Instance blocking should replace defederation
Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don't want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead.
We'd be able to curate our own browsing experience so much better without admin/mod drama influencing the rest of us.
Edit: Alright so maybe not exactly replace defederation, but it should still be an option available to us, and in general should become the default action before defederation IMHO.
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Flip side: imagine being a new Lemmy user, maybe coming from the algorithmically curated experience of Reddit, and having to learn what instance blocking is, how to do it and who to block. It would be quite overwhelming.
I'm all for user freedom but some users don't want freedom. They want something that works without having to spend 15 minutes configuring it.
How about a compromise? Each instance can define a blocklist of other instances they don't want, which is copied to the user's blocklist when they register to the instance. Then you give an option to the user to edit the blocklist.
This way you have the curated experience, but users have freedom to change it for themselves if they want to.
Totally agreed on that, it's actually a feature I'm working on adding to the UI fork I'm going to use for my instance.
It uses the admin-defined Fediseers preferences of an instance and hides content from users according to them.
Very good.
Also I checked fediseer.com, it's an almost perfect website, congrats.
Ahaha thanks but I can't take any merit for the Fediseer, that's @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com's baby. It also has a nice GUI that - despite not being the "best motherfucking website" - is pretty cool to look at.
For some reason I thought your thing was part of Fediseer, but now I see it just uses it.
Good luck with your UI fork, I'll keep an eye out on it to see how it turns out.
Looks nice!
also that's what facebook is for.
I'd rather have that than massive instances with communities for things like fantasy sports and every possible country on earth and not have a way of curating that properly while also being subject to the whims of a few powerhungry admins.
It's why a lot of people praised the fediverse instead of reddit yet we're facing the exact same problems.
It is the virtue of the federation system that defederating does not deplatform or silence people. If you want to read content from a server that a server you use defederated from - it's still there. Just go make an account somewhere more open or directly on whatever instance you feel you're missing.
I don't see how that would be impacted by user-based choice instead of mod-based choice.
Both options should be available, yes. Admins can choose what they want on their sites. We should be able to easily curate what we have on our feeds. I'd find this option handy just to block things I have no interest in such as sports.
Also, I would not say admins who run these sites are "power hungry"... instances are their websites and they can do whatever they want with it. If they don't want fascism or communism or furry porn or whatever on their sites, it's their choice. It's not like reddit where mods don't have a financial investment, or any real liability, and might not have even started the communities they run. It's also not like reddit where a admin can ban or shadowban you from every community, or a mod can ban or shadowban you from a dozen of the most popular communities. You can always just join a different instance.
I think smart-clients are doing this where one feed on a client can even come from multiple accounts on different servers. Isn't that kind of how RSS readers did their browsing, blending multiple sources?
There's been so many tools to move profiles around between servers, is is basically multi-reddit by server-login