- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
also don’t block other instances too much! I mean as long as they are bot servers that threaten the health of the network, then you have to get rid of them of course. but way too many people are getting their panties in a bunch about content they don’t like, and immediately resort to the nuclear option of defederation, which is actually hurting the network and effectively splitting the user base. all these things should be blocked on a user level (by blocking specific communities, not whole instances!).
There are unfortunately not enough people that hold this opinion, too many are trigger happy on defederating from those they don’t like.
Like you say, there can be some legitimate reasons, such as bot servers, and I would add if a big company created an instance to take it over and kill the federation.
But too many simply do it because they disagree with what the people in an instance are saying, and that hurts the federated nature of the fediverse.
I’m having trouble seeing the purpose of the federation system if not to cater what people see, to one degree or another. After seeing soft nazi rhetoric spread through years worth of complacency, the argument of “don’t get too banhappy, fellas, all ideas are worth considering” really doesn’t strike me as wise.
When there’s an instance that doesn’t want to play well with others, it’s up to others to take action.
Generally, I agree, but sometimes it’s going to happen. See also the great IRC split, and countless other networks prior that mostly no longer exist.