Better documentation/visibility for blocked instances

5 days ago by SomethingWentWrong to c/lemmy_ca_support

Please add a new section under "for Users" in https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/overview about the lemmy.ca sitewide blocked instances and reasons. Don't need to list the reason for every single blocked instance but can call out the more noteworthy ones that had a discussion.

Why I'm asking for this is I was trying to subscribe to some communities from lemmit.online but was getting a terse and confusing error. It took a bit of digging to see it was intentionally blocked from lemmy.ca and the reason why.

SomethingWentWrong 2 points 5 days ago

Here's a suggested starting point for contents:

Sitewide Blocked Instances

lemmy.ca blocks instances at a sitewide basis due to them having inappropriate content. The list of blocked instances can be viewed at:

https://lemmy.ca/instances

Discussion about blocked instances of note:

lemmit.online https://lemmy.ca/post/1380644

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otter 2 points 5 days ago

That's good feedback, I agree and I think we can put that information in the guidelines section for lemmy.ca and then link to it from any relevant pages (ex. the threadiverse how to block / report sections). It ties into our new proposed guidelines on our federation policy: https://fedecan.ca/...

For information that is specific to our instance, I prefer to keep it on the other pages so that it is not confusing for non-lemmy.ca users that are reading the guide.

For lemmit.online specifically, we're open to a discussion about federating with it again. If you would like that, could you post on !main@lemmy.ca about it?

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SomethingWentWrong 2 points 4 days ago

I posted https://lemmy.ca/post/69414850 in the main community about whether to unblock lemmit.online and the comments are mostly negative.

Was a little journey of exploration as while most peer lemmy servers don't block that instance many of them have banned the bot@lemmit.online user based on lack of recent posts.

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otter 1 point 3 days ago

Yes it does look like it was banned from some other instances. You can check the mod logs for various users: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=238006

I'm going to explore if we can re-federate, but hide all of the communities so that only subscribed users can see them. I see that the admins of lemmit are not going to add any more communities, so hiding all of them should be feasible. I haven't brought this up with the other admins yet, and I don't know if users will go for it, but that seems like a compromise that the community might support.

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SomethingWentWrong 2 points 3 days ago

3 years ago the bot had a bug on lemmy.world which created some comment spam and then it was banned. The bot's error message about "Something went terribly wrong" is funny given my username.

You don't need to re-federate with lemmit.online just for me as the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I'm just requesting improved documentation/visibility about blocked instances to reduce confusion for this and other instances that get blocked in the future.

Digging into lemmy's handling of blocked instances has been an interesting "journey of discovery". I have another low priority related request about blocked instances: https://lemmy.ca/post/69461640

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