- No server operator needs to federate with you.
- No server operator needs to tolerate things they don’t want on their instance.
- No user of an instance needs to personally curate their own extensive never ending blocklist of users and channels they don’t want to see.
Quit your pseudo-intellectual whining and choose what instance(s) work for you. If you think regularly interacting with shit content somehow helps you stay out of an echo chamber then go ahead and make a second account on those garbage instances full of hateful people. Then you can read both the decent servers and the trash ones and be the fedora wearing ackshually right fair and balanced uber nerd you always wanted to be.
I feel like these are just growing pains. I mean I’m sure people will argue about to defederate or not for as long as the fediverse exists, but I imagine it’ll become background noise as people get accustomed to what the fediverse is and isn’t.
The fact that this level of choice exists, both for operaters and for users is a big part what makes these places stand apart from reddit and it’s ilk.
I’m not sure it’s entirely just growing pains. Some of the people arguing for defederation seem to be arguing in bad faith. On the other hand, it seems like they are uniting the community against defederation, which is ultimately a good thing.
A lot of the people arguing to never defederate are the types who smell of “but who is going to read my extremist views if you all defederate my instance, I already got banned everywhere else”.
Some of us are old enough to remember IRC networks splitting up and the Fediverse de-federation drama feels exactly the same. It is an aspect of human nature that cannot be solved with technical solutions.
It is completely normal for groups of humans to split up and segregate themselves from each other with some individuals belonging to multiple groups simultaneously. It’s how we evolved and it’s how the Fediverse (and whatever comes after) will evolve going forward.
Every instance is like a political party without exclusivity. You can belong to multiple at once. Rather than working on identity migration my opinion is that they should instead come up with a way for people to login to each other’s instances with different accounts. Just like I can login to Disqus or StackExchange with my Google account I should be able to login to Beehaw.org with my programming.dev account and vice versa.
This would be very convenient from an end-user’s perspective since they could access posts and comments on the instance where they live and links to communities could be handled in an absolute, universal format and it wouldn’t even matter (from the end user’s perspective). Because if they loaded /c/whatever on some Lemmy instance or /m/whatever on a Kbin instance they’d still be posting using their Beehaw.org account (or wherever they have an account). Links to external communities could just load those external communities and it wouldn’t need so much data to be federated between all instances (e.g. comments and votes).
In regards to moderation: Even if Beehaw.org banned my account from posts/comments that doesn’t really have any bearing on whether or not it should accept my account from a login perspective (it’s better than having banned users browsing anonymously–because then the instance owners will know they’re there). It would also allow moderators at Beehaw.org (or any other instance) to ban specific users from other instances much more easily because those users would likely stay at that other instance rather than have multiple accounts anywhere and everywhere that would also need to be banned.