Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
There is a need for something like this. Lots of folks here are die-hard free speech defenders, which I completely understand, but some are starting to get into ‘Freeze Peach’ territory side of things. You can’t expect every new Lemmy instance admin to manually research about this nazi instance or that pedo instance everytime, especially with self-hosted hobby projects. If there isn’t anything like this, then admins might as well as start copypasting blocked instances lists from big servers like Lemmy.world or Beehaw.org, which again makes it even less coordinated.
There are plenty of potential for abuse as well. Eventually it has to have some kind of a public wiki where the reason for block can be consulted and have an appeal process with a 3rd party ruling to handle these things.