In the spirit of being encouraged to speak my mind here’s a slight effort post:

Defederation does not do what you think it does.

The instance creator and admins are those with the ultimate power within their instance. The active users delegate them that power by interacting with their instance.

Defining “defederation” within the context of Lemmy as I understand it:

“the act of denying the ability for accounts within specific instances to interact with each other”

Anyone at this current time can create an account on most instances. One site on sh.itjust.works is defederated right now, but anyone here may also have an account there, who knows? The value comes from our activity and interaction within each instance.

Defederation is a narrow and a slippery slope because it doesn’t actually solve any problems. There are many instances which are doing things I think should be banned. I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.

We uphold an inclusive enjoyable community here by being active. Individuals with malicious intent are ostracized naturally by an active community. Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.

It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.

  • GhostedIC@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I just want to append that a “rampantly fascist troll farm” would be something like The Stormfront, which hosts literal neo-nazis, or possibly 4chan’s /pol/ forum, where Jewish conspiracies are blamed for all the world’s ills and… only maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the users are saying that ironically. These are real websites with real people, and if you are used to Reddit as your main social media, I would urge you to take a look just once and get an example of what actual hate speech looks like. That is, illegal in the UK, or could be used as evidence to increase the sentence in conjunction with a guilty verdict for violent crime in the US. Trumptard/trans-skeptic is no the same as rampantly fascist.

    I only ask to reserve the use of the word for two reasons. One, the real thing is out there and we shouldn’t forget it. Two, accusing someone of attempting a fascist takeover of the government which would end democracy… is a pretty good excuse to take over the government and end democracy. It’s the same sort of thing as saying someone’s words are “violent” towards you in an attempt to justify (real) violence towards them.