Its a shame that they did that, especially since the largest neurodivergent community on lemmy was over there, but for anyone who calls this instance or lemmy.world home I saw we make this the new one.
Why did they defederate us, wtf?
is their announcement, xposted to our instance: https://sh.itjust.works/post/107627 the tldr is that they don’t like our open registration policy and claim that there are people here trolling their users, which IMO probably means they are having difficulty moderating their instance and decided it was easier to go the nuclear option.
Edit: it appears their claims were true, there were a few bad apples using this as their home instance and harrasing users over there. Kinda sucks b7t what can you do. I think they made a valid decision in defederating, but it is going to be anoyying having to deal with the early stages of instances figuring out which other instances to defederate with and the instance that is right for me, and then resubscribing to all the things I want in my feed again. Hopefully this process will get streamlined and better with more developers working on lemmy/kbin.
IMO moderation necessarily has to exist two places in a federated environement. Yes, the community (hosting instance) always has to do moderation, but so does the federating instance. If the federating instance does not have policies in place to handle bad actors who go to other servers and break their rules and it is a large enough problem this action could make sense even well into the future. Unfortunately Lemmy is in a quite early state so I don’t think the tooling to do such work well even really exists. Something like only allowing confirmed posters from federated instancea or requiring someone to be subscribed for an amount of time before posting could do wonders. Yes, this is the nuclear option, but their choices at the moment are a butter knife or a nuke.
I sincerely hope this gets better as Lemmy matures.
Mastodon had similar conflicts between free speech absolutist servers and servers who wanted a hate/bigotry/pedo/whatever free experience.