I didn’t say “defederate them”; I said that I didn’t know why other instances were defederated when that instance is worse. I intentionally didn’t say defederation is bad or good because that’s irrelevant.
Also, different people have different views on defederation and its relation to the Fediverse. In my experience, curating away from content harmful to your users is important to creating healthy communities.
This guy has been spamming garbage everywhere. sh.itjust.works is a terrible instance with no moderation and this quality of post is pretty normal from users there. I don’t know why they haven’t been defederated en masse when other less spammy/disruptive instances that actually contribute to discussions have been.
I think that would be useful! I also think that anyone putting that much work in should look into hosting their own server, because they’ve already done the hardest part of hosting a server in the fediverse. A big part of the issue is that a lot of ActivityPub apps don’t really have granular enough customization baked in to support that sort of thing just yet; you can get some apps that do that on the user side, but anything on the server/community side is usually just “block all” or nothing. The admin of my Mastodon instance is always complaining that he can’t just hide certain instances from the “all” tab without blocking then entirely, and he just wants to hide them so they don’t overwhelm the server, not block them from showing up for people who choose to interact with them.
Honestly, I’ve seen the Fediblock thing on Mastodon, and it’s…pretty terrible. A whole lot of minority groups get targeted disproportionately by that stuff, especially by misinformation about their instances. The answer is really to leave instances if you disagree with moderation policies and the admins won’t listen, and to join instances that are philosophically aligned with you, because unlike in a centralized/capitalist model, this actually works at cultivating a community that you can engage with in a healthy manner. If not, and you go with something like Fediblock/the one big blocklist site, you’re just gonna end up with most instances that serve 2SLGBTQIA+ people getting blocked or having more harmful misinformation spread about them. Hell, if a lot of Lemmy had its way, anything but being capitalist and pro-USA would be banned.
But also, a lot of clients can subscribe to feeds already. ActivityPub is pretty great at cross compatibility with Mastodon and the like. You just subscribe to someone who uses a microblogging platform based on ActivityPub and it’ll show up in your feed.
You can use nginx or traefik as a reverse proxy locally without opening ports 80 and 443 to the world and host your own local DNS service that points to your server’s IP (and even use a self signed certificate to get HTTPS working).
Honestly, your instance has gotten worse over time in that regard too. Lemmy.ml used to be one of the better instances in that regard but the influx of Reddit users caused quality to crater and weird propaganda-ish pro-America/pro-capitalism stuff (and, not coincidentally, more racist/transphobic stuff) to start flowing from .ml. Probably not anything worthy of any block/defederation because ml still has decent content and a lot of good users but I sometimes am surprised by the stuff that comes out of there.