I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist.
Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
If you are talking about the recent the_Donald case that this is not a matter of different opinions. That community on Reddit has a long history of not willing to co-exists peacefully and if an admin does not draw a clear line that such communities are not welcome on their instance then it is a clear case of the above 1).
I think some people reacted a bit too quickly to that sublemmy appearing though.. Give admins some time to evaluate and resolve the situation before impulsively defederating an entire 6000-user instance.
As far as I know this is exactly what happend. Just because there where some vocal users asking for defederation doesn't mean the admins thought the same.
However, in the case of an ongoing troll attack quick temporary defederation is a useful tool for which the benefits outweight the damage it does.