Tesseract is great!

Defederation is the nuclear option. Until now we had removed any communities we weren’t comfortable hosting, and treated users on a case-by-case basis based on how they behaved in our communities, which worked for a while but became untenable.

When we started this project the admin team felt that welcoming outsiders into our (wholesome, sane) Star Trek communities was the net-positive action. But as I said it became too much to handle so we unfortunately had to cut the cord.

I think Beehaw.org is. We’re 2/3 as well (now). .ml has some communities/users we’ve removed, but largely speaking .ml users have not caused any issues on our hosted communities, and we feel exposing them to our (generally awesome) communities is the net-positive here. Honestly .world’s (lack of) moderation is more actively an issue for our mods, but since they’re so big and we’re a niche instance we really can’t afford to de-federate from them.

Bookstack is great!

You are correct that it is a requirement for all communities hosted on this instance to be actively moderated within instance principles.

Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.

The problem is nobody wants to grow and maintain a federated “Trek adjacent” community. I’ve even offered the opportunity to host one on this instance and nobody wants to put in the effort.

(Also, I just need to point out that Stamets was not “right” about anything involving our team. He claimed the Risa mods were “transphobic”, and set up a new community where he repeated the claims. When one of our Admins asked Stamets if he intended to continue, he cried harassment and used the attention to promote a GoFundMe.)

The admin team doesn’t make instance decisions based on what’s “popular”. It’s actually against our mission statement. Though that doesn’t mean community input is ignored.

But that being said, admins can see who’s voting and we can see that the downvotes are not coming from users with much/any history in this community. So we are not taking their feedback strongly into account.

True, but if Meta (or anyone) wanted to “directly” get that data, it would be as trivial as setting up an instance on something as small as a Raspberry Pi and subscribing to a community here. We would have no way of knowing who it is or stopping them. Defederation is a tool to prevent brigading, not lurking.

If (if) Meta wanted to set a lemmy-style platform, preemptively defederating from it would be a largely symbolic gesture. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, like I said we’ll cross that bridge if and when it becomes relevant.

The “user data” (comments, posts, votes, etc) that would be available to a hypothetical instance owned my Meta is already public for anyone, so not much we have control over there. “Defederating” essentially just means “blanket banning” a bunch of users at once.

We’re aware of the pact and will cross that bridge when (or if) it ever really happens. We’re certainly no fans of Meta (or Reddit,or Twitter). So far it seems more likely to affect Mastodon than Lemmy/Kbin.