I for one have stopped posting any content to lemmy.ml communities.
They moved from hexbear? I thought .ml had got worse! I wish my instance would defederate from them, but it seemed so hard for them to do that from HB.
Tbf, many of the users already had accounts on both, but yeah since “no means yes” to them, when HB got defederated from they simply switched to whatever would allow them to continue their harassment campaigns. Lemmygrad.ml users say the same as well.
So if ML ever were to be defederated with, from let’s say LW (Lemmy.World), they would continue forward with LW accounts rather than take the strong “suggestion” that they not.
That’s why I prefer the approach that PieFed is testing out: not outright blocking it but placing an icon next to users that e.g. are brand-new accounts, or a different icon for those who have more downvotes than upvotes.
Hexbear mods tolerate (and sometimes encourage) the worst behaviors of their user base, which is why instances defederate from hexbear.
When those users join other instances one of two things happens:
- the mod team does their job, forcing those users to tone down their behavior or get banned.
- the instances goes to shit and other instances defederate from them.
As long as you stick to a decent instance it’s eventually a self correcting problem. You can also block instances yourself in your account settings on lemmy.
Yup. Fwiw, PieFed.social has actually defederated from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, so the approach I mentioned is more for overall instances like Lemmy.ml.
Although instance blocking does very little - only muting communities from that instance, but the users can still reply to you, generating notifications when they do, and they can vote and thereby influence the visibility of your content (especially impactful when it is first starting out in a larger community and even 1-2 downvotes can prevent it from being seen by many).
PieFed, along with the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect, and the Lemmy instances lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org allow for true blocking of all users from lemmy.ml (the latter two requiring admin support but they have chosen to defederate from all of the big 3, and they are the only instances to have done so, thus earned quite the distinction).
