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:
I skimmed over the Oliphant unified tier 0 blocklist, and it does not block any instances that I interact with, for what that's worth. I am a bit concerned with the idea of routinely updating the block list based on the Oliphant algorithm. I suspect that the Oliphant project has a tendency to attract administrators who most enthusiastic about blocking. The justifications that I see for blocking would often apply to a lot of mainstream/establishment opinion in the USA (and probably more so in GA).
That said, I'm fully in favor of blocking obnoxious sites simply for the purpose of maintaining a pleasant and productive environment. For instance, brighton.social is on the tier0 list -- this is basically a conspiracy theory propaganda mill; the local feed screams paranoia. I'd support blocking brighton.social purely to protect theATL users from wandering into a conversation prompted by their nonsense. I consider this to be the same as public parks having a policy that people need to clean up after their dogs. I consider it very unpleasant to be at the receiving end of a propaganda firehose, even if the propaganda is not personally threatening. (I don't know if this captures the entire story for why they are on the blocklist -- there could be other problems with them)
I did notice two sizable instances that are often considered "borderline problematic" in the defederation debates -- and both were set to "silence" rather than "suspend". One, is newsie.social (where Decaturish is located). I vaguely remember some criticisms about newsie.social a few months back -- I think part of it was that people were reposting or repeating opinions that published in the Washington Post or New York Times. Many of the critics wanted nothing to do with journalists. As we've seen with the BBC instance, there are a decent number of people in the fediverse who would block those mainstream publishers, either because they have different standards from mainstream society or because they simply don't want that experience on their Mastodon instance. I wouldn't necessarily take their 'block' as meaning that the instance is anything we'd consider horrible.
The other 'borderline' instance I saw silenced was "QOTO" -- this instance is controversial because its policy is to only defederate when absolutely necessary (e.g. spam overwhelms the server). Many other instances block QOTO either because they view this as aiding hate-mongers, or because they just want to keep the hate-monges a couple steps removed from them. (Disclaimer, my account was hosted on Qoto before I came here)
So I guess I don't have a clear opinion here. I think even tier0 may be a bit too stringent, but i can't suggest a better way to quickly distinguish between those that are exceptionally horrible and those that are everyday horrible. Perhaps just silence them, and treat that as a strike, so that if we have any problems with harassment we quickly block the whole server. I suspect that some need to be blocked outright -- if you look at Qoto's blocklist, that could give you a small number that are absolutely intolerable.
Thank you, @DecaturNature - earlier this evening, I conducted a careful review of reading the domain names of the blocked Tier 0 instances. Many instances' names were self-describing the type of content hosted, and those descriptions were suffiicent criteria for exclusion. Others, as you mentioned, were banned for unclear or highly subjective reasons. The instanced that you mentioned were automatically not blocked or silenced because people on theATL.social were already following/engaged with them.
With regards to auto-updating the Tier 0 list, I am in agreement that an automatic update procedure is not ideal, as instances may be again be blocked without cause.
Perhaps it best, now that the worst of the worst are now blocked, to have a better documented review process for any future additions to the block list.
And I know that we did have a moderation council before from our earlier meetings with Andy, but coordination with that council fell apart a bit - which I'll take the blame for. Perhaps re-grouping that group would be helpful going forward.