The Issue
Currently, it seems to be that the majority of instance defederations happen silently on SJW: As of writing this, SJW currently blocks federation with 86 instances ^[1]^, yet, from what I can tell ^[2]^, there has not been 86 announcements. For clarity, this is not intended to be construed as an accusation, pointed at the SJW admins, that this is some sort of intentional obfuscation; however, for the sake of transparency and understanding, I think it would be a good practice to open these practices up to the rest of the instance.
Proposal
I propose that whenever an instance is to be defederated, an open (ie unlocked) post should be published by the SJW admins (eg it could be published to [email protected]) detailing the name of the instance that is to be defederated, the rationale for why it is to be defederated (including evidence to support the rationale), and what steps would need to be taken by the respective instance's admins in order for that instance to be re-federated.
Benefits
- I think it would provide users with an opportunity to better understand the rationale and alignment SJW's admins.
- I think it helps keep the administrators (both locally and federated) publicly accountable.
- Having an open announcement for defederation could invite discussion on the topic. I think this discussion could offer enlightening insight.
- It will create a sort of searchable database for users to reference if they wish to know why a given instance is defederated.
- I think it could potentially reduce the administrative burden on the admins in that it serves as a sort of FAQ in place of users repetitively asking the admins why an instance was defederated.
- I think that It may provide a more targeted opportunity for the admins of the defederated instance to directly, and publicly, engage with the issue.
Drawbacks
- If there ends up being a large volume of defederations, this practice may end up becoming a sizeable burden for the SJW admins. One note on this is that it may be possible for some defederations to be grouped together, but this would have to be done carefully so as to not become obfuscative.
Additional Context
I think a potential counterargument could be: "If a user wishes to know more about why an instance is defederated, then they should just make a post asking about it, or they should dm the admins."; however, I think this may actually increase the workload on the admins if the question is posed frequently enough, furthermore, I fear that this sort of active approach on the part of the inquirer could have a sort of chilling effect: the topic of "instance defederation" is often a contentious one, and some may be hesitant to actively open themselves up to that sort of potential conflict in order to seek the desired information. This proposal would offer sanctuary for the inquisitive lurker.
References
- Type: Website. Publisher: sh.itjust.works. Accessed: 2025-03-03T05:15Z. URI: https://sh.itjust.works/instances.
- See the "Blocked Instances" tab.
- I simply searched for posts with keywords like "defederate" and "block" in [email protected].
To be clear, I didn't specify that the admins would be required to engage with and resolve every comment that they receive on the posts about the instances that they are defederating from; they simply have that option. The main aspiration of the proposal is that the admins simply provide their rationale for defederating an instance when they do so. I wasn't advocating for some involved process where they must receive agreement and input from the community before a defederation occurs (though, I don't necessarily think that is entirely a bad idea).
That simplifies things, for sure. While public notification is good in principle, I outlined a reason why it may not be ideal in my other comment.
A solution, probably, would be reasonable notifications about defederation. Assuming that an admin wants to see the instance grow, justification for a block should be posted clearly, but needs a technical limit of some kind. What those limits are, I haven't a clue.
A hypothetical situation: If 80% of users participate in communities on a specific instance that is going to get blocked, that will have significant impact to the local users. Notification and justification would be super awesome in that case, but I don't even know if admins could gather that kind of data in the first place.