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 believe the admin has sufficient skills to determine if any instances listed in tier-0 are consumed by users of theatl.social. I trust they're making sounds calls what to include from the list and what to not include. That said, an auto-update could be deployed with some automated list scrubbing (i.e.: scan the list for changes, check if newly added instances are consumed, post a message to theatl.social clearly calling out changes or calls for review). But until then, a manual periodic review is appreciated.
I feel the general Mastodon community well established has a consistent baseline of acceptable use/content with guardrails requiring content warnings (CW) and proper flagging of material not suitable for general audiences. That said, there's a time, place, and instance that can provide people with outlets to consume and share non-"G-Rated" (NSFW) content and other content not generally accepted in polite company. TheATL.social is managed in such a way to avoid publishing NSFW content- and that's fine. My litmus test before posting on theatl.social: "would I feel okay if my mom saw this post?" If not, rethink the content or post to a more appropriate instance.
However...I want to call out one sentence that made me bristle a bit:
Assuming the content/instance in question doesn't violate established community standards or violate terms of use, I would not appreciate the admin (or anyone) doing something to "protect" me from accidental conversation wandering. I'm fully functional adult who can choose what to read, what to "believe", and what to reject. Same goes for the concept of blocking mainstream news orgs and other entities with knee jerk reactions, such as preemptively blocking threads.net. Why actively close yourself off from the world around you? Echo chambers can be quite toxic and lead to uninformed world views. Why block something without a clear observation of impact? If I don't want to see it, I can simply block from my account.
To round out the public park analogy- I've wandered through many public parks while people hand out flyers, yell from megaphones, and try to recruit for their cults. I just walk by and ignore them. Just as I do when I see something in social media I don't want to engage with. I don't need a nanny to "protect" me. As a gay man, I've heard plenty of mainstream news orgs propagate ideas I find personally offensive; I take the content for what it is and move on or engage in healthy public debates. By blocking the org, I'd loose context around the discussion, the people engaging in the discussion, and in impact of the topics. I'd rather be informed of the unsavory things than to be blindsided because someone put my head in the sand.
I too am a big advocate for free speech and robust public debate, which is why I support the fediverse. But that doesn't mean that individual instances need to include access to everything that's legally published. The ability to access everything is supported by the fediverse as a whole, just as its supported by the publishing industry as a whole, not individual magazines.
Behaviors that are tolerable in individuals can become a problem when they are organized and professionalized, as Brighton has done with conspiracy-theorism (some background info here). Brighton is a noise machine. A community dedicated to conspiracy theories is a community that is not only dedicated to lies, it is dedicated to figuring out how to promote these lies with manipulative arguments and by slowly drawing people into a fantasy world. It's frankly a lot of work to assess these lies on a case-by-case basis and I don't think people will be attracted to theATL if the site expects them to do this work for themselves. This isn't a matter of letting people voice their opinions and hear other people's opinions -- it's a matter of turning down the volume on a propaganda campaign. We can see the world around us better when we filter out other people's attempts to mislead us; when those attempts to mislead us are coordinated at the community level, it's appropriate to silence them at the community level.
Tangentially, a community dedicated to conspiracy theories is bound to contain a lot of slander and antisemitism (along with other hateful attitudes).