free speech also applies to lemmy servers. If the server doesn't agree with most of what's on your server, they can and should have the option to not associate with your server at all.
This honestly sounds like a shit take elon would have made.
I think there's benefit to blocking the particularly Nazi/pedo instances, but otherwise do wish we'd just all be able to federate together and share content for the most part.
lemmy world admins cracking down on posts they don't like with no accountability and arbitrarily changing their ToS after the fact to cover for it, but somehow the entirety of the factionalist weirdos who cling to the idea of a corpo-friendly Reddit clone are laying the blame on... other instances?
I think it depends on what you disagree with. If one is promoting going after our neighbors, hunting them down and killing them? Yeah, defederate. If another is Meta trying to take over the federation. Yeah, I vote defederate. If one thinks Hawaiian pizza is a travesty and the other doesn't, hold your horses.
I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn't defederated from the socialists or "tankies". So I can participate.
This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.
If lemmy can't somehow federate communities separately from instances I don't see lemmy thriving.
In aggregate; 5 instances, less than 5 communities, and more than 69, nice, blocked users.
I don't mess around. I don't hesitate to block people who argue needlessly, make my experience less informational or less entertaining, troll, or disregard arguments made in foundational logic to push a point of view or 'win the argument'. Similarly my instance ignores downvotes and does not display them; as with most platforms which behave similarly to reddit; they simply do not work outside of your personal, local account, local instance, user-sorting context.
Everyone likes dialectics and agree that it's the best method to learn and move the thinking forward... Until they actually met with some antithesis of their thinking.
Have yet to personally block any instances. So far I think the closest I've come is blocking a spider community because fuck those hell spawns and a Minecraft community or two.
Edit:
Found out there's more than I remember being blocked. Multiple mc communities, a cock community (, because that stuff ain't for me and I remember accidentally clicking on one post from there by accident), a pussy community because I don't come here for porn, a Sintendo community, some bikinibottomtwitter or something similarly named community (you can guess why), and for some reason an xbox community (couldn't tell you why).
Also, I noticed for some reason I have someone from a different instance that I cannot remember why I blocked. Some guy from lemmt(dot)tf, so I have absolutely no clue since I have no idea what that instance is like, let alone remember anything about that account.
this is an explicit design feature of federation: free association. this is one of the primary reasons it is in theory better than something centralized. this post is layers of wrong.
I prefer if my instance is federated to everything and I can just block what I don't care to see. Like lemmygrad seems to be some fascist propaganda and hexbear is the same but for people that are underage so I blocked both. Apparently I was permabanned from both without posting or commenting there so it's not like I can interact with people there even if I wanted to.