Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.
Part of the problem is the instance’s open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.
We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.
Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world
Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we’re setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!
I’d say that’s fair. I understand that what I want is unlikely to come about, it’s a somewhat extreme view, and due to Lemmy’s current configuration, admins are on the hook legally for everything posted on their server. Something needs to change for defederation to change, and it’s very likely that defederation won’t change. I’ve only ever been expressing a concern of mine. Lemmy doesn’t cater to my will- I’m not even a programmer, I couldn’t do any of this stuff even if I had the power to do so. I just hope that it does change.
Defederation is never going to go away because there are whole instances out there dedicated to hosting illegal material and because, lets not forget, Admin’s want the Lemmyverse to succeed and a way for it to not succeed is to federate with instances that do this and also have userbases made up of racists, homophobes, transphobes etc. Literally no one wants to be constantly firefighting their own individual user block lists to keep blocking hundreds of awful people. What they want is to spend time on their communities. That’s why instances have codes of conduct stating what they won’t allow. It allows quick, painless instant separation from arseholes without putting the onus on all their users to individually block users from whole instances.
But, as Admin and Mod level tools (and to a lesser extent user tools) get developed, defederation will happen less and less.