exploding-heads are infiltrating our discussions
The screenshot shows the recommendations from https://join-lemmy.org/.
Still being federated with exploding-heads does not mean the instance supports them. But it means that shit-heads are allowed to take part in the discussions on their communities. They do intoxicate the discussions we will have. They will attack minorities. Maybe you will not be harassed by them, more vulnerable people will be. They are allowed to moderate communities on these instances. Exploding-heads members actively guide young and unknowing people to their hateful instance.
They try to start discussions about the holocaust https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268. They create communities only to crosspost exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma They take over discussions against them https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189 "WHY are vulnerable people joining a decentralized system? Isnt this why you want a closed, not for public eyes community?"
This was a link to exploding-heads, because when someone copies a permalink of a comment from them on another instance, it will be a link to their instance.
Are we building a place where vulnerable people are welcome and safe or are we building a place where nazis are welcome and safe?
They want you to block them, they comment that everywhere. They block people who are in favor of defederating them https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 When their opponents won't see them anymore, they can harass and recruit without being noticed.
Blocking will not solve the problem. They will spread even when you close your eyes.
Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now there is a post with a list of 'health communities on Lemmy' with the first entry guiding to exploding heads. https://lemmy.world/post/396561
It is still possible that some of the mentioned instances do support them. The owner of sh.itjust.works says that because of “free speech” all other instances would be allowed. It is suspicious to me that his line is drawn only for lemmygrad https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474
The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.
I’d like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that’s all about and report back?
At the same time they seem to ignore the call and vote to defederate with exploding-heads https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483.
They rejected to delete The_Donald from sh.itjust.works until they feared to get isolated from the other instances: https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored early warnings. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248). TD was more important to them than keeping the only mod of their 4th biggest community c/patientgamers (https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747, https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922)
Since The_Donald was removed, I did not find more racist content on the mentioned servers. That is part their tactics. They act harmless but recruit to their instance, attract likeminded people and chase others away. Discussions on sh.itjust.works about such topics are very toxic already, soon they might be able to do more harm.
(My research is very limited, as i could not search for all exploding-heads member content on other instances by entering their domain. I know there are nice communities on sh.itjust.works.)
What can be done? On joinmastodon.org there is a Mastodon Server Covenant with very few useful rules, one of them is "Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia". https://joinmastodon.org/covenant It would be a first step to implement these rules for join-lemmy.org. At least instances that want to be recommended on there should have to agree to that rule.
More actions should be taken now. Please make suggestions. Things will only become more complicated. The next reddit wave is incoming.
For those who did not already know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?
-Share/crosspost
-Contact admins
update: lemmy.word defederated eh
Exploding-heads.com has been blocked by https://lemmy.world as well.
Full list of our linked and blocked instances can be found here: https://lemmy.world/instances
King
I've thought about making a feature request for Lemmy itself to support this, but would you guys ever consider some kind of page with all the blocked instances and why they were blocked?
Reverse search: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=exploding-heads.com
Good. Are you actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
Ofcourse. We will come up with an official statement soon and then I will edit my top post to link it but honestly this action was a no-brainer. Unanimous decision from everyone involved.
Why do you have to sound like such a douchebag about this?
As soon as you fix your op.
They are going to cause issues sooner rather than later in communities that don’t defederate from them. It’s quite literally just a given. I’m shocked some of those instances haven’t defederated from them already.
A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me
I think the whole attitude of "oh just block the community and ignore it" really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren't cut off preemptively. You aren't deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.
The question I always find myself asking is, why is it that people only expect the targets of abuse to do the filtering of that abuse, and why, other than you yourself would like to enact abuse, would you want to leave people engaging in abusive behavior in position to continue being abusive? Beehaw has lamented there not being more flexible moderation tools allowing us to perform more powerful moderation actions, enabling the filtration of abuse on otherwise good servers, but until those tools exist, what good reason is there to ignore and enable abuse?
It's this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷♂️.
Americans who understand the first amendment will tell you that freedom of association is inseparable from freedom of expression. The government (plus its agents) is the only entity constrained by the First Amendment. Everyone else benefits from it, including certain instance owners who don't want to associate with certain others.
I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those "free speech absolutist" types. It's a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.
That's why I moved there from lemmy.world. I'd rather not have somebody else tell me what to think or see.
You cannot have a space which is welcoming to nazis which is also welcoming to minorities.
Nobody is telling you what to "think or see" when an instance gets deferderated. You're welcome to think whatever you like, and to go seek it out. You're just not welcome to bring it into some spaces.
Yep. And (obviously) America is going to one day be forced to come to that same understanding that Germany was painfully forced to. I'm just hopeful it doesn't take a genocide or some sort of dictatorship for a similar reckoning to occur. Germany might not be perfect, but there are many things American society could learn from that exist within modern day German culture especially in regards to cultural reconciliation with historical wrongs. It's hard to really describe how happy it makes me feel that as a Jewish person I can say I would feel very safe and welcome living in and visiting most places in Germany, but it also makes me sad to an immense degree that I can truthfully say I'd probably feel safer most places there than in the most places in the states right now... :(
If censorship is the answer, why have years of censorship failed to eradicate undesirable ideologies?
The same way that depends is the answer, yet Donald Trump is still incontinent.
Fucking christian fundamentalists fascists. They are a fucking cancer in every social media platform.
The worst thing it's they are being funded by the conservative elite nations to speak fascist hate all over the internet.
It's super effective! Humanity hurt itself in its confusion!
A tale as old as time
They are very much bad too. But christians are the dominant religion in western nations, which are the core audience of social media. Islamic fundamentalist thus simply do not have a similar presence as Christianity does on social media.
Both fundamentalists are crazy bastards but the ones with power and money are more dangerous.
It's almost like they're both bad, but one is a more immediate problem. Al Qaeda may have taken down the twin towers, but they never tried to launch a coup and get Roe V Wade overturned.
original, innovative, unprecedented
also, yknow, a complete lie
I bitch about Islam constantly. Almost as much as I bitch about Christianity. Being in the USA, Christianity negatively effects my life far more than Islam does so it's a higher priority to complain about.
They're playing the traditional Alt-Right playbook, and they're playing a bunch of instance admins like fiddles. I've noticed a consistent pattern of abusive trolls being from that instance. My secondary account is on sh.itjust.works, and I'm looking for another instance to be my secondary instance that I use to look at lemmy.world content I can't see from this, my primary account. Thus far, there aren't any instances I can find that have a federation / defederation list that matches my ideal list, so for now, I have my happy account and my "it stresses me out" account.
It seems like there are two camps here in the threadiverse. People who are excited to find an instance admin who moderates the way they like, and people who think an instance admin is only responsible for uptