I’ll put my opinions aside. Out of curiosity, what makes you think blocking is such an “absolute last resort” that it seems like too drastic an action? I don’t really understand what value exploding-heads brings to us, and if it’s truly, somehow, the wrong move (personally doubtful), we can always re-federate. I think prioritizing the comfort and safety of users who actually use mander.xyz is more important, since they’re the ones contributing content to the instance.

There are some practical reasons and some ideological considerations.

First, I want to point out that this is not about exploding-heads. I genuinely do not think that exploding-heads is a significant threat due to its scale. It has about 30 active users. I have had to deal with an orders-of-magnitude larger amount of disturbing material from users being created in the larger instances. If we are objective and serious about addressing the threat of disturbing content brigades, we should defederate with lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, lemmugrad.ml, and lemmy.world - because, due to their scale, they are overwhelmingly the worst offenders.

A practical reason for opting for a non-defederation strategy is that the userbase will disagree with what they want to federate or defederate with. I think that exploding-heads is an easy one to point at, because they produce offensive content, they use foul language, and spew racist/homophobic views. We can all agree that their views are harmful, so we defederate. Then, next week, users come in asking to defederate from lemmygrad.ml because the have a Death to NATO community, or from lemmy.ml because of one of the admin/developer's essays about the Uyghur genocide. Once I enact a blocking policy, this gives users the platform to fight for what gets and what doesn't get federated, and I am in the position of having to defend and justify every federating action. I do not want to be the person in charge of filtering what people can and can't see, and I also don't want some of the users to make these choices for other users. It is impossible to make everyone happy. Personally, I am curious to see any content that is out there. Yes, even if I strongly disagree with it, or if it is offensive. And so, why would I be the one to limit the network for myself and others? I prefer to provide a space where the admin does not choose limit what anyone can and can't access outside of the instance.

The ideological reason is that I genuinely believe that most people are good people. Yes, even communists, and the people creating offensive edgy-memes at exploding-heads, and probably many violent criminals as well. I think that most of these are good people, and that they genuinely would like the world to be a better place. More often than not I disagree with their beliefs, and their methods. And tolerance has some hard limits, but they have to be crossed. I don't believe in assuming the worst of people as a defensive action. I think that the hate that we see in online communities is in large part the result of polarization more than it is a function of our disagreements. Today's world is too polarized, and this polarization is the root of a large amount of society's problems. Some of this polarization is natural, but the media and politicians benefit from it, and they have agreed to amplify this polarization - either on purpose or through the structures that naturally arise. The action of defederating is a polarizing action, one in which we outright reject a group of people, and and contributes towards this polarization. That is why I do not think that this an action to be taken lightly. A network that I want to help build should serve as a tool to reduce, not to amplify, polarization.