Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:
- Don’t like their content
- Dont like their political leaning
- Dont like their free speech approach
- General feeling of being offended
- I want a safe space!
- This instance if hurting vulnerable people
I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148
Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!
Not really. When some instance is federated, the home instance is literally hosting and serving the content from that instance: comments and posts. (Only if one or more home instance users subscribe to a community on the other instance) If the users and/or admins think the content is that bad, or the users are that bad, then why host them at all? Defedetate them and keep the content off the server entirely. Why help lies and hateful content spread, even in that minor way?
Well, considering we were defederated from beehaw, and I don’t find our instance particularly negative or hateful in much of the content and users I’ve personally seen - I think it’s hard to paint a whole community with one brush stroke. Not that it’s not possible or even useful to do in some cases, but it’s not something that should be done willy-nilly. And I guess I like the idea of a more individualistic approach. That’s just my thoughts.
But the beauty of it is there are plenty of instances to try out; the fedi-universe is certainly an interesting concept I’m starting to wrap my head around.