The apparently-close connection between the primary lemmy devs and the lemmygrad.rs instance (as well as other potentially problematic behavior/associations) has been a major point of discussion in recent r/rust posts about trying to move the community somewhere off of reddit. One common recommendation in these threads is that the community should adopt/recommend an instance that has defederated from lemmygrad.rs (See for instance here.)
I’ve only just joined (as part of the reddit exodus), so I don’t feel comfortable making this as a recommendation or even a request, but I do want to know: is this something that the current lemmyrs administrators are interested in and/or already planning? Personally, I don’t mind either way (I understand there are pretty good tools available to users to “self-isolate” in this way). I do think, though, that it would be reasonable for special-interest instances like lemmyrs to defederate from all instances that aren’t specifically related to the special interest; i.e. lemmyrs could defederate from every instance that isn’t programming or at least technology related. That said, the obvious reason not to do so is that we’d lose access to programming communities hosted on general-purpose instances.
Again, I don’t have a strong personal stance here, and I realize the answer could change over time, but I think it would be good to have an explicit stance on this given that it has come up several times on reddit already.
P. S. I was surprised not to find an existing thread for this, so please forgive me if there actually is one and I just missed it.
I think as long as lemmyrs is federated with other instances, accounts from those instances can freely post or comment here, right? E.g. with the account I made here, it looks like I can post on beehaw. So I think there’s still a potential risk of bot/troll posts from accounts that are registered on a different instance, right?
Right, that’s certainly possible. Is it enough for us to start thinking about de-federating, maybe? Arguably this has been true since forever on any public forum. I think what’s needed is better mod tools on Lemmy in general.
Personally, I think it’s best for us to be patient while things settle before we consider any action. FWIW, we don’t see much incoming traffic here anyway since the subreddits started coming back online after the 48 hr blackout.
If things start getting out of hand and this instance starts getting bombarded with just bots/troll, we will likely have to consider de-federation (or some other alternative).