There has recently been a lot of debate on defederation as a tool. In particular, around exploding-heads and lemmygrad. I am somewhat in favour, but I do understand the concerns of fragmentation (I'm not going to entertain the "free speech" people).
I think most people on here - or at least the active commenters, which is a biased sample - don't like the general type of content on those instances and the communities they generate. This means, for instance, most of us probably don't want them appearing in the local and federated feeds.
However, the proposal for users to have to manually block those instances isn't really enough, because it means we all have to do this manually even if most of the instance doesn't want to propagate and elevate the content from these other instances.
What I think would be best is if/when Lemmy improves moderation tools ^.^. In particular, I'd suggest that we should push lemmy or actively develop into lemmy (its open source after all) some way to stop either specific communities or posts from entire instances from appearing in the main feeds, while they are still accessible if specifically linked to or searched for - "silencing". One step above per-user blocking of instances, but still below defederation.
We could also say "members from this instance can comment but not post" or other things to reduce the risk of hostile brigading and organising on this instance while not directly hindering interoperability ^.^
I agree that it could be easier and personally don't think defederation is the answer (outside of bad actors).
Exploding heads was simple enough since it is like... two people or something lol
However, I'm also not very fond of beehaw which, to me, looks like the opposite extreme to exploding heads, and I'm personally not looking for communities like that.
Do I think this means I should push for instances to defederate beehaw? No. I do think admins with very specific political views turning their instance into an echo chamber of those views is worse than Reddit, however, but I'm also not going to sit and rant at/about admins doing what they want with their own instance. If that's what they want their instance to be, great, just not a place for me.
It was simple to get around beehaw, for the time being, by joining a level-headed instance they defederated, although I know I am missing some good links. This is not a permanent solution (I've been told the beehaw defederation is temporary, but am not following along), and am trying to figure out things like still seeing the good links posted to beehaw without the temptation of commenting things that don't fit in the echo chamber and pissing off the admins further to the point they deem whatever instance I'm on a spam instance and defederate it, ruining it for everyone else on my instance. (I'm a leftist, but apparently not far enough left for beehaw admins)
I'm torn between building tools that allow easier echo chamber like feeds en masse or forcing people to individually think for themselves of what kind of content/communities they do/don't want in their personal feeds.
I don't think it's great to start down a generic "this is the content you should have in your feed (dictated by random person X)" type path (not that you are saying that, I've just been thinking about this topic a lot, and that is what I see both beehaw and exploding heads as).
Lemmy devs are already working extremely hard. I personally don't like this terminology.
This is the way. I am learning Rust for this purpose. It takes some time, however, to familiarize with both a language and a large codebase like Lemmy (during personal free time). I'm also semi cheating by learning jerboa code at the same time, but I am a Kotlin dev by trade, so it is a bit easier.