Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.
Part of the problem is the instance's open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.
We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.
Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we're setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!
I mentioned elsewhere, I don't have the ability to run my own instance. Mastodon also has user migration tools, making it much easier to start up a new account on a different instance. Lemmy does not. I'm also not even talking just about myself. There's been drama about large instances defederating from each other since I joined- which, to be fair, was only a few months ago, but it's also when the population exploded and defederation became a real concern. My main problem is the simple idea that, due to actions entirely outside of my control, large sections of the fediverse can just disappear for my account, forcing me to either accept the newer, smaller fediverse, or make a new account somewhere else that happens to federate with both my previous instance AND the defederated instance if I want a single account to view the same content I used to.
I think so too, especially if and when users get the ability to block entire instances. That will prevent some of the defederation-for-wrongthink (in either direction, it doesn't matter), and as it matures, I think the "accidentally hosting CSAM" will be less of an issue as well.
LASIM can help you move all your account details. Lemmy is nowhere hear as mature a product as Mastodon so it's no surprise a lot of what Mastodon has, Lemmy doesn't - yet.
I'm really not sure you're ever going to be able to have what you seem to want because it doesn't exist. There's a limited set of tools available and if an instance Admin isn't being vigilant, there'll always be fuckwits ready to do shitty things. If the only way that other Admins can tackle that is defederation then that's what'll happen. It's not going to affect user retention because I think the majority of people are quite prepared to accept that unmoderated instances are a liability of a much greater scale than defederation.
I'd say that's fair. I understand that what I want is unlikely to come about, it's a somewhat extreme view, and due to Lemmy's current configuration, admins are on the hook legally for everything posted on their server. Something needs to change for defederation to change, and it's very likely that defederation won't change. I've only ever been expressing a concern of mine. Lemmy doesn't cater to my will- I'm not even a programmer, I couldn't do any of this stuff even if I had the power to do so. I just hope that it does change.
Defederation is never going to go away because there are whole instances out there dedicated to hosting illegal material and because, lets not forget, Admin's want the Lemmyverse to succeed and a way for it to not succeed is to federate with instances that do this and also have userbases made up of racists, homophobes, transphobes etc. Literally no one wants to be constantly firefighting their own individual user block lists to keep blocking hundreds of awful people. What they want is to spend time on their communities. That's why instances have codes of conduct stating what they won't allow. It allows quick, painless instant separation from arseholes without putting the onus on all their users to individually block users from whole instances.
But, as Admin and Mod level tools (and to a lesser extent user tools) get developed, defederation will happen less and less.