The “Welcome to my Humble Racist Instance” bit was only a little bit funny, and not in very good taste, but it did provide me with some insight about fedi as a whole. Namely, the fact that some instance admins don’t actually look into other instances when moderating. Obviously, you shouldn’t have to witness extremely racist/homophobic posts or, you know, child porn, in order to conclude that Yep! We’re Defederating From This One!

And yet, at the same time, if you’re a moderator it is actually your job to look into things and judge, according to whatever policies your instance follows, whether or not another instance goes against said policies and should be defederated. This does mean needing to actually investigate instances at times, and no, it’s not something that’s easy to enjoy, but if you can’t handle that sort of stuff (or simply don’t want to) then maybe just… don’t? No one is forcing you… But if you want to do it well, it needs to be done right.

Back when me and Anna were active on oomfie.city we went through all the defederated instances (which had been imported from a blocklist. shame on us) and found that a bunch were false positives. There’s a lot I could say about blocklists, but I’ll stop myself. Or, do you remember px.mathias777.com ? the instance was left open and subsequently became a vector for spambots. WE WERE THE ONES WHO REACHED OUT TO THE GUY AND HELPED HIM FIX IT. While everyone else was defederating, we were looking into the instance and found out that he was literally just a guy with a weird website and a pixelfed instance trying to share, like, photos of his cat or whatever.

Again, if you want it done well, you have to do it right. If you’re serving a community like, oh, I don’t know, a service that thousands of people use that’s part of a network with millions of users, you might need to take shit seriously. Don’t blindly trust anything, especially not if it’s from someone you don’t know. Investigate, get evidence, solve shit without just hand-waving it away.

… With that tangent out of the way, I don’t think those who found “Humble Racist Instance” unfunny can’t take a joke or anything like that. I get it. I simply think that taking a straight up lie at face value and defederating without doing the most basic research to confirm whether or not it was true isn’t the kind of judgement I would trust.

it was a real terrible bit though, yeah. I won’t deny that.