Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
What could a single user instance possibly do to be defederated on a massive scale? And at that point, why not simply join another instance?
A single admin on a larger instance could get a stick up his ass and defederate a smaller instance, which would then propagate to everyone else copying that ban list. Power tripping admins didn’t die with Reddit.
It would be very easy for some crazy instance admin to start blocking everyone they disagree with. And then it makes it on the list.
that’s exactly where shared blocklist are a problem, if for some reason or another someone’s instance get mistakingly defederated, which is far form unlikely in one the enormous instances that have to manage federation of hundreds of instances, then all of a sudden, that big instance everyone trust get their blocklist copied all over the verse and poor jane is blocked from everything and has no idea why
They could have done nothing, but because someone on a so called trusted source de-federated it because he did not like him, de-federation would accumulate.
Actually beehaw is a nice instance and is blocking lemmy.world, which too is fantastic. Thus sharing beehaw’s de-federation list would cut out lemmy.world from a huge audience. In this particulare case, I wonder what lemmy.world did wrong to be worth de-federating from.
So you see, sharing huge block lists would wrongfully cut out people. Since nobody would investigate the whole list because doing so would take weeks.
Joining another instance is out of the question for many because they are firm belivers of self-hosting and decentralization. Two principles that are pillars of the the fediverse.