Didn't want to further derail the exploding heads vote thread, so:
What are the criteria that should be applied when determining whether to defederate from an instance? And should there be a specific process to be followed, and what level of communication if any with the instance admins?
For context it may be useful to look at the history of the Fediblock tag in Mastodon, to see what sorts of stuff folks are dealing with historically in terms of both obvious and unremarkable bad actors (e.g., spam) and conflict over acceptability of types of speech and moderation standards.
(Not saying that folks need to embrace similar standards or practices, but it's useful to know what's been going on all this time, especially for folks who are new to the fediverse.)
For example:
- Presence of posts that violate this instance's "no bigotry" rule (Does it matter how prolific this type of content is on the target instance?)
- Instance rules that conflict with this instance's rules directly - if this instance blocks hate speech and the other instance explicitly allows it, for example.
- Admin non-response or unsatisfactory response to reported posts which violate community rules
- Not sure if there's a way in lemmy to track incoming/outgoing reports, but it would be useful for the community to have some idea here. NOT saying to expose the content of all reports, just an idea of volume.
- High volume of bad faith reports from the target instance on users here (e.g., if someone talks about racism here and a hostile instance reports it for "white genocide" or some other bs). This may seem obscure, but it's a real issue on Mastodon.
- Edited to add: Hosting communities whose stated purpose is to share content bigoted content
- Coordinating trolling, harassment, etc.
For reference, local rules:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
No Ads / Spamming.
No pornography.
I definitely think de federation should be on the table if an instance has a significant portion of their users breaking our site rules, or trolling/spamming our communities. We don't want to have our communities overrun with people who want to promote a negative atmosphere because the admins of another instance are unwilling/unable to moderate their users effectively, as it will just put undue burden on our admins and community moderators.
I'd say before de federating we should definitely try to engage with the offending instance's admins to see if they're acting in good faith, and if they have a plan for mitigating the issues.
Personally I don't think we should federate with instances that make themselves safe-havens for people who post bigoted/conspiratorial content and dog-whistling, as having that kind of content on our /all feed will drive away users from groups the content is targeting, making the community worse overall.
The way I look at it is that there are some things that are absolutely unacceptable. Violence, CSAM, Doxing, harassment campaigns, illegal activities, etc. These are a red line for de-federation.
Then we have our instance rules. They circumscribes the behavior that we allow and don't allow in communities on this instance. Let's say this is the green line.
There is a huge amount of grey area between the red line and the green line. I think that this grey area is best handled by individual users' ability to block and avoid communities and users that they don't care to see.
Federating with an instance isn't an approval of their users or communities, it is simply a line of communication. Cutting that line should be avoided if at all possible. Otherwise we don't have a social media network, we have a few islands of instances and we're back to being no better off than the current social media where you need to create 50 different accounts to access each island of content.
You're absolutely right. If an instance's users are coordinating to harass or brigade our communities, then the admin staff should work with the other instance owner to resolve the problem. De-federation would be a last resort if it isn't possible to reach a resolution. That scenario fits into the 'harassment campaigns' category.
Before de-federation we should talk to the admin/mods and also ban the accounts causing the problem.
I don't think de-federation should be used to clean up the "all" feed, that is not at all appropriate or useful.