This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users.
A week ago Lemmy.world announced their Discord server. This wasn’t very well received (about 25% downvotes, which is rather bad compared to other announcements). The comments on that post were turned off, presumably to avoid backlash.
Before that, announcements about the instance used to be posted to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world. This time, the information was posted on the Discord server instead.
I don’t agree with this. Having to use a proprietary platform to participate in an open-source one goes against the very purpose for me, especially when the new solution isn’t really an improvement (as before the information about the platform was closer to it).
Edit: Corrected the announcements community name.
Update: Lemmy.world finally released an announcement and promised they would inform about similar actions and gather feedback in advance in future.
I know you can’t block an instance as a user. I understand why you would want to. It would make things easier for us and I think it would be a good feature to add on the user side. Or perhaps an “opt in” to a block list that is kept by your instance.
In my opinion, blocking the individual users and instance communities is good enough for now. If a problematic member of another instance starts causing trouble in a community on your instance, then I believe it’s the job of the moderators to block them if they’re breaking the community rules, and outside of that it’s my own job to block individuals I don’t like.