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:
Funny thing is that threads.net is already 'suspended' on the Tier 1 list (but not the Tier 0 list).
Later on, it may be worthwhile to consider using these bigger lists for silencing -- it may help improve the quality of the content on the "federated timeline". For instance, if you look at the tier 3 list it excludes a lot of politics-focused instances (both left and right). Not that politics on Mastodon is a problem, but it may be more enjoyable for most people with more substantial discussions if the loudest political accounts are turned down a notch.
Anyway, that would be a question for the people who actually use the federated timeline (not me)