But banning people from the whole platform (like Twitter does) or in this case whole Instance just coz you are lazy (?) to ban individuals is just shameful in my opinion.

And hearing it is in the name of protection over some “harm”… omg, how could someone be harmed over a damn social network. It is a damn social network…

https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/285670822264307712

@lordshedy I think a decentralized network makes heavy-handed moderation more ok, rather than being hypocritical. Somewhere like twitter, where you can be kicked off the platform entirely, really does need to step a lot more carefully w.r.t. free speech; but when there’s lots of instances, even if one instance de-federates with you, it doesn’t mean you’re isolated from the social graph entirely as long as your instance isn’t so consistently awful that literally nobody wants to have to deal with your community.

And while I do feel that blocking a whole instance across the board should be a weapon of last resort, I think it can be justified; if there’s an instance where one or a couple or a LOT of people are doing something you don’t want to have in your community, and the other instance is consistently failing to deal with it on their end, I think it’s just fine to cut them off. (Just blocking the particular individual(s) instance-wide wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient, since you’ll still have to deal with the second-order stuff that comes from discussions with or about that guy. Also, they could just make a new account if they wanted.) If it’s really important to a user that they have contact with that instance, they can just make a second account on that instance or somewhere that does federate with it; you can have more than one account at once.

Think of it like if everybody in a group of mutually connected instances is all in the same room, talking to each other. If there’s one group that’s being disruptive, I think you (one of the admins, as a representative of your group) has the right to tell them to fuck off and go somewhere else. If any of the people hanging out with you (members of your instance) are bothered by that, they’re entirely free to go wander over there if they want, and then come back and keep hanging out; you just don’t have community A discussions spilling over into Community B or vice-versa. Maybe there’s one guy in Community A that keeps talking about pineapple on pizza memes, and so community A members are always getting into arguments about pizza toppings, and that’s been spilling over into your otherwise Discourse-free cat appreciation club and generating acrimonious arguments. Even if not all of your friends are specifically trying to ignore them, and not all of your friends even mind, I don’t think there’d be any issue with you picking up and moving to another table that’s not right next to the pizza people.