EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
And you are repeating my own words back to me in a different order as if it will surprise me into keeping my questions to myself.
Pardon me for trying to find out if I just wandered into an environment that is as chill and welcoming as it seems from the outside or another reddit where many genuine questions will get shouted down.
Genuine apologies, as that's not my intent.
We've had what has seemed (to me) an influx of just really bad faith and downright trolling type stuff going down recently and it's perhaps colored my take on things more than I realized, and it probably has for others as well.
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like "yeah, this works for me."
Other things may get added to that block list in the future, yes. I pointed you to the Agora because you may not, as a new user, be aware of it, as the Dude set it up as the place where these kinds of decisions will most likely be made in the future and where community discussions tend to be focused.
However, as a Canadian based instance, they have different laws on what does and doesn't put them at risk, so there are times where those calls may be his and his to make alone (which is why there are two where there was only one on the list of defederated).
Is that so? On this instance or in general? So far, I did not perceive that. On the contrary, I enjoy the discussions around here so far.
It started with a discussion on sh.itjustworks, but due to the open nature of federation, anyone can wander in to the discussion, as you can see with input from users outside our instance.
There was some confusion, some trolling, but I think if as a user you weren't really active in our Main or Agora communities it may not have been something you would have been aware of, if that makes sense.
Honestly in my experience, most (I'd say as close to all as you can get) of sh.itjustworks users are really just here to chill and make an awesome experience.
If you are of the opinion that I am not active Ilin the Agora, clearly you don't follow it that well. I am sorry.
No, that's on me for not closely looking at who I was replying to in thread.
Edit: I should not be multitasking, it's not my thing
That is why I am here too.
I am hoping that some of the more acerbic comments in this thread are just an expression of those frustrations and not the same old social media junk. Hopefully time will show this instance to be as chill as it seemed at first.