this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I don't really understand the whole "choose who you federate with", federation is a server-to-server thing as far as I am aware, and banning whole servers results in some of your users becoming unable to reach all of theirs, incurring a penalty on both sides. I don't think blocking users based on whoever hosts their account ever makes sense in the general case (it's a weak argument to prove someone "guilty by association"), and is incredibly unfair (the statement being made is that all users on that instance, without exception, should suffer the consequences of the actions of a few).
Unfortunately there isn't a finer grained tool. You can ban users, but if the instance they're from has open sign ups the banned user can just create a new account and return to harassing people on the server. This is the reason that Beehaw defederated with the two earlier this week. They tried everything they could before then, but the tools just aren't there yet to not punish the whole instance if the instance's admin isn't willing to meet part way.
Yup, that's dramatic. The fediverse still has a long way to go.
Think about it this way. In real life, you choose who you associate with for many reasons. Do the same in the Fediverse. If your instance gets blocked look at your fellow users as to why, and to the admin policies of your instance administrators. The biggest issue is when Federation ends because that is disruptive. Keep in mind instances mostly never federate with all other nodes. They cannot. Some are illegal, others just full of bad actors and trolls.
I agree that it should be a last resort and it usually is. But when it happens look to your instance not the one de-federating.
Which is good, so the incentive is to federate more than not.
To give an example of a technology that works the same way but is mature, there's email. You can send an email between hotmail and gmail seamlessly, but to set up an account on one of those two you need to provide something traceable to meatspace. That's because a server with open signups would instantly be flooded with spam accounts, and would get on the giant blacklists of domains that have existed for a long time.
A reminder that users can just join another instance, so if they're legitimate users and can prove it it's more of an inconvenience than anything.