this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025

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[Discussion] If an instance is to be defederated, the SJW admins should publish a post detailing their rationale (self.agora)

submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by Kalcifer to c/agora

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Issue

Currently, it seems to be that the majority of instance defederations happen silently on SJW: As of writing this, SJW currently blocks federation with 86 instances ^[1]^, yet, from what I can tell ^[2]^, there has not been 86 announcements. For clarity, this is not intended to be construed as an accusation, pointed at the SJW admins, that this is some sort of intentional obfuscation; however, for the sake of transparency and understanding, I think it would be a good practice to open these practices up to the rest of the instance.

Proposal

I propose that whenever an instance is to be defederated, an open (ie unlocked) post should be published by the SJW admins (eg it could be published to [email protected]) detailing the name of the instance that is to be defederated, the rationale for why it is to be defederated (including evidence to support the rationale), and what steps would need to be taken by the respective instance's admins in order for that instance to be re-federated.

Benefits

I think it would provide users with an opportunity to better understand the rationale and alignment SJW's admins.
I think it helps keep the administrators (both locally and federated) publicly accountable.
Having an open announcement for defederation could invite discussion on the topic. I think this discussion could offer enlightening insight.
It will create a sort of searchable database for users to reference if they wish to know why a given instance is defederated.
I think it could potentially reduce the administrative burden on the admins in that it serves as a sort of FAQ in place of users repetitively asking the admins why an instance was defederated.
I think that It may provide a more targeted opportunity for the admins of the defederated instance to directly, and publicly, engage with the issue.

Drawbacks

If there ends up being a large volume of defederations, this practice may end up becoming a sizeable burden for the SJW admins. One note on this is that it may be possible for some defederations to be grouped together, but this would have to be done carefully so as to not become obfuscative.

Additional Context

I think a potential counterargument could be: "If a user wishes to know more about why an instance is defederated, then they should just make a post asking about it, or they should dm the admins."; however, I think this may actually increase the workload on the admins if the question is posed frequently enough, furthermore, I fear that this sort of active approach on the part of the inquirer could have a sort of chilling effect: the topic of "instance defederation" is often a contentious one, and some may be hesitant to actively open themselves up to that sort of potential conflict in order to seek the desired information. This proposal would offer sanctuary for the inquisitive lurker.

References

Type: Website. Publisher: sh.itjust.works. Accessed: 2025-03-03T05:15Z. URI: https://sh.itjust.works/instances.
- See the "Blocked Instances" tab.
I simply searched for posts with keywords like "defederate" and "block" in [email protected].

top 12 comments

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[–] CancerMancer 1 points 3 hours ago

If a user wishes to know more about why an instance is defederated, then they should just make a post asking about it, or they should dm the admins.

I think the obvious counterargument is that being transparent-by-default increases trust and cohesion. I for one would be more willing to support an instance that is transparent in this way. Understandably there is an increased burden here and if it's a problem I think a few users would have some suggestions about how to handle it.

[–] taladar 6 points 9 hours ago

I would assume numerically the majority of defederated instances are probably very new instances that immediately start spamming all over the place and instances doing something illegal? I could see your proposal for large, established instances but for this kind of low level moderation noise it really doesn't make sense.

[–] kersploosh 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Transparency is good. But I'm not sure announcing or voting on each defederation is necessary.

In cases where there is concern about another instance's culture or general user behavior then an announcement or even a vote may be appropriate. We have done this in the past for exploding-heads (link) and threads (link).

However, most of the instances on our block list either (a.) allow pedo/loli/CSAM type content, or (b.) are unmoderated/abandoned instances where spammers set up shop. In those cases we just hit the block button and move on with our day. We have sometimes made announcements (link), but not consistently. In the case of a CSAM-friendly instance I would not want to give them free advertising by making a public announcement.

If you are ever curious why a particular instance was defederated, look at our Fediseer profile below. We try to keep the Censures list up to date with our instance block list, and note the rationale for blocking each instance. And if you see something odd in that list please let us know. At least once an instance was unblocked after a user brought it to our attention (link).

