Yes, but what we’re talking about here is how to effectively target and limit violence, bigotry, hate speech, etc., and that happens best at the community level not the instance level. Let’s say you have something like this:

• MixedBag.social - a popular fictitious instance that has some good communities and one really bad one
• MixedBag.social/c/BigotsRUs - a community of bigoted content that YourInstance.com doesn’t want to deal with
• Users of MixedBag.social - a mixed bag themselves, who mostly flocked there because of open signups

How do we limit harm to YourInstance.com?

• The Users: Most of the MixedBag users are harmless and contribute to the growth and diversity of the fediverse (including YourInstance), so defederating them is a last resort. But what about the BigotsRUs subscribers? On Reddit, some mods use bots to ban or mute people subscribed to problematic subreddits. We could try something similar here, but that’s not the only option. After all, I live over here, not in the community where they’re trash-talking. It’s when they bring their shit into my house that I get pissed. If they put on their Sunday Best over here and want to have actual conversations, I’m fine with that. That more tolerant approach has the benefit of not ostracising and radicalizing users who are on the fence and just hang out there on occasion for the memes. So basically, ban the bad actors when they cross the line while on your turf, but leave the rest alone.

• The Community: If BigotsRUs is poorly moderated, frequently spews hate, and its inclusion in All harms YourInstance’s users, that’s what Remove is for. As an admin, you can remove communities from the feed without affecting users or the instance, which feels like the first and best step to handling most issues.

• The Instance: Like I said, defederation is the nuclear option that impacts all communities and all users on MixedBag.social, so I’d rather limit that to a last resort. However, sometimes the instance itself if the problem by either encouraging bad actors or centering around a topic that has no place in your instance’s vision. For example, what if you’re running an orthodox religious instance for your friends and want to defederate from the porn-only lemmyNSFW.com? Or what if your instance is being overrun by bots from LaxSignUps.social and you don’t have a big enough mod team to separate out the trash? For me, that’s the ideal use case for instance-wide defederation, and it’s the main reason Beehaw is defederating from others. Yes, they’re protective of their culture, but right now it’s mostly about the small mod team’s inability to filter out spam from instances with lax signups.