Okay, so I want to talk about this because there is something going on here that I'm actually worried about wrt to fedi health.

I think it's overall a good thing that we have defederation. It's a key tool that we have as admins to keep our users save from harassment, spam, and privacy violations.

What worries me is that I'm seeing a trend from several instances announcing they would defederate from instances that don't themselves defederate from the Meta instance. I strongly believe this is an improper use of defederation and has harmful effects on the Fediverse at large.

First, let me tell you the number one thing I hear from friends I talk to about why they haven't joined yet: they're afraid of defederation and "picking the wrong instance". The portability and connectivity properties central to he argument that you can set up anywhere are eroded when defederation is involved. Thats fine when you're removing your users access to slurhub.racism. it's a moderation decision.

But it's basically weidling mass block power on behalf of your users. This is why "we will defed instances that don't defed meta" is problematic: it erodes the federated graph, putting the constraints of a block for all your users, because you came to a different conclusion than another admin did. I think that's nuts.

People make decisions for complicated reasons, and part of having multiple instances is getting to choose where you go and still have access to your friends on other instances. Defed-unless-defed means that any instance who wanted to wait and see, or even is just not as skeptical as us, has had basically all their users and your users shut off from each other. Admin spats should not do this.

So sure, if you want to defed the instances that according to rumors got money or signed NDAs or whatever, go ahead (though even this I feel is too much). But understand that this is a real fracturing of the graph, one that is legitimately scaring people away from the scene.

RE: https://fuzzy.zone/notes/9gtj3sq7ak