EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn’t follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn’t take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don’t fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn’t seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml “Introduce yourself” thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying “Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are” (paraphrasing, don’t remember the exact words).
When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and “fighting” people isn’t something I want to see here.
That sounds like a good reason to block that idiot or maybe even that community from my own thread, but I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
On the other hand, blocking burggit so I don’t have simulated CP showing up in my feed is not the kind of choice that I need clarification about.
it seems like you have a fundamental issue with instances like sh.itjust.works and would be better off joining a different one, or even better making your own then
Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.
I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.
lemm.ee has not blocked any instances for anything other than bot activity as far as i know, if youre interested
Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world
I hadn’t really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.
Lemm.ee is only banning instances that have abnormal growth (i.e. They didn’t enable captcha, have maybe 7 active users, and suddenly go from 30 total registrations to 52000 in a couple of days). Other than that there is nothing banned for ideological reasons unlike sh.itjust.works and other instances.
I would argue that even lemmygrad isn’t an ideological ban, it’s an anti-brigading/trolling ban. There are plenty of marxist-leninist folk on lemmy.ml that share the same philosophy, but don’t go full “ATTACK THE HEATHEN” like lemmygrad does.
I should clarify that this wasn’t just 1 user that was isolated. This was an upvoted comment, with many other users congratulating him on his commitment to “trolling the libtards”.