What is Defederation?
Defederation means we have disconnected our instance from another, and users from our instance will no longer be able to see anything (communities, posts or comments) coming from it, and their users won't be able to see anything coming from ours.
What will get an Instance Defederated?
Our goal is to avoid defederation, but we will do so under the following circumstances:
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The instance spreads overwhelming amounts of drama, hate or negativity.
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The instance is mostly made up bots, and or promotes spam.
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The instance allows the harassment or doxxing of others.
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The instance knowingly hosts CSAM or other illegal content.
Has FMHY Defederated Instances?
Only two, both for breaking the 1st rule above:
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exploding-heads
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lemmygrad
Things to Note:
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There are circumstances where we may block a specific community within an instance, rather than blocking the entire instance itself, but this is very uncommon.
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Remember that if there's a community you don't like, you can block it entirely in settings.
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Keep in mind that our goal is to keep this community safe, so if you see something that breaks our rules please don't hesitate to report it.
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If its something urgent, you can always contact us easily via Divolt ๐ฌ. Its connected to our discord, so there are mods online 24/7.
So what does deferedating from them do for us? I wasn't seeing their content anyway because it wasn't popular enough to end up on all.
Does it have any practical effects for fmhy users?
I personally joined this instance because so many other large ones have massive federation lists. So if the only effect of defederating is to send a message, then I'm not sure I'm for that.
Yeah they haven't become a huge issue for us yet, but they have for other instances, and most of our reports of "racism" have come from things posted to exploding. Deferedating isn't to send any sort of message, its just to prevent having issues with them in the future.
I think it's valid to make these kinds of decisions, in the future if there are more popular instances that end up being defeated but don't create any obvious issues then maybe it would be best to have a community discussion or at least take into account various opinions. That's not to say a loud minority should be catered to, and ultimately if that instance is incredibly valuable to that subset of users perhaps they can migrate to said instance or move to another that has not chosen to defederate.
Just my .02c