Hey icy,

The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.

I'd like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that's all about and report back?

Just make another account on an instance that federates with them. It's really not a big deal. It's not like reddit where you don't have anywhere else to go.

If you want absolute control over what instances you’re federated with, start your own instance. Otherwise, find one that’s more closely aligned to your views.

As others have said, this is one of the main points of federated networks, if you don’t like how an instance is run, you can take your ball and go play somewhere else.

When I first got to Lemmy I was deep in a thread with these guys spouting incredibly hyperbolic whataboutism in support of Russia against Ukraine, death to liberals and worse. It wasn’t any “different viewpoints” being discussed rationally, it was straight up shocking vitriolic nonsense and dangerous stuff. You want it? You can definitely go get it, most instances probably didn’t block them.

About transparency, these instances are home run by hobbyists, not corporates who start out with a week dedicated to policy and procedures establishment.

Truly, you can start your own instance and do it your own way, I and many others have.

Here's the god's honest truth: Instances are not, as a rule, democracies. They are more like benevolent dictatorships. You can make your complaints heard, for sure, but the name of the game is really "Don't like it? Take your business elsewhere or build something better". As it always should be, imo.

There's nothing really stopping you from spinning up your own single user instance and using that to interact with Lemmy and the wider fediverse however you please. If you're the only user you can pretty much run it off a toaster (or at least I'm led to believe this). If you don't want to do that, then you choose to play by the rules of whatever instance you call home.

And this isn't necessarily a dig at you - if you're worried about admins engaging in censorship, I sincerely recommend looking into selfhosting. It's the only real way to ensure you're the one at the helm at all times.

Cause they are a toxic shithole that permanently deny genocide and are brigading other instances.

The stuff they post there is straight up illegal in many places.

I am in no way opposed to Lemmygrad being blocked, it's not really the kind of content that I want to see.

But, I do understand how one of the main attractions of sh.itjust.works is supposed to be that it just works, regardless of what you may want to post about, and that blocking communities isn't very conductive to that. I think the answer here should be democracy, doing a poll on such things isn't a hard thing to do, I think most of us would have been fine with the block.

Hey, have you moderated something before?

Mods are afraid these other instances might influence your views. Just switch to another uncensored instance.

Honestly they post some extremely controversial, potentially illegal stuff on there so it probably isn't a great idea to federate with them. Also that type of content tends to scare away users so it just kind of makes sense.

I, for one, wouldn't have joined this instance if it wasn't blocked.

How would people feel about a feature where instances have a default user block list, or, hide certain communities from the front page unless a user specifically searches them out. Similar to how EG some instances hide NSFW unless you are logged in, it prevents newbies from having their front page show them stuff that's going to get them outraged at the whole site.

That could be a better solution than defederating some instances, like burggit, where users here are just mad about having a few weird porn communities shown to them. Ideally, communities could opt in the this flagging as well if they want to be less discoverable. Booru sites do this with default blacklist tags, for example, and it's been a successful way of having their cake and eating it too with regard to having normies and weirdoes on the same site and avoiding controversy.

Me, personally, I wouldn't mind if ONLY lemmygrad stayed defeated, but there's going to be more issues like this in the future.