It seems that the issue was resolved behind closed doors, so it could have been resolved behind closed doors to begin with, and then if the defederation was to go ahead simply announce the defederation.
Making an announcement “it will be defederated in 48 hours” made for this weird countdown drama thread (we even had programming.dev people show up and be sad about defederation!) that didn’t really go anywhere, and then y’all just locked it when we refederated and made it clear that you were never interested in input and you’ll be running the instance as you please (which is well within your rights of course). So what was the point of the thread?
I can see how it is nice to have warning if a community you’re involved in is going to be defederated, but it also drags drama to our nice little corner of the fediverse, and pins it at the top of our feeds for all to see. In fact it shows up as the top of every feed for me, Local, All, and Subscribed. I can’t get away from it.
Every time these threads show up they end up blowing up. Honestly, if you didn’t make these threads, I wouldn’t care who you defederate. But because the thread exists, I have to come in and I have to have an opinion. That’s a personal issue and I recognize that, but I would hazard a guess that I’m not the only one. People who have never interacted with Blahaj nor the instance getting defederated show up in these threads sometimes. These threads invite drama, and for me personally, whenever they come up they make this space feel significantly less safe and make me want to leave Lemmy as a whole because it feels like it’s just nonstop defederation drama for days at a time, but it’s pinned at the top of my feed.
Maybe these threads actually provide utility, and I should just take these threads as a sign I should take a break from the Internet for a bit. But to me, they just seem like they’re all downsides.
The point to them is to inform users that it’s happening before it happens, so that it doesn’t catch people completely by surprise.
The fact that they can’t be restricted to this instance alone, and federate to every other lemmy instance, means they become a drama point, but unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for that. The moment it becomes an option, I will be using it for threads like that
I’d just like to say that I really appreciate how this was handled.
In order to curate a space like this, it’s important to address issues swiftly and decisively, and I would absolutely consider questionable behavior on the part of an instance admin to be a major issue. It’s not really feasible to start a discussion with every instance, nor should you be required to - especially when it’s not clear that such a discussion would be welcomed in good faith.
The 48 hour notice is an effective courtesy for local users, and in this case resulted in immediate improvements on the other instance, which would probably have lacked motivation without the impending defederation. And with the problem addressed, the defederation was just as swiftly rescinded.
Well done!
There is technically a roundabout way you can do it although it involves a bit of actions
I havent fully tested it so may need some variation of the actions to work but:
cant you just make an instance-only community, call it meta, post that kinda posts there and have instance-users just auto join that instead?
ugh, wakata wakata: THERE NO INSTANCE ONLY COMMUNITIES I GET IT
If it were possible, that is exactly what I would do! But lemmy doesn’t have such a feature at this time.
What about a bot that automatically removes post/comments and bans people from other instances from the community?
I can do that part manually, but if you stop them interacting completely, it just makes it worse. When they can see it but can’t interact, the trolling, the fake signups, the spam etc kicks in.
Ok I can see how that could make a drama thread worse.
Only other workaround I can think of is a setting up a second instance that only federates with blahaj.zone. But that wouldn’t show up on the local feed and there may be federation quirks im not aware of.
i dont use matrix (anymore {until synapse stops hogging all the ram and shitting all over the database [with federation enabled] or dendrite gets an import/run-from-synapse-db-solution}) but matrix certainly has instance-only (or private or something) rooms… not perfect, but maybe better than “federation quirks”
Instance only communities don’t exist, but a separate instance like blahaj.local that only fedderates with Blahaj.zone could work similarly but wouldn’t show up in the local feed.
the issue is there isnt such thing as an instance-only community
if you mimic the actions I did above but on the community level rather than the post level you might be able to do it but new instances pulling the community for federation after you did it wouldnt be affected by that so you would need to seed it in the instances ahead of time or keep doing it
a second way would be reaching out to other admins to remove the community from their instance but that involves talking to a ton of different instances
I don’t really think that’s a great idea, I think local-only posts are a better idea, there are reasons someone from another instance might want to post on the meta instance, such as a problem related to the instance. It’s better to have posts be marked as local only and not federate out but still have the Town Square open and public, so to speak.
I appreciate the heads up, because Lemmy itself gives you zero clue. Stuff just vanishes from your feed.
i do agree that the timing was a bit off… if you were gonna talk to them anyway, could postpone the post until you were certain you would defederate in 48h actually… shrug
I wasn’t “going to talk to them anyway”. They approached me to tell me they were looking in to it, and then when they made a public meta thread with an update, the defederation was rescinded.
guess im just naive
The federation part was appreciated on my end at least. This instance is a big part of lemmy experience, and would have been odd for it to suddenly disappear.
I feel like it would still create drama, I mean it’s not like the only people opposed to it were users outside here, plus it’s not like people couldn’t re-post it elsewhere as news since it’s all public anyway, regardless of federation.
Defederation is an unpleasant topic and it’s bound to cause unpleasantness, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it though, or that we should not give notice or announcements when it happens, it just means that we have to consider and account for the fact that it will come with drama, and to deal with that drama when it arises.
Though I do wish we could make certain posts local-only. I would definitely use that feature when posting, as it’s quite useful when you have things you want to share with and get feedback from the instance but not necessarily the whole fediverse.
Defederation always causes drama because Lemmy is biased towards people who value “free” speech over empathy.
The difference it would make though is where the bulk of the discussion on drama occurs. Right now it occurs in our announcement threads that all of our users see. With local only, it would occur in external gossip threads that many of us would never see