I have zero interest in spending that much time wading through crap just so I can have the personal decision to block it.

Flip side: imagine being a new Lemmy user, maybe coming from the algorithmically curated experience of Reddit, and having to learn what instance blocking is, how to do it and who to block. It would be quite overwhelming.

I'm all for user freedom but some users don't want freedom. They want something that works without having to spend 15 minutes configuring it.

I chose my instance partly because of their anti-spam and defederation policy, so I don't have to do it myself. Imo instance blocking would be a nice feature on top, but not as a replacement. You can always switch instances or create your own if you don't like what your current instance is doing. I think we should rather improve that part of the system, so being able to easily move accounts and communities between instances.

Also, your instance hosts the content of federated instances for you (excl. images), and there is some stuff they just can't or don't want to have on their servers. That's just something you have to respect when using a service they provide to you imo.

Then you fundamentally don't agree with the principles behind federation, and the fediverse might not be for you. It's funny that you are mad and "want to curate your own browsing experience", but aren't willing to put in the effort to run a simple script (https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate), pick an instance or a few that match your stance (they're out there and much more common than the niche Beehaw serves), or start your own instance.

Do you know how much effort being federated with spam factories / outrage machines generates for the mods and admins? When you depend on individual blocking, you get to click and forget about every bad actor or community. You don't see the ongoing hours that mods and admins have to pour in to dealing with that actor or community as they keep spitting out garbage.

Also, good thing you're on a very unlocked instance then. If you're mad about your instance doing whatever, then take it up with your admins, not Beehaw. Beehaw is a uniquely curated instance primarily intended to serve as a space where queer people don't have to get bombarded with non-queer people being ignorant. We deal with that enough in real life.

I don't see why those two features should be exclusive; both should exist and have their own purposes.

Defederation is for nasty instances whose users violate basic etiquette such as exploding-heads or hexbear. No tolerance for the intolerant.

Instance blocking should IMO be reserved for potentially disagreeable instances that aren't degenerated shitholes. Places that can behave themselves but are about topics a large portion of users might personally not like or aren't interested in such as feddit.de/nl/uk/it/..., programming.dev, startrek.website or lemmygrad.

Edit: Grammar.

I think one big reason for defederating is that a specific instance is creating a lot of work for the mods/admins because its users keep breaking rules. Instance blocking doesn't really help there.

listen, imagine a world where random people don't roll up on beehaw and tell them how to run their shit. just imagine!

The people hosting the instance are still responsible for the content being on their server, hiding it doesn't make that go away.

Pretty sure kbin has this feature.

The all feed would then be crap. I think you would have to filter or drop it.

Like the more control. You could never get rid of blacklisting or white listing as some stuff simply cannot be allowed on the node. On the other hand it could allow for more options in the gray area.

You may not want to under estimate the magnitude of the moderation issue too or the number of improvements needed or the lack of developers to address them. Lack of moderator actions federating is a good example and is just nuts. Frankly some sort of collaborative moderation would be great too.

This is like, my fourth account on Lemmy. Had to switch instances several times because they were defederating too much and I couldn’t get an unbiased all feed.

There are some instances which are better to block.

The only thing we cannot tolerate is intolerance.

I don't think it should replace it but it should be an option.

When it comes to instances that are unmoderated and full of spam or oriented towards questionable porn, it's a better idea to defederate. Lemmy admins could face legal jeopardy for CSAM, spam bullshit can be a security risk. No reason at all to help host or spread that. As far as trolls/politics, I think it's reasonable for instance admins to decide whether they want to amplify and serve people say, some hateful content about hating minorities or accusing people of being "groomers" or whatever bullshit. If I ran an instance I'd have those people off my site pretty quickly. As far as instances that are just sort of provocative or have questionable political views, sure. Instance blocking (which is in the works, I believe) would take some pressure off the admins to defederate entirely.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that an individual user should be able to override their instance admins' preferences on access for content-related reasons, but I don't think it would be workable from an administrative viewpoint to allow users to allowlist instances that were blocklisted for administrative reasons.

Lemmy.world dealt with (and is probably still dealing with) a series of malicious actions designed to actually bring down the service or otherwise tie up its resources (including moderator/admin attention and effort, and exposure to literal criminal charges), using maliciously crafted requests to bring down servers, literally illegal content posted to their servers, etc. Defederation in response to these types of attacks would be defeated if a user could let the content come through anyway.

I imagine most instances are dealing with similar issues.

So ideally we'd need to be able to create 4 categories of relationships with other instances:

1. Blocked no matter what
2. Blocked by default for users, can be user overridden
3. Allowed by default for users, can be user overridden
4. Allowed no matter what (not sure what the use case for this status would be, but seems to be trivial to implement since it already exists as default).

But I think you'd find that the typical scenario that justifies blocking would actually put the typical block into category 1, not category 2.

I love beehaw. It would be a shame for it to leave the fediverse and I believe it will fall apart if that happens.

Agreed, curious to see when it will be implemented.

On connect it let's you ban instances. It will overwrite comments from that instance with 'this is blocked due to use being from instance x. Gives an option to show the comment anyway (if the context is different Fi)

I love that feature