Did the admins poll the community about it? Why was such measure so needed? If the tankie content is so annoying why not let users decide what they want to see or not and what they want to block?
I don't like that the admins want to censor the content I can view or not. You guys are not protecting us nor doing us a favor, you're imposing your views over everyone else by limiting the information we are able to receive.
I don't support the devs views or the views in lemmygrad, but this is a dangerous precedent.
I've read several of the "arguments" for blocking the instance and all I can see is a bunch of people talking about politics and arguing about "floods in the frontpage". Well, let the user block communities if that's the case, same way I'm already blocking communities I'm not interested.
I think the admins want to feel like Facebook moderation. I'd be OK with it if any instance repeatedly generated spam, security, doxxing or any other concern that couldn't be solved by banning individuals, otherwise it's just plain censorship.
I just don't want the admins to use their power to decide what I can see or not. If this is going to be like this, I'll leave for a better instance because I can see where this is going to.
Defederation is an inevitable fact of life for a federated ecosystem and it won't always be for things where everyone agrees (just look at the fediblock tag on mastodon). The important thing is that instance owners have clear criteria for how they defederate from other instances and transparency about their reasons for having done so, so that their users and other instances have the correct expectations for their future behavior.
It's early days for a lot of instances and probably many of us will end up migrating to other instances as it becomes clear which ones make decisions that suit our values.
What I do worry about is the fact that folks are setting up communities wherever they first land and Lemmy doesn't yet have tools for migrating a community between instances (correct me if I'm wrong about that). That seems like a ticking time bomb in some ways.
That's why I made this post. Want to see transparency on why they blocked an instance. Honestly if the guys running this want Reddit 2 with all the oversanitization I think I'm going to set my main acc on another instance.
Keep in mind that these are the early days of Lemmy and the admin is donating time and resources to get this community going. Getting the configs published publicly so that people can make informed choices about which instance they wish to use would certainly be nice, but comparing this to Reddit is a bit far-fetched. TheDude is trying to sustain the community as best as he can, whereas Reddit has been suffocating the community in exchange for corporate profits.
From what I've seen people saying it's because the users have a reputation for getting overly involved in other instances (skewing voting in news communities) which seems like a recipe for conflict. That kind of thing can have a big impact on a new/small instance, maybe if this was bigger with more mods then it wouldn't be such a problem. I think some separation of politically extreme communities might be required in general because they mix like oil and fire then spill everywhere.
More discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lemmy/comments/142h1a5/choosing_an_instance_and_my_issues_with_lemmygrad/