A while back I signed up to rammy.site a small lemmy instance run by a single person. It was a very nice instance, very stable and had pretty good access to other instances, or at least it used to. Recently though all of that has changed when the instance was taken over by far right-wing users from the right-wing instance known as exploding-heads, an instance which has been blocked by many others for the hateful content they post and the abusive behavior of its members. The reason that this was even allowed to happen was that the admin stopped moderating the server but left the server online, this is a problem because it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them.

There isn’t much you can do to prevent going innactive but there are ways to mitigate what happened on rammy.site to prevent a full blown catastrophe like what has happened here. If you run a server and you are going to be going away for a while I’d recommend turning off account registration and community creation on your instance, that wouldn’t prevent federated users and existing users from spamming existing communities but it would help against users joining the site and creating new communities which is what happened here on rammy.

I understand that it’s not always possible to always be there to moderate your instance but you can at lease take steps to ensure that in your absence the instance won’t be utterly decimated and/or used as a weapon to spread hatred or attack other instances.

  • PowerfulTurtle@rammy.siteOP
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    1 year ago

    Yup it’s a proxy to circumvent defederation, they’re just posting shit there because at least when they started it was federated with many others. They’ll probably just flee elsewhere but this is why it’s very important to make sure you have people to manage the instance in case you aren’t able to anymore.

    • shagie@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      My crystal ball says that this is the beginning of whitelist federation rather than post facto defederation.

      There are far too many instances out there that happened with the Reddit exodus that it will be playing whack a mole until people are tired of it.