What are you suggestions to this problem? There isn’t any grand solution to this and it plagues all federated services as far as I know.

A collection of instances could start up a federation council with a set of guidelines, one of these guidelines could be “moderate within the jurisdiction of your instance and allow others to moderate within the jurisdiction of their instance” as well as “all instances of the federation must federate with all other members of the federation council” then federate under this agreement and refuse to federate with anyone that does not agree to the federation council and its terms of federation.

This would eliminate most games and make matters of disagreements between instances a matter of the federation council instead.

There is a lot of good reasons why a host shouldn’t allow anybody to post anything on their site. I don’t know of many good reasons for why they should. I think most admins consider their own servers their jurisdictions. I’m always open for new perspectives.

This isn’t how it feels as a user though. As a user, if I am responding to something that is posted to the lemmy.ml community I feel like I am posting to the lemmy.ml community. If another instance is federated to lemmy.ml that to me feels like consent to share lemmy.ml community content in return for the mutual exchange of lemmy.ml receiving lemmygrad content (or any other instance), under the understanding this cross pollination is cross pollination of userbases but also content itself which improves the reason to be on lemmy (content is why people are here) and is mutual growth at the same time.

As a user, if I comment on a lemmygrad.ml thread rehosted to here via federation, I expect the people at lemmygrad to see the comments I might make from here. I feel that I am posting to lemmygrad.ml via proxy of Lemmy. I don’t feel that I am posting to a copy of the lemmygrad.ml post rehosted on lemmy that may or may not also rehost what I post in the copy here, maybe, if they haven’t individually performed a targeted defederation of me.

I’m using lemmygrad as an example here because I want this to be about the mechanics of this function itself and how it feels as a user.

The ideal in my mind is that the communities themselves are jurisdictions of their own instances. Agreement between federated instances would be to not take action against users for their behaviour on other instances, and to maintain moderation within their own instance and at behaviour specifically within their own instance. If they don’t want like how another instance moderates they can hash it out with that instance via the federation backchannels or leave the federation entirely and not receive the benefits of the growth or cross pollination of ideas and content that comes with being part of the federation. That also just fundamentally makes more sense from a user experience perspective, that you are following the rules of whatever instance you are posting or commenting to, and the subrules of the community within that instance and won’t be subject to what feel like bizarre overreaches of jurisdiction or ideologically targeted silencing.