Hi theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) friends. Your friendly admin, @michael, here.

Currently, theATL.social blocks two domains from federation but does not utilize any block lists. the Lemmy yall.theATL.social does not block any domains.

My general admin philosophy is to let users decide what content they want to see, or not see. However, the Mastodon UI can make the adding/removing of domain block lists a bit tedious. (There are some tech/UI-related options to make this easier.)

On the other hand, I am personally not a free speech absolutist, and there are limits to what content could/should be relayed through theATL.social’s servers.

For example, illegal content, instances dedicated solely to hate speech/harassment, etc. To that end, the Oliphant Tier 0 block list offers a “floor” to remove literally the worst instances operating on the Fediverse: https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blocklists

As your admin, I don’t want to make any unilateral decisions - rather, I’d prefer a user/stakeholder conversation, with as many Q&As as helpful.

With that intro, let me know your thoughts:

  • michaelOPMAEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    Hi @DecaturNature@yall.theatl.social - apologies for the slight delay. Work and some other stuff kept my dance card more full than expected this past week.

    How do we unblock any instance that got on Oliphant tier 0 but are later removed? Is that something that will be checked for?

    I’d like to have a users council or other group-type decision for block/unblocking going forward. If I was put on the spot for my own personal thoughts, I’d say that unless an instance is primarily dedicated towards illegal, hateful, malicious, or otherwise disruptive activities, I’m inclined to not defederate. My own personal differences with the speech or opinions of another instance have ever been a factor in that decision. So, if there was an instance that needs to be unblocked that was blocked on Oliphant, then let’s unblock it!

    how does blocking and silencing affect the new search system? I guess blocking is obvious…but does silence block search?

    Yeah, blocking/defederating would prevent search, so agreed that we need to be a bit more careful with who we block or not.