Sadly I don’t think it’s possible on the Lemmy-ui/server level, but some mobile apps allow you to (maybe just one, note sure. Either Memmy or Voyager since I use them interchangeably). I also look forward to the ability to block instances fully on desktop.
Which one was your favourite
Leave blocking communities and instances to users. If you don’t want to see “extremists” in your All page, block the community. Block the users in the comments.
Defederation should happen based on the instance community’s collective decision (no vote was done for defederation) and when an instance is actively working against the rules of a federated instance. Hexbear has not shown itself to be breaking the rules or to be planning to, and the arguments used by the world admins were all opinions and not based in reality. The admins of hexbear specifically made a post telling their users to respect federated instances rules.
Yes, the users are opinionated - but that in and of itself isn’t worth defederating with.
Mind you I’m not about to start asking to defederate from world, but I’m still kinda worried that this type of preemptive defederation is going to be the norm for world.
I feel like the admins of hexbear are fairly conscious of their user base and have made sure to take all the necessary steps to properly federate with world. What’s concerning to me is that world preemptively defederated without hexbear showing any signs of hostility or malicious intent. Remember how long it took world to defed from exploding-heads? A literal nazi hub?
It all seems like de federation based on political ideology which, I mean, is in worlds own rights to do, but the fact that they’re the largest instance making preemptive decisions based on nothing isn’t boding very well.
I feel like it’s been so active because app developers almost all default to lemmy.world. It’s a bit concerning honestly, I wish things were a bit more spread out because everyone is at the mercy of Lemmy world and as we’ve seen several times it doesn’t look like the admins of the instance are making decisions based on community feedback.
It’s what struck me when I switched to Android… the play store is awful. Good on Apple, hopefully Google will follow suit.
This was me when my dad would use limewire, break the family PC, and blame me because I was playing “those video games”.
Yeah, like I said the Lemmy setting is ridiculously generous with what it considers read and how it hides things. Best way to circumvent this is just to use an app that’s has the option to hide read posts in-app and doesn’t use the Lemmy settings. I think Voyager (formerly wefwef) does it, maybe Memmy? Not sure about the Android applications. Connect probably
Edit: Aw lil guy found a home
I would like to humbly suggest 
You can hide posts - I believe. There’s a setting in your Lemmy profile to hide read posts. It’s a server side setting so it’ll propagate to any apps. I believe some apps also have their own local “hide post” feature.
Note that the Lemmy profile setting is pretty generous when it comes considering what’s read and what isn’t, but in general it works.
I suggest browsing New, the experience is 100% better.
I believe multi communities have been suggested before. Not sure if there’s an issue for it on GitHub yet.
How it works in the fediverse in general is that you log into your home instance and navigate to the other instances from your home instance. You won’t be able to log in with your Lemmy.world credentials on lemmy.ml. You can, however, view lemmy.ml content and interact with it (same for kbin.social) in the same way that I’m talking to you from a Lemmy instance.
kbin and Lemmy are two different ActivityPub softwares with similar goals and so you can use them interchangeably. If you prefer being on kbin.social and you prefer the things kbin as a backend provides to you more than lemmy, then you can use kbin entirely and still interact with everyone else. That’s the magic of the fediverse. Think Gmail vs Outlook. It’s still emails. Just flavoured differently.
Someone explained it really, really well on Reddit some years ago:
Hexbear.net started out as chapo.chat - a replacement for the defunct r/ChapoTrapHouse community after it was banned from Reddit. It launched one year ago today, based on a modified version of the Lemmy source code. At the time, Lemmy itself was only around a year old, and in an alpha state. Since r/ChapoTrapHouse had accumulated a long list of enemies in its time, a dozen or so members of the community did about a month-long sprint hardening Lemmy and adding features that reflected the needs of the community.
The developers of Lemmy maintained a pretty low-profile community, while the Chapo refugees were the exact opposite of low-profile, so the communities had divergent priorities. It wouldn’t be fair to demand the Lemmy developers drop everything they were doing to satisfy the Chapo refugee’s needs, but the needs of the Chapo community still had to be met for the project to be successful.
The process was very chaotic, and as a result, the fork of Lemmy used for Hexbear.net will likely never be capable of federating with the wider network of Lemmy instances. A handful of changes were contributed upstream, but many of them likely will never be accepted. None the less, it still abides by the AGPL license and the code is publicly available on git.chapo.chat.
The relationship between Hexbear.net and Lemmy is basically that the Chapo refugees decided Lemmy was the most viable platform to work with, and the Lemmy developers were completely blindsided. The Chapo git repository recorded about 2000 changes within the span of a month and not all of the changes were ideal or appropriate to adopt upstream. Within a week or two of launching, chapo.chat had more users than the flagship Lemmy instance. This was also before federation was officially supported upstream, even though that was always the goal of the project. Had the timing worked out differently, Hexbear might have been federated before adding additional features for their instance, but that’s not how things turned out.
Have you tried using this instead?
They all work with each other and they are both public platforms so they’re as private as any other activitypub-based software. Content amount doesn’t matter when it’s all federated
Join a smaller instance and enjoy the wonderful stability of a system not under constant stress. I haven’t had any trouble with uptime.
Obviously it’ll get better as things stabilize and Lemmy matures to deal with load balancing. Might take some time for the bigger instances though.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but GDPR doesn’t apply fully to small organizations (less than 250 employees) and mostly only applies if you offer goods and services which is not the case if you’re running a Lemmy instance. If you’re an instance owner with no employees because you’re not a registered business of any sort, you’re not on the hook for anything
Then again, I am neither European or knowledgeable in GDPR so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: I am wrong see below
You can’t - unless you own the instance in which case you can block other instances from federating with yours. However, it’s been a long requested feature so I’m sure it might show up at some point.
I suggest you either a) block individual communities b) switch to an instance that isn’t federated with them (yet). You won’t see their content if no one on the instance has tried to find their content before.
Found its way here as well wee
I don’t believe that there’s a lemmy-ui or server side option for it, but some mobile apps do let you block instances which for me is good enough.