I'm not claiming to speak for @PaulaToThePeople but I'm not fully in favor of the covenant, either.
The general theme seems to be, "disconnect as little as possible", and it recommends instance admins refrain from inhibitting the ability of users to connect.
Many users, however, want their moderators to be aggressive in blocking instances with differing codes of content.
There are tradeoffs with every policy, but many would favor user comfort over maximizing potential connections.
Long reply
I'm more than happy for them to block other individuals and instances as liberally as they please! Both Pleroma and Misskey have user-level domain blocks so users can paste whatever lists they like into that field and heavily curate their experience without impairing other users' ability to do the same.
Personally, when a problematic instance such as Gab shows up, I do take action. Nothing of value was ever posted by any Gab user and they did nothing but harass people. A few of my users did experience harassment originating from Gab, I pinged some of their moderators, they did nothing, I suspended the user instance-wide, they evaded the suspension by creating new accounts, administration still did nothing, so I defederated from them.
If there's a problem, it should be addressed. Otherwise, I prefer to live and let live. If they're not actively causing problems with my users, there's no reason to defederate from them.
This is my *personal* approach. I know there are other instances with even more lax approaches and I don't particularly agree with them.
I gotcha, so you're describing a policy and recognizing that there's a spectrum of defederation aggressiveness that people follow. There are many fediverse users who would prefer an instance with that kind of policy.
And that's dandy! It's likely that those instances will have more connections, which their user base will value.
Users that value more active moderation will likely gravitate towards servers with prescriptive codes of conduct.
The beauty of the fediverse!
@Argus @amolith @PaulaToThePeople feels like we've meet before, amolith...
on that moderation note, i still feel banana.dog to be too heavily moderated. just saw a bunch of memes from a collection filled with broken images and content warnings over nothing.
this wiki guidelines are generally very well written i think... if they're followed, why do i still feel too much moderation?
in my head we miss a global mindset to enable individual content moderation, which i never been done seen anywhere, because it's technically very challenging both for devs and users.
a lot of users, however, are ready to take ownership in moderating their content-intake in life.
we need software that allows us to moderate the content to our own taste, regardless of the origin or creator.
in practice, it should not be just blocking a hashtag or a user, but avoiding a complex set of red flags from anywhere, at the same time getting sporadic representative samples of what's being blocked as to constantly maintain it in good shape for me.
please let me know if there's anything like this done yet!
@amolith
For example:
5. No Guilt-by-Association/Federation
If the goal is to remove content from a known bad actor, then defederating from intermediate connections is often necessary. Mastodon.Technology followed this step with Gab to ensure that content from Gab didn't show up for m.t users.