I completely disagree.

The same person who creates a niche instance/community, is often ideal for moderating it. The fostering of a community around a given subject (not people) is what motivates volunteer maintenance of said community.

What's the incentive for your subscription banlist maintainers? How would communities form in such a system?

You say community as if it's not just an access point to the federation.

incentices

Show the amount of subs on the moderation stream - topN can be proud of themselves. Can ask for donations too I guess.

how would communities form

I imagine some space for moderation of specific subjects would emerge, like you don't want to see nazies = you run nazi-block list & check out others lists. Moderation could be thematic and specific.

Huh, weird they don't geoblock the UK like they do on their Lemmy instance.

You seem to be confusing my use of the word community with lemmy terminology. I am using it both as that, and as its dictionary definition.

Bragging rights and money are not healthy motivators. You'd be replacing personal interest, in the subject at hand. That puts every other potential motivator to shame.

Moderation could be thematic and specific.

It isn't already?

You're suggesting communities will form in the negative space created by people removing the same things. I don't think that'd work.

And it's definitely not how you foster niche communities. That's how you drown them. Currently they survive in positive space, where even a small numbers of users, browsing using their subbed feed, leads to regular activity even with a tiny usercount. Even as the posts are essentially invisible in all.

I am asking how would such communities in your system survive, let alone form? Tags completely disconnected from a host instance?

What is this called - some kind of reverse defederation?

I remember something about this, like Piefed being able to prevent users from logging from some countries without having to block the site as a whole

@Demigodrick@lemmy.zip ?

Some anti-birgading measure I guess.

Yes there is potentially the option to block country codes in Piefed. We haven't fully utilised that yet but its on the todo list

I wonder why they would bother?

Unless OP is merely referring to the feature that hides certain specified remote communities from their users, a measure that is similar to defederation but does not block the entire instance, only one community at a time. I've seen instances do that for e.g. Chapotraphouse, seemingly in order to salvage the rest of the communities on that instance by merely blocking the most controversial one(s).

But to actually show the content while not allowing users to interact with it... seems so strange.

Yeah I saw the dozen other times you spammed this.

I posted it 3 times, not sure why you are saying "dozen"

Thanks for confirming!

Local admin can literally do whatever the fuck they want. It's up to them what code the instance runs, and it doesn't have to be pure or official lemmy.

That's a relief. I'm guessing the admins have to remove the instance from the block list first?

What hexbear does is good, and what someone who disagrees with them is evil and bad. That's why they call it out.

Yes, probably. What I guess is that the code above just sets up the block list at setup, but then of course the admins can revise it as they see fit.

Because bad faith is the default for this person

Seems like it, they even made another post about this on !fediverse@lemmy.ml

That's what bluesky does for their decentralized network.