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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon itself can't actually remove servers, any more than they can remove someone else's website, because servers are hosted by other people on others' computers. Mastodon can lock those servers out of their directories, or out of the main federation-network, though.

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yeah , defederation. it would be better to have a protocol that doesnt allow that.

So if someone spun a child porn instance, we should all be forced to see that in our federated timeline?

Come on, get real.

no but it could be up to the receiver address to choose what to block.

That’s literally how it works now

email works the same way.

If I, as the email admin of xyzcorp.biz get too many spammy emails from your domain, you can expect to be blocked / defederated.

are we dismissing smtp now as a protocol?

email servers block by content/address though, not only entire domains

that's not true at all. I've ran mail servers. It's really easy to block by domain, and I have.

I think this is the correct way of doing it. Anyone can start their own instance and their own federation.

It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon federation—kind of like not having the freedom to block someone on Twitter.

Exactly. Anyone has the freedom to post whatever they want on their own server. I have the freedom not to carry their traffic.

Blocking each instance is the best way compared to other centered option.

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