I think it has become more than apparent that our federation with Hexbear has degraded the quality of browsing on this instance. I'm generally for open federation, but the amount of brigading and general toxicity is not conducive to the friendly communications that make Lemmy great.
I'm honestly tired of seeing the constant Hexbear defederation posts popping up on /all from other instances' meta communities, and now sadly our own.
The features to defederate on a per-user basis are coming: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397
For anyone who can't wait, it is honestly easier to sign up on another instance who has already defederated. This is not reddit, you're not penalised or restricted for having a brand new account somewhere. You also don't need to type an essay if there's an application, just prove you're human.
Its ubiquitous for a reason. They have been nothing but trouble since they federated.
I wouldnt even mind defederating them for now and then deleting the blacklist once the instance blocking feature is added.
From that pull request:
"My PR only hides communities from that instance, but not users."
So no, it's not defederation on a per-user basis.