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/sh.itjust.works

[–] Kalcifer 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

[…] I'm not sure […] voting on each defederation is necessary. […]

My proposal does not include voting on cases of defederation.

[–] kersploosh 1 points 40 minutes ago

Yes, sorry. My reply wandered off track a bit. In my defense, it was late and I should have been sleeping instead of spending time on Lemmy.

In short, all I meant to say is that I generally agree with your proposal, and we do have a history of announcing and discussing defederations in advance in some cases, but I wouldn't make it a blanket rule.

Of course that's purely my personal opinion. If the rest of the community feels differently (including the other admins) then I'm all ears.

[–] AwesomeLowlander 1 points 8 hours ago

Does the link not contain the information you're looking for, then?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

That's sweet and all, but my first response (if I was an admin) is fuck that noise. It's too much work. It's not the number of instances that would be the issue, it's potentially the hundreds of options that would need sorting through from the users.

I believe the idea is still good and in the interest of transparency but it's just not practical. There are still a good number of "fringe" instances as well as spam instances out there and I just want the admins to nuke that shit from orbit.

Like you pointed out, all a person needs to do is look at logs to see that an instance was defederated and I am not sure engaging the admins in a philosophical debate about why they blocked an instance is going to be productive.

If an admin blocks instances, cool. If they block too many, that limits visibility for instance users and people will leave. If they don't block any, people will leave because of all the shitposting.

I say let the admins keep doing their admin things and grow their instance the way they choose. Time filters out instances with bad admins, so any problems will self-resolve.

My only ask is that admins post clear instance rules and keep the server running.

[–] Kalcifer 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

[…] I am not sure engaging the admins in a philosophical debate about why they blocked an instance is going to be productive. […]

To be clear, I didn't specify that the admins would be required to engage with and resolve every comment that they receive on the posts about the instances that they are defederating from; they simply have that option. The main aspiration of the proposal is that the admins simply provide their rationale for defederating an instance when they do so. I wasn't advocating for some involved process where they must receive agreement and input from the community before a defederation occurs (though, I don't necessarily think that is entirely a bad idea).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

That simplifies things, for sure. While public notification is good in principle, I outlined a reason why it may not be ideal in my other comment.

A solution, probably, would be reasonable notifications about defederation. Assuming that an admin wants to see the instance grow, justification for a block should be posted clearly, but needs a technical limit of some kind. What those limits are, I haven't a clue.

A hypothetical situation: If 80% of users participate in communities on a specific instance that is going to get blocked, that will have significant impact to the local users. Notification and justification would be super awesome in that case, but I don't even know if admins could gather that kind of data in the first place.

[–] Kalcifer 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

[…] it’s potentially the hundreds of options that would need sorting through from the users. […]

I'm not sure that I understand; could you clarify what you mean?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Your "Proposal" section is the reference in this case.

If they stickied a post with just that data you requested, cool. They should probably lock that post too. The biggest problem that it doesn't take much for a troublemaker to cause problems in a thread on a post that could be controversial. It'll turn into an admin hate-post, more often than not. (This can cause weeks of headache for admins or until the drama gets boring.) Having moderated large (10k-20k) subreddits before, I can tell you the drama is real and it follows very primitive patterns. This example is just one pattern of several.

In my opinion only, sometimes it's just easier to silently block things to keep the communities "normal". In the case of Lemmy, we have public logs so it's not fully hidden.

Look, I can hypothesize about things that may or may not be controversial or cause instance drama, all day. My personal bias leans in the direction of not having the admins justify their decisions. It's their instance and their rules. Your suggestions are just fine though! Believe me, I have made my own fair share of suggestions about some instance rules and ensuring they are clear. (I left that instance and moved to another that was more aligned with my personal beliefs.)

[–] Cheradenine 2 points 11 hours ago

When was the last time one was defederated? I remember a bunch early on, and I think I remember an admin post about it being mostly instances that were either CSAM, or spam.

I'm pretty sure a bunch of those are dead anyway. I clicked on 5 random instances from the block list, 1 had an invalid cert, 3 were were not resolved, 1 had a single user and hadn't posted in over a year.

That does not address your concerns going forward though.