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.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to.

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.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch.

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.

One could also simply move to another country if desired.

That's nowhere near as easy for the majority of people - especially those in authoritarian countries - as you're making it out to be.

North Korean defectors are North Korean people who left North Korea to become citizens in a new country. In North Korea, it is against the law to leave North Korea without permission. North Koreans are also not allowed to change their own citizenship, so anyone born a North Korean must also die a North Korean. The punishment for leaving North Korea without permission is extremely harsh. People who are caught are usually sent a prison camp or put to death in public. Like many other crimes in North Korea, illegally leaving the country may not only punish the accused, but also his or her family up to three generations.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Anyone can start an instance. Make your own, and federate with whomever you want. Nobody's stopping you.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

What? It's nothing like that at all. Your instance isn't a country; you aren't stuck there. You can go wherever you want. You can read content on multiple instances.

It's more akin to CNN deciding not to run a story that Newsmax is covering. You can have more than one source for your news.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

Instances are run by individuals, who in turn have the power to run those instances as they see fit. If you dislike how a particular instance is being run, move to a different one, it's as simple as that.

Nobody's being censored. Anyone can go to lemmygrad and read their content. They're not even being deplatformed - nobody's preventing them from posting anything their instance allows on that instance. It's closer to curation than censorship... instances are free to curate the content they host. If you don't like the curation of a given instance, just move to a different one.

Anecdotally, when I was a kid, we had an electrical issue wherein a short or something was causing wires to slowly melt through their jacket, inside the wall. It was triggering smoke detectors, but we couldn't see or smell anything. Fire department came out and found it, but if we'd ignored it, it almost definitely would have been a huge house fire eventually. Definitely second this advice. It doesn't cost anything to have them come look.

Shortly after we moved in, someone was taking a shower in our second-floor bathroom, the bottom of the shower cracked, and they didn't notice. End result was an entire shower's worth of water draining out the bottom of the shower, flowing about 10 feet inside the first-floor ceiling, draining down through the hole from a light fixture, across the kitchen floor, down through the kitchen floor into the basement ceiling, soaking into a bunch of exposed insulation, and making that insulation collapse onto the (concrete) basement floor.

That's on average 57 per day, or 3.5 per hour if we assume 16 hours a day awake. Seems likely he just automated the process somehow, or that multiple people were making reports under his name. Or he was just submitting a report every 17 waking minutes for the entire year. Who knows.

Biden's whole campaign is riding on "Look how bad it would be if Trump got elected, this is the most important election of your lives!", yet he seems far less concerned when he's asked to win back some voter support by stopping the widely unpopular supply of weapons to Israel...

"Hey, can you recommend a good free photoshop alternative?"

"DIE!"

Just like the good old Jraphics Interchange Format!

Plus as an added bonus we can have the 'gif' pronunciation disagreement!