Sure, I could block the users individually, but I prefer to just use an instance that de-federates from cesspools of such users.
Within just a few back and forths I realized that this person was either just bored and trolling, or I was unable to understand their perspective and it was relentless.
I still didn't block them, or their instance. I saw their message in the public timeline, it didn't arrive directly to me in any way.
1) "...it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU"
2) "But to just block their entire instance...is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them"
Unless your instance is specifically dedicated to taking action in EU politics are you not sweeping a bunch of humans under the carpet and not even attempting to communicate with them by blocking everyone outside of the EU from talking to you?
Forgive me if I missed something, I am just truly curious because you don't see some seemingly contradictory statements in close proximity often which makes it likely I am just missing some core fact.
My instance is a Swedish one, it's aimed at Swedish users. In the 1st few months of operation I was getting a lot of spam users registering and noticed this was a wide spread issue among instance admins.
So I made the decision to use a basic GeoIP block on the path used to register new accounts, blocking all IPs outside of EU to make the area wide in order to avoid blocking Swedes.
This caused my spam to go down to zero. At the same time I use several ActivityPub relay servers that make my public timeline so active that you can see posts appear every second. I'm quite happy with this solution and consider it a good method to use in general with federation.
I'd much rather see smaller localized communities using AP relaying to stay in touch with each other, than huge monolithic instances that vacuum up all the users.
What I mean when I say that you shouldn't block entire instances from federating just because of a few hateful users is that they're being blocked from the public timeline. Not being blocked from registering.
I'm as left as left gets, my family and friends are made up of several activists. But I also am annoyed with how hate speech and right wing people are moderated.
My opinion is that they should first of all be reasoned with. And if you can't reason with them then each user may block them on their own.
But to just block their entire instance, or "Gab", is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them. That goes against my core principles.