I mean, the people calling people tankies are usually anarchists. Not really the same people as cable news organizations lol. Most modern anarchists are highly critical of countries generally, and their own country specifically. At least from my experience, alot of mutual aid orgs and other explicitly anarchist movements in the US reject the premise that the land beneath their feet even BELONGS to the US government.

I guess I understand the backlash, but defederation IS blocking, its just community wide blocking. Some people don’t want to have to manage whether they’re exposed to certain content, they’d rather have their community do it for them. At least for me, beehaw has been pretty open about the conditions of why they defederated from certain instances (and why they are organizing development of more granular moderation tools, so they don’t feel like they have to). Maybe you can argue they are motivated by a sinister desire to restrict access, but at least from my perspective that isn’t a convincing argument. Certain communities want certain things, some may want unfettered access to everything the internet has to offer, but honestly? That ain’t me. I have other accounts on other platforms for that. Sometimes I don’t want to hear why the North Korean state is actually just responding to western aggression, or that trans people should die, or whatever else. Sometimes I do, I consume lots of media from people who I fundamentally disagree with, but that shit stresses me out sometimes. Do I think that lemmygrad is even primarily composed of people who think that way? No. But the admins of beehaw have been pretty clear about what they want out of their community, and as of right now, they don’t have the tools to moderate the influx of people coming over from other instances and being trolls, or not behaving according to the standards they have in place.

Just as a last note, though, I think that alot of the discourse about why defederation is bad is kinda philosophically at odds with the goals of the Fediverse to begin with. Remember, defederation is part of the structure of the Fediverse for a reason, and its partly because it gives autonomy to communities to decide what it is they want to do. Centralized platforms where one authority dictates what is and isn’t appropriate have been going through controversies about that for a WHILE now, and the solutions they come up with are often dogshit. The Fediverse makes these sorts of disagreements fundamentally MORE solvable than any preexisting platform, and with outcomes that mean the people affected have alternatives if they disagree with a decision. Honestly, I think this is a holdover from platforms like reddit, where admin decisions affect EVERYBODY and nobody really has a different place to go.

I think that you can think that YOU want to only block people and never defederate and also respect that other folks don’t necessarily want the same thing. That’s your choice. But if you join an instance that doesn’t moderate its users and that instance can post without limitation on instances like beehaw, which do have moderation standards, defederation is like… the only way that we currently have to stop assholes from brigading or being weirdos. Lemmy isn’t a public square, it isn’t the “front page of the internet”. Its like a community hall, or a political rally, or a convention center. Different instances have different standards, and some instances don’t necessarily want to have an open hallway connecting their Pride Parade to a KKK rally. Or, in a more nuanced example, if you’re hanging out with your friends somewhere, maybe you find someplace quiet and out of the way so you can chat privately. I just think giving people and communities more power in how they live their online lives, allowing them to do whatever they want, whenever they want? That’s just objectively BETTER than some corporation forcing you to stay in the same room as everybody else.

I dunno. You can do what you want. But I just really don’t think you need to be getting mad at other people somewhere else doing something you don’t like. Like… too bad lol. It ain’t your business. You can’t do anything about it, and nobody should be able to do anything about it. Embrace the chaos. Find where you want to be.