Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.
Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.