I have been looking through a long thread on another instance where a few users have been trying to convince that instance to defederate from Exploding Heads - because they do not want to see the content posted on Exploding Heads.
I have thought long and hard about how to please these people. They do have the option to individually block Exploding Heads communities or users, but they either do not know how to or simply do not want to.
In the end I realized if I ban those specific users requesting defederation from Exploding Heads - they will not see any content from Exploding Heads and therefore will not be offended by it. (Truth be told I am not sure if some of these users have really visited our site or interacted with our users).
So today I have banned those users with the explanation that they have said they do not want to see Exploding Heads content. If any of those users wish to be unbanned in the future, all they have to do is say so and I will happily unban them.
These users are not being banned in order to censor them, but to help them achieve what they have been requesting - to not see Exploding Heads content.
I hope you all find this a fair and reasonable action - if not let me know.
Not how it works.
Other instances get information about who posted/commented to your instance from your instance, and that tells them which instances to ask for the content of those posts/comments. If you’re defederated from an instance, they will not get any notice that there is content to fetch from that instance in the first place.
Technically, it might be possible to ask the defederated instance directly if it had any content to show, but as it stands the only instance that gets “asked” directly is the local instance.
As such, if you defederate from EH, the rest of the fediverse won’t see EH users posting shit to your instance. Only EH users will see EH posts/comments to your instance.
Yeah that’s what I’ve realised now by checking a post where I was discussing it with other users, turns out we were all from the same instance.