Yes, but I think the implementation of the block is what caused the schism (or simply isolation).
It was sad, to have witnessed such a bright future unfold, interesting discussions on language, on tech, on culture. And then to have half of the world just cut off.
If you know about this, you should consider that mastodon.social acts as an example instance. This effectively made blocking Pawoo and a few other instances the norm.
There was a block-list circulating around, and if you do not block every instance on the list, your instance is misogynist, pedophile and far-right.
That's simply untrue, speaking as the admin of a smaller instance. There are blocklists but they are entirely up to yourself to implement. I myself only implement rules to completely block far-right instances or "free speech" instances, those tend to cover almost 99% of content that would be frankly illegal for me to federate. The rest is a few japanese and sex-positive instances, which are only media-blocked, so they still federate but I don't allow their media on my server, which I think is an acceptable compromise completely blocking it. And from talking to other people running instances, this is pretty much the norm for the fediverse, regardless of what the far-right instances want you to believe.
It just feel very weird to me that the word "fediverse" is thrown around like a universe, except it is a balance of not getting thrown out by not being the norm. Perhaps it is just me that has this fantasy of everyone being in one place, at least on the Internet, but jerks are jerks.
The Fediverse is simply a term for all of the instances. It's not entirely fragmented, there is certainly shared hosts between bubbles in the fediverse. Though I don't think this is an issue really; our own universe functions on the bubble principle as well and it makes fediverse a place that you can find an instance to be on without having to worry that your instance moderator will allow nazis to vent their garbage into your feed.
> Are you blocking instances, and on what conditions?
I block instances when they either flood or I find I don't want to have anything to do with them (I do tolerate opinions I disagree with, of course; but not patent bigotry).
And only based on evidence I gather myself, I don't trust screenshots or copy-pastes (but I understand some mod teams do, and that's ok if that's what their users want).
> I wonder how often you get complaints about wanting an instance blocked, and how you manage them.
As I said, I never got complaints. I also never got instance requests personnally; although I do sometimes see other instance admins saying they blocked a given instance. When it happens, I take a look at that instance's public pages. Usually, that's enough to make my mind, eg. because their public timeline is overrun by literal nazis and/or lolicon.
(I was looking for examples as I was writing this, and it turns out most of the nazi instances I blocked don't exist anymore. Oh well.)
The hardest part is dealing with big instances with many "well-behaved" users, but also a very lax moderation policy that tolerates trolls. So far I only banned individual trolls in this case, but it requires work, and I understand not all moderators want to spend so much time.
It was sad, to have witnessed such a bright future unfold, interesting discussions on language, on tech, on culture. And then to have half of the world just cut off.
The fediverse was the future...