It became the largest instance and the one to absorb most of the attention-seekers that expect to be treated as "customers", despite the instance admin (of lemmy.world) emphasizing they're all volunteers working for the community.

Threads already violates rules 1 and 3, hosting people who escalated their harrassment into real life multiple times already, so I hope the decision to block them (should they ever choose to federate) is a no-brainer to FMHY admins.

If Lemmy supported user instance blocking I would agree with you, but until then this is the best option available.

We want to use defederation as a last resort and hopefully when users are able to block instances themselves we'll be able to use it even less frequently. I dislike defederation personally as well, and like Nbats stated here, if the community's opinion of those two instances change and the instances themselves make their communities safer we'll refed.

Yeah they haven't become a huge issue for us yet, but they have for other instances, and most of our reports of "racism" have come from things posted to exploding. Deferedating isn't to send any sort of message, its just to prevent having issues with them in the future.

Yeah good point, I just added that it goes both ways. As far as blocking single communities go I don't have all the details but I've been told we've done it for one so far.

I've been hearing different answers on this lately, particularly regarding Lemmy.world and Beehaw. Beehaw defederated LW, but not vice versa. The result is that no one on Beehaw can see any posts on LW, but users on LW are seeing some posts on Beehaw. It doesn't seem to be a complete cut to all communication.

But that's still something worth bringing up - Here is the list of instances that block FMHY, and are (somewhat) effectively isolated from us here:

https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=lemmy.fmhy.ml

The only one that's significant is feddit.de. From what I can tell, it's because FMHY has open registration

Yeah I don't see it happening at all outside of circumstances like this where the community as a whole is really pushing for it.

Defederating from people who support bombing innocent people is not censorship 🤦

I mean our goal is to not have to do this, but its up the individual instances to protect their own reputations and neither of the ones we blocked have done that so far. If they clean things up and the communities overall opinion of them changes then we can consider federating with them again but as of now they have too many people against them.

It's not cool, but if you think defederation is censorship then you can switch to a different instance. This is a non-issue.

This guys's posts are exactly what you'd expect from someone that gets offended when an alt-right instance gets blocked.

You really gotta look up what censorship is before you use the word.

Umm..... What did you think the point of mods on reddit was? The mods we chose to support and followed here to lemmy and kept the community on track?

And you know you can just lurk on here and can use another instance that better fits your idea of the type of conversations you want. There's nothing keeping you from making an account on exploding heads and chatting away with them. You can multiple accounts you know.

I think preemtive defederation/blocking from Threads is the most logical decision for every instance since we are talking about a known hostile company, not something new testing the waters that nobody knows how it will behave, it's Meta being Meta (even if they are trying to hide it behind the "by Instagram" slogan).

Don't defederate enough and people will switch to a less objectionable instance.

It's a balancing act.

Out of curiosity, what’s the deal with exploding-heads? I keep seeing them referenced negatively all over several instances.

Edit: thanks for all the replies! I’ve got it now hahaha