I know this post will probably be downvoted to hell, give me much problems and probably will make my account being banned but you have to know that i take no side writing this.
So i wanted to take a look at lemmygrad.ml to see if it was as it’s reputation is(im not the kind of person to follow the herd without thinking by myself) and apparently lemmygrad never defederated with any instances without consulting it’s members(which lemmy.world and others instances did).
So i was thinking, isn’t censoring content without asking your community a totalitarian thing like north korea or any so-called totalitarian country could have done ?
I know i may be incorrect but i accept any kind of criticism against this post if it’s constructive, “shut up hidden tankie” or any kind of free insult isn’t a valid arguments, if you really defend democracy as i do im sure you can debate while being civilized.
It’s because, despite claiming to have acknowledged the problem, you’re still making such an incredible false equivalency - comparing joining a new Lemmy instance to moving out of an authoritarian country - that you either completely misunderstand what you’re talking about, or you’re arguing in bad faith.
You’d have full control over your instance, and could, if you built up a community, use any online voting method you wanted - of which there are plenty - to poll your userbase and gather their opinions.
However, ultimately, you’d be the one paying for the instance, and doing the work to set it up and keep it updated and running. What would you do if you attracted a userbase that had views that were completely counter to your own? What if you attracted the alt-right crowd, and what got voted into place was all hate-speech, nazi rhetoric, and intolerance? (I assume you disagree with these things…) Would you continue paying for and hosting the instance, just because that’s what was democratically decided, even though it’s no longer an instance that you want to participate in? Could anyone really fault you for not wanting to do that?
A better method might be for you to make clear your own opinions - either via a post explaining them, or via a pre-defined federation / defederation plan - and let people join your instance who agreed with those decisions. Which, incidentally, is how most instances currently operate.
I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.
As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.
Be the change you want to see in the world. You don’t have to code in an integrated solution; all you’d have to do is set up an online poll, listing all of the other instances up for consideration (such a list can be pretty easily obtained - for example from https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list ), run a new poll on regular intervals, say, every 2 months, and let anyone who is interested vote. Then, you update the defederation list based on the results of the poll.
However, I think you’ll quickly run into the other problems I outlined which, unfortunately, can’t really be changed. You could require everyone who’s participating in the voting to also be contributing time or money to run the server, except that then you’re operating a plutocracy, not a democracy, so most likely, you’ll need to be giving up your time and money to make your desired server administration a reality.