I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I’ve been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc… But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist. Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the ‘compatible’ users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
This is a lot of work if you’re just trying to browse the site. Instead of spending hours blocking instances after first checking whether an instance is mostly bots (and safe to block) or if it’s just a single group of bots in an otherwise fine instance in which case you block the users, a general list like OP suggested would be more useful.
I don’t see how it’s more complicated than blocking a user or a community. Instances is nothing but a group of communities and users at the highest level