I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist.
Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
Honestly degenerating whole instances (particularly the larger instances like with beehaw and Lemmy world) is pretty harmful to the health of the fediverse imo.
Really hope communities can find a better way forward.
The health of the fediverse depends on smaller instances existing. The fact that larger "untouchable" instances exist at all is harming the fediverse as we speak. Mastodon folk are already familiar with this problem regarding dot social & dot online.
I am not sure how we won't always have large instances when we want large communities.
Communities are directly tied to instances. If you have a large community you naturally will have a large instance.
Communities are not exclusive to people from their own instances. Otherwise single-user instances like the one I'm replying from would be impossible.
But communities are exclusive to their instance. That is what I am try to get at. If we want large communities naturally we are going to get large instances.
Not only that but if an instance has a large community odds are good traffic from the large community will help the other communitys on that instance to grow as well. At least that is how my experience has been. Someone linked to a community on another instance, i looked at that community and also looked at the other communitys on that instance.
At some point does it really matter where the user accounts are hosted when all of the users just go to the same community on the single large instance.
Communities are not exclusive to an instance. I really don't know where you get that false impression.
And it is extremely easy for a community to switch to another instance, something that is much harder for thousands of user accounts on an overly large instance.
I am getting it from the community link.
For example asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Please let me know how i am wrong. And why Because i would love to be wrong. But as far as i know that is a community is directly tied into the lemmy.ml instance. If that server goes away I believe that community also goes away. If it doesn't go away then what would be the new link?
Wouldn't all the users need to move over to the new community as well? Sure if there was time for coordination maybe. But if a community dies on my feed I might not realize for a long time unless i am specifically seeking it out.
Being part of an instance doesn't mean that it is exclusive to it at all if you can participate in it from any other instance. So I guess we just had a different understanding of what "exclusive" means?
As for the other question: You can just follow several similar communities on different instances right now, so if one instance gets de-federated or otherwise inaccessible you can just switch to another and so will most other people. Also, since your instance does cache remote communities, the posts in them do not disappear and are still accessible. Thus if a community decides to move they can post about that in the community and that notice will be retained on your instance for you to see later, even if the server the community was originally on disappears.