Defederating was the right call. The_Donald is being hosted on sh.itjust.works.

Jeze3D@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 332 points –
i.imgur.com

The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.

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It's really an issue with how the fediverse handles communities. On Reddit each sub had its own moderation/governance structure which I think fits the role of an "instance" best. Here, each instance has a variety of communities which may overlap with other instance.

I.e. banning an instance for having community X impacts community Z who may also dislike X.

Without ripping up the floorboards, I suspect the answer is instances having community-level granularity in blocking. So one can block: The_Donald@*, *@sh.itjust.works, or most narrowly The_Donald@sh.itjust.works

From a fellow instance administrator; does anyone know if it's possible to block a single community across your whole instance rather than defederating it? E.g., is it possible for me to block "HateSpeechCommunity@*" or "HateSpeechCommunity@domain.ext" as opposed to defederating all of "domain.ext"?

Specifically, we would love to ban "The_Donald@sh.itjust.works" from our instance without having to blanket ban the server, as there are some communities on this server (e.g. gaming@, etc) that we do actually want to interact with.

I'm aware that I can block the community on my own user account, but not sure if I can block just the one community from showing up on my instance altogether.

It is possible. Yes. This was confirmed in the sh.itjust.works thread on the same topic by an instance host. He said that you just have to mark the community as "removed" and then no one in your instance can see it. Except admins, probably.

You'll still have to deal with the users of that community coming onto your server and posting on other communities you can see.

Yea, understood. In this case I was looking for a less heavy-handed option, blocking just the communities in question rather than all the users on the instance. We're a tiny instance so we don't get too much inbound traffic, it's just me and a few other people interacting with the wider Fediverse for now. So something in between defederation and complete tolerance would be great if they add that in the future.

I'm able to block specific communities from my feed as a user over here at Beehaw.

I've not seen it myself (not being an admin), but I think there's a "remove" (not purge) button on the community page. It clears all the posts from that community, and prevents new ones from being received.