It seems that the issue was resolved behind closed doors, so it could have been resolved behind closed doors to begin with, and then if the defederation was to go ahead simply announce the defederation.
Making an announcement "it will be defederated in 48 hours" made for this weird countdown drama thread (we even had programming.dev people show up and be sad about defederation!) that didn't really go anywhere, and then y'all just locked it when we refederated and made it clear that you were never interested in input and you'll be running the instance as you please (which is well within your rights of course). So what was the point of the thread?
I can see how it is nice to have warning if a community you're involved in is going to be defederated, but it also drags drama to our nice little corner of the fediverse, and pins it at the top of our feeds for all to see. In fact it shows up as the top of every feed for me, Local, All, and Subscribed. I can't get away from it.
Every time these threads show up they end up blowing up. Honestly, if you didn't make these threads, I wouldn't care who you defederate. But because the thread exists, I have to come in and I have to have an opinion. That's a personal issue and I recognize that, but I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only one. People who have never interacted with Blahaj nor the instance getting defederated show up in these threads sometimes. These threads invite drama, and for me personally, whenever they come up they make this space feel significantly less safe and make me want to leave Lemmy as a whole because it feels like it's just nonstop defederation drama for days at a time, but it's pinned at the top of my feed.
Maybe these threads actually provide utility, and I should just take these threads as a sign I should take a break from the Internet for a bit. But to me, they just seem like they're all downsides.
There is technically a roundabout way you can do it although it involves a bit of actions
I havent fully tested it so may need some variation of the actions to work but:
cant you just make an instance-only community, call it meta, post that kinda posts there and have instance-users just auto join that instead?
ugh, wakata wakata: THERE NO INSTANCE ONLY COMMUNITIES I GET IT
If it were possible, that is exactly what I would do! But lemmy doesn't have such a feature at this time.
What about a bot that automatically removes post/comments and bans people from other instances from the community?
I can do that part manually, but if you stop them interacting completely, it just makes it worse. When they can see it but can't interact, the trolling, the fake signups, the spam etc kicks in.
Ok I can see how that could make a drama thread worse.
Only other workaround I can think of is a setting up a second instance that only federates with blahaj.zone. But that wouldn't show up on the local feed and there may be federation quirks im not aware of.
i dont use matrix (anymore {until synapse stops hogging all the ram and shitting all over the database [with federation enabled] or dendrite gets an import/run-from-synapse-db-solution}) but matrix certainly has instance-only (or private or something) rooms... not perfect, but maybe better than "federation quirks"
the issue is there isnt such thing as an instance-only community
if you mimic the actions I did above but on the community level rather than the post level you might be able to do it but new instances pulling the community for federation after you did it wouldnt be affected by that so you would need to seed it in the instances ahead of time or keep doing it
a second way would be reaching out to other admins to remove the community from their instance but that involves talking to a ton of different instances
Instance only communities don't exist, but a separate instance like blahaj.local that only fedderates with Blahaj.zone could work similarly but wouldn't show up in the local feed.
I don't really think that's a great idea, I think local-only posts are a better idea, there are reasons someone from another instance might want to post on the meta instance, such as a problem related to the instance. It's better to have posts be marked as local only and not federate out but still have the Town Square open and public, so to speak.