I dont like tankies or tories any more than the next person, but breaking federation is just wrong.
I dont want to have to make a separate account just to get around that, mainly because this is actually already my account for getting around that!
Its quite easy to block a community at user level, if needed, and we are not the target of any spam, but now we users have lost the option of the ability to interact forever with a corner of the threadiverse, which i think is not cool.
If its just me thinking this way, fine, i’ll just maintain several accounts, but i would hope its not, because its feeling like instances are gettinh pretty triggerhappy with the block button https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/tree/main
This will very quickly go the same way as IRC. The spirit of Eris lives again on ActivityPub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet
IRC is a plaintext chat system which was originally decentralised and federated. Technically decentralisation and federation is still perfectly possible in the IRC protocol. Nobody does it so freely any more, ever since the Eris Free Net decided to go its own way because it made sense to do so.
It achieved this by blocking any IRC server that is connected to the Eris server.
In this case it wasn’t political - it was due to spam, flamewars, and organisational problems (what I just called ‘the spirit of Eris’). If you throw politics in there (or rather the fact that these days moderators are accustomed to seeing political views they already agree with on the Internet), I think it just will accelerate things towards defederation, or federation with only people we seem to agree with (read: easy to moderate).