The what?

I’m not that well read on this subject, but you can do this in your house or with a VPS? I always thought there was some conflict with residential internet and selfhosting?

Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but this whole thing is starting to sound like “don’t interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Was it rigged from the start? For a couple of days everyone was civil and in less than a week, “Let’s Get Ready toooo RUMBLE”!

Was there another way?

I will elaborate. Every user can and should make a list of instances they personally don’t like, but admins/mods are also users. They’re just telling you that we don’t like these instances, but it’s your choice on whether you want to block them or not. Maybe they shouldn’t show it to you upon signup, I sort of agree there but a new user showing up and needing to start by cleaning up the place to their liking is a bit of friction for them. Will make a stronger selling point for another server that just defederates by default.

Here is the answer.

Autoblock spam and illegal content Make a “not cool” communities list and allow users to check a button upon signing up to block instantly.

Problem solved.

I’m not sure on this, but I think it’s the latter that you mentioned.

If everyone plays nice, you get to have really big islands. But that’s only if your overlords (the mods) allow it. If they don’t like an instance, see ya! I don’t think this happens often other than blocking spam and illegal activity, but you can clearly see how this will make all the mini islands.

It’s essentially like email. If you have a gmail, you can communicate with anyone on any other email service. If gmail determines that spamsite.xyz, you won’t send or recieve any emails from that domain. Same thing here. You’re using lemmy.world. If lemmy.world defederates with my server sh.itjust.works, you won’t see my messages. We will just never cross paths.

Then you will need to follow users around other places that they interact. You just get more work creep at the end of it all.