I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist.
Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
Usually there are two reasons for defederation:
A instance that has no intentions to co-exist peacefully in the federation and the problem starts with the admins. This warrants a permanent defederation.
A instance that is temporarily overwhelmed by trolls or has grown too big to have any efficient moderation and thus poses a thread to the federation. This usually warrants a temporary defederation but can at times require a permanent one if the admins are not cooperating in getting things under control (by which it becomes a case 1.)
Your proposal solves neither and automated ban-lists like that have a much higher risk of silent abuse than a very public defederation that needs to be well justified.
I think that's a simplistic view. We've seen people defederating or asking for defederation for the existence of a single community. Just because instance admins have different ideas of what's tolerable doesn't mean the rest of the communities at large can't collaborate.
The point where admins would have settings to accept/review ban lists was to reduce the risk of abuse
If you are talking about the recent the_Donald case that this is not a matter of different opinions. That community on Reddit has a long history of not willing to co-exists peacefully and if an admin does not draw a clear line that such communities are not welcome on their instance then it is a clear case of the above 1).
I think some people reacted a bit too quickly to that sublemmy appearing though.. Give admins some time to evaluate and resolve the situation before impulsively defederating an entire 6000-user instance.
As far as I know this is exactly what happend. Just because there where some vocal users asking for defederation doesn't mean the admins thought the same.
However, in the case of an ongoing troll attack quick temporary defederation is a useful tool for which the benefits outweight the damage it does.