Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.

True, but if Meta (or anyone) wanted to “directly” get that data, it would be as trivial as setting up an instance on something as small as a Raspberry Pi and subscribing to a community here. We would have no way of knowing who it is or stopping them. Defederation is a tool to prevent brigading, not lurking.

If (if) Meta wanted to set a lemmy-style platform, preemptively defederating from it would be a largely symbolic gesture. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, like I said we’ll cross that bridge if and when it becomes relevant.

We suspect this may have to do with their older Lemmy version as we’re noticing it on some other instances as well, but not .ml which is running the latest.

The downvotes are all coming from accounts on other instances, which as @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website suggested, makes us think it’s most likely people browsing “All” and not appreciating seeing twenty discussion posts (not that that justifies it).

Tesseract is great!

Defederation is the nuclear option. Until now we had removed any communities we weren’t comfortable hosting, and treated users on a case-by-case basis based on how they behaved in our communities, which worked for a while but became untenable.

When we started this project the admin team felt that welcoming outsiders into our (wholesome, sane) Star Trek communities was the net-positive action. But as I said it became too much to handle so we unfortunately had to cut the cord.

Straight jump, no issues that I’ve noticed thus far.

I think Beehaw.org is. We’re 2/3 as well (now). .ml has some communities/users we’ve removed, but largely speaking .ml users have not caused any issues on our hosted communities, and we feel exposing them to our (generally awesome) communities is the net-positive here. Honestly .world’s (lack of) moderation is more actively an issue for our mods, but since they’re so big and we’re a niche instance we really can’t afford to de-federate from them.

Bookstack is great!

You are correct that it is a requirement for all communities hosted on this instance to be actively moderated within instance principles.