Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS) to keep your block list up to date

And I guarantee at some point people are going to start thinking “Hey, if this instance isn’t subscribing to the shared blocklist, that must mean they want those other instances around, and therefore they deserve to be added to the list”

Already is happening on the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse. Instances getting de-federated because they dared allowed their users to see posts from "bad" instances

Lemmy is built as a single instance with federation capabilities as an after thought. The biggest clue to this and the reason why it will always re-centralize is that communities are server bound. There is no fediverse wide community and they is by design. Read this closed issue

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033

And those who want to review every single one manually can still do that.

But will they? This tool promotes blindly trusting another instance block list without due diligence from the admin.

Also a sysadmin.

Shared email Blocklists are the norm, not the exception

Shared blocklists in IT are managed by industry professionals for the purpose of safety from malicious activity and there are vetted processes for being removed from days lists. False positives happen, but you aren't hung out to dry if you get hit, you just go through the process and clear your name.

Most of this "Fediblock" nonsense is several orders of magnitude less reliable, and filled with toxic people pursing personal grudges. There's no process to clear your name, and I've personally watched multiple admins and their entire communities be publicly mocked and told they "don't owe you anything" for merely asking why they were blocked, let alone how to remedy the situation.

These are not remotely equivalent and anybody who trusts them is a fool. The Fediverse has a serious problem with vile, bitter people who would not be out of place running an HOA. If we are going to emulate the blocklists common in IT, we need professionals in charge of it, not nosy busybodies.

Read my other reply, I'm not talking about email blocklists, my reference is to email providers doing that, which is extremely rare and done with explicit intent and good reason.

Secondly, while I won't disagree there's some vile content out there on the Fediverse, do you trust someone else to make that decision for you? Why would you let someone else decide what is and isn't vile for you and those using your instance? Better yet, how would you feel if some popular instance decides you were the vile one, and because it was a common instance to use for blocking references, your instance is now cut off from a good chunk of the Fediverse?

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that swept Twitter with shared Blocklists, and the potential for negative impact on the Fediverse is even worse from it. Don't let others decide make decisions for you just because it's easy, as it doesn't absolve you of responsibility when something goes wrong.

Wrong comparison. It's not like a server admin using an email block lists (which are also often implemented badly, as anyone with a protonmail account knows...). It's more like if Protonmail suddenly blocked Tutanota, or if Gmail blocked MS Exchange. The uproar and rage from that would be unceasing.

The Fediverse operates on a model like that of email, and in the email world blocking whole email servers from each other is very rare, and usually done with the most explicit of intent and for a very good reason. That's how the Fediverse should operate as well.

And does this only delete visual media by default? If not, this is worse than anything reddit has done ever. I frequently save posts and links to myself in the form of links, for later processing. This would mean that by the time I get to it (can easily be years, honestly), it will have disappeared forever.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !fediseer@lemmy.dbzer0.com

I haven't heard of users or instances getting banned/blocked for supporting the wrong political party either unless racism, brigading, CP, and death threats are core tenets of said party, which leads me to believe you may be referring to the Republican party in the US?

You forgot people who selfhost single user instances. So they would have to destroy the old instance and create and new one with a new domain, which is a lot of work and resources.

Edit: Please also notice the problem here is not defederation itself, but shared lists of defederation. Because most likely the list is super long and nobody would check if all instances are legitimately blocked.

The problem is that Reddit has a massive user-base and profits from the FOMO on newcomers while Lemmy is a very small thing most people don't know about and there are multiple cases of instances defederating others just because they feel like it... like the BS that beehaw.org pulled. Now we've lemmy.world and beehaw.org two of the largest instances that don't talk to each other.

this process and improves Lemmy’s capability to protect it’s users from spam and brigading

That assumes defederation only happens in those cases. You have an account from lemmy.world, so I guess you trust that instance. You know, the same instance that preemptively defederated from hexbear.net for political reasons. You see the problem?

Disagree, this tool is meant for use by small instance servers, not large ones. Large ones have to manually handle their list since they are on the hook more for maintaining some kind of policy and announcement structure.) The only way it hurts them as a little guy is if they break the policies of a major instance enough to get blocked by the instance admins, which would take some work for a small instance. (The same or greater amount of effort that would get you banned if you lived on the major instance so no benefit to making it your home there.) And then they only get blocked by that instance and the other small instances using this tool who chose to sync from that major instance. They remain fine on other large instances and small instance that sync from those other large instances instead.

If a large instance does start squashing little people excessively then hopefully that hits the feed and people can pick a different instance to sync from.