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?
Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.
I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.
lemm.ee has not blocked any instances for anything other than bot activity as far as i know, if youre interested
Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world
I hadn't really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.
Lemm.ee is only banning instances that have abnormal growth (i.e. They didn't enable captcha, have maybe 7 active users, and suddenly go from 30 total registrations to 52000 in a couple of days). Other than that there is nothing banned for ideological reasons unlike sh.itjust.works and other instances.
I would argue that even lemmygrad isn't an ideological ban, it's an anti-brigading/trolling ban. There are plenty of marxist-leninist folk on lemmy.ml that share the same philosophy, but don't go full "ATTACK THE HEATHEN" like lemmygrad does.
I'd say it's an ideological ban. If you read the original TheDude's message, it was an ideological ban. Also, they have very few subscribers. It can be easy to ban them. Do I want to see their content in my feed? No. Do I care if they comment under my funny posts with a "lol thank god"? I don't mind either. I don't join the people with their ideology. I moderate a few communities and it would be very easy to ban people who abused, but so far it hasn't happened in any of the servers I am in that are federated with lemmygrad. Maybe it'll happen in the future. I don't consider myself incapable of dealing with these people if they try and raid something. They are also very prolific at creating accounts in other servers. For example, see the amount of downvotes in this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37624
It could very well be the case that I've had 3 bad experiences and my perspective is biased based on that. I will try and be cautiously open-minded if the situation on this instance ever changes.
maybe that's why there's free places & restricted places, just a diffence in tolerance levels & desires
i don't personally mind being trolled sometimes or people using bad faith arguments against me, and i don't really mind seeing people be emotional in a no-consequences place.
i've been on 4chan where ppl just insult each other all the time, i don't think anyone's too butthurt knowing that it's so common, but... accidents happen i guess
yeah i wouldn't recommend that someone sensitive goes there, and would actively discourage such ppl from going there, but if you're like me and you don't give a shit about anything and you'd just rather see a circus with people throwing shit at each other while laughing, then banning the circus goes against the purpose lol
i don't personally mind too much the commie ban, i have had enough tankie bullshit at home with the dictatorship supporters, but with time i've come to accept them as people and value their input in many things that are not related to politics, but yeah i have no issue with them being gone, couldn't care less, i can open lemmygrad.ml whenever i wanna see some idiots being idiots, which is about once a week cuz i just like being entertained
I guess I'm half like you in this case? It doesn't hurt me or anything, I've heard worse, but it's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in deep discussions of shit, not hurling insults.
I like both sometimes but honestly I'm too tired of having too deep discussions. Writing long texts, reading long texts, ahhh, i'm too busy for that, i don't come here to be tired but to have a good time after hours of coding. (note: i do read long texts often, i just don't try and find long texts, especially debatey texts, oof)
I hope you find an instance that fits your needs. I honestly do.
What this place is hasn't really been decided yet. The first few days were IT guys and generally techy people that liked the server setup. Then we had a big influx of users and the predictable chaos that follows. Then general ideas and frameworks started being put down by our admin and mods to try and steer that chaos.
You've walked in the door right as we're trying to figure out what we want this place to be and how we want to run it.
Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment.
You would save yourself time by making your own instance, and run it how you like. We did that, and thousands of other people have, too. It’s not hard.
I am not too worried about the technical difficulties of hosting an instance, but I really don't want to deal with the social ones. I would rather sit back and appreciate @TheDave for the trouble he and the other admins go through.
There isn’t much to worry about. We made our instance at the same time as sh.itjust.works but didn’t get popular, and also had all the restrictions for account creation in place. So we barely have any users, run our own show and fly under all the radar.