The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn’t just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can’t read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don’t want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
This is exactly it.
Defederation, to my mind (and someone feel free to correct me) is about minimizing a given server’s exposure to other servers that, by one definition or another, are problematic. Bots made out of the control of the people maintaining the server, servers with a large concentration of trolls, or other factors that either create risk for an instance owner or a shitty experience for the users as a net group they support.
For anyone crying out “Censorship! Hive minds and safe spaces for soy bois!” - these other instances don’t just disappear. You can still reach them, still read them, still make an account there, still capture RSS feeds, etc. etc. As a user, you have plenty of ways to see and interact with whatever instance you choose, even if one instance is defederated from another.
Both explodingheads* and lemmygrad, in my opinion, are appropriate candidates for defederation with the above in mind. Both far-right and far-left politically focused communities with loose moderation are prone to brigading and, given laws around hate speech in Canada, create legal risks for sh.itjust.works (yes, lemmygrad too, calls for or support of genocide against racial or religious minorities are hate speech no matter what your rationale is). Cutting off direct interaction between these instances is a protection to our admin’s resources and level of liability.
But if you, personally, want to engage with these communities, there’s literally nothing stopping you, you just can’t do it from here. Stop expecting that one specific instance will spoon-feed you everything you want, every time - that’s how we got to where we are with mainstream social media. Where splinters exist, figure out ways around them.
*mentioned though I think we’re still federated with EH? What’s the hold up?