I recently noticed this lemmy instance in my all feed. They have an odd premise in their instance sidebar:
We are a down to earth instance who doesn’t get our feelings hurt or offended easily.
And then, on their front page today, there are some links to breitbart and some to russia today. When calling them out on that, I got this comment from their instance:
about as believable as calling trump nazi, you really sound fascistic imo
Is this some kind of right-wing instance? Should we defederate from it?
Lemmy.world did defederate from exploding-heads, but never defederated from hilariouschaos as far as I know. When hilariouschaos appeared the admin team discussed it and decided to take a wait-and-see approach. First, some of the more problematic exploding-heads users seemed to be gone. Second, by that time Lemmy had more blocking options for users to curate their own feeds, so instance-level defederation seemed less urgent.
We will discuss it again. Personally, it’s been a while since I have peeked over the fence to see what they’re up to over there.
It probably is a good idea to consider it. Something that should be kept in mind is that Instance blocking isn’t an alternative to defederation because of how it works it doesn’t do anything for the most problematic aspects of an instance, its userbase (instance blocks only target communities). Also since blocking is one-way only, it’s really only useful for non-objective or opinionated problems like disagreements, or personal opinions, it’s basically useless in cases of harassment or discrimination since they’ll just back-bite you without your knowledge, possibly even spread lies about you (was a real problem back on Reddit until they revised it to be two-way).
I just checked my filter and I don’t have them blocked. So I guess something glitched out when I went there using the browser? Possibly on my end.