I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don't want other people to control what I see.

That's it. That's my entire position on the matter.

Just throwing my opinion in... Since we can block communities on our own, we don't really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it's not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might've decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I'd still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.

In my point of view it's a kind of censorship. Just let the user himself decide what he wants to see.

Thanks for this. It's recomforting and makes me thing I chose the right instance to sign up

I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don't like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It's annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don't want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.

I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.

I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol

I think that structures that permit people and communities to do literally whatever they want is how lemmy can thrive. The people in beehaw (myself included) are on the whole perfectly chill with the defederation, and the specific reasons and conditions for that defederation. The admins have been open about the fact that they want more moderation tools for our community before refederating with those instances, it isn't a permanent state of affairs. I like beehaw. Its chill. Maybe other people wouldn't like that, but then maybe just don't host your account there? There are tons of other places to be. This isn't reddit, if you aren't inside beehaw, its management doesn't affect you.

Except for the fact that defederating is bidirectional at the moment. It would be nice if the platform's defederation and the user's defederation were less tied together, but as far as I can tell, the beehaw admins only defederated because there wasn't a compromise between "do nothing" and "ban everything" available to them.

The problem at the moment is that the community moderation tools are pretty limited. At some point there will be coordinated attacks on some communities and the moderation tools are not yet sufficient to defend against that sort of thing.

I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It's a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they'd never remove anything hateful towards trans people.

On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There's no way to bar them from making a new server.

I very much appreciate this philosophy. It looks like this is the right instance for me :)

as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it's important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we're still federated with them and things seem fine?

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances

I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That's the beauty of the model and that's why kbin and lemmy with thrive.

Why lemmygrad tho?

Why did lemmygrad get blocked?

I think the general idea behind Lemmy and activity pub was not to have all the instances and groups on one server to begin with. It's just that some of the older users of Lemmy/kbin/mastodon, already had the servers up and running instead of people creating own self-hosted instances.

The intention was more for one server to host one instance on a specific topic and then federate with the rest of the community. That server would just be in control of that one instance, like a subreddit on Reddit's main site.

Instead what you had was three or four people who were used to the back end software, creating a bunch of groups or letting be created a bunch of groups on their instance. This is going to centralize the population to certain servers instead of ending up with thousands of small federated servers.

And once the personal belief systems and moderation start seeping into all groups on that server we're going to see problems. The more control one single person has, the higher the likelihood is that they're going to start abusing the power in some way, even if they don't think it's an abuse their selves.

Nice to see admins with a level head

Fuck beehaw!