Defederation doesn’t work against large instances
Access and communication across diverse servers is important, and people do depend on it to keep in touch with their friends and audience. But the safety and dignity of vulnerable people is more important. Knowingly putting your vulnerable members at risk by placing them within reach of a known-bad-actor server is unconscionable. Privileged people need to fucking deal with it when communication is severed to stop abuse; the safety of vulnerable people takes precedence.
Having said that, I think smaller instances defederating from larger ones remains disproportionately painful for the smaller instance, and largely ineffective in changing the behavior of the larger. Ideally the answer is to never let any instance (or small set of instances) become large and dominant, but I don’t know how to achieve that end in the real world.
The following thought was first posted on May 14, 2023 on Mastodon
Defederation doesn’t work against large instances.
Say there are a dozen large instances that hold 80% of the Fedi population. Will your medium-sized server with a growing community actually be able to defederate from any of them?
When a major instance is made of 75% regular people and 25% Nazis, but account for 7% of the total Fedi population, you can’t threaten to defederate from them unless one or more of the other 11 major instances also threaten to do so. Your instance would stand to lose way more than the offending major instance would, because the users on your instance depend on a lot of non-problematic traffic from the major instance for their feed, but not the other way around.
In short, your threat of defederation has zero power over a major instance.
Using defederation as a tool to enforce social norms only works among peers who need each other equally. We need better tools to deal with bad actors on very large instances.