I was there, I saw the thread. @TheDude, did you? It was pretty strongly in favour. Do we really need to keep waiting around to see if an instance administrated by a guy who wants to declare “cis” a slur is going to turn out okay?
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 for context.
Ok, sorry, I’m a little buzzed and feisty currently. After thinking about this in context of the best options for users and the health of the community as a whole:
As a user, I’d like to be able to block instances if I see a need. I don’t think this is possibly yet, but I can block communities and individual users, which is useful.
At the admin/instance level, defederating would be a temp or permanant nuke, for defederating from instances that cause bigger issues like allowing bots to manipulate votes, spreading hate, or exposing their intended audience to content they don’t want to allow (child friendly instance such as BeeHaw blocks porn, fair play) per the admin’s discretion
Last but not least, Mods are only responsible for posts on their own communities and pruning comments or blocking users who violate their rules or the instances rules. (They should be able to report to admins/the instance when a user was blocked for violating instance rules so the admin can consider banning across the instance if necessary).
I have thought of developing an anti-instance block, but since I would definitely not use it I haven’t gone forward with it. But it seems quite an easy task, to be honest. A script would just go over any post or comment, check the community’s instance, check the poster/commenter’s instance, and if any of the two match, it can simply do node.deleteNode() and that’s it, ez pz. It’d probably take me less than an hour to do this.