting discussions on language, on tech, on culture. And then to have half of the world just cut off.
The fediverse was the future...
There was a block-list circulating around, and if you do not block every instance on the list, your instance is misogynist, pedophile and far-right.
I was just so frustrated when the instance cut me off from people I follow, sorry for the language.
I must have missed the memo, because I run a medium-sized instance, don't follow any blocklist, and no one ever complained about it.
I block instances when they either flood or I find I don't want to have anything to do with them (I do tolerate opinions I disagree with, of course; but not patent bigotry).
And only based on evidence I gather myself, I don't trust screenshots or copy-pastes (but I understand some mod teams do, and that's ok if that's what their users want).
> I wonder how often you get complaints about wanting an instance blocked, and how you manage them.
As I said, I never got complaints. I also never got instance requests personnally; although I do sometimes see other instance admins saying they blocked a given instance. When it happens, I take a look at that instance's public pages. Usually, that's enough to make my mind, eg. because their public timeline is overrun by literal nazis and/or lolicon.
(I was looking for examples as I was writing this, and it turns out most of the nazi instances I blocked don't exist anymore. Oh well.)
The hardest part is dealing with big instances with many "well-behaved" users, but also a very lax moderation policy that tolerates trolls. So far I only banned individual trolls in this case, but it requires work, and I understand not all moderators want to spend so much time.
It just feel very weird to me that the word "fediverse" is thrown around like a universe, except it is a balance of not getting thrown out by not being the norm. Perhaps it is just me that has this fantasy of everyone being in one place, at least on the Internet, but jerks are jerks.
String phone in one hand, scissors in another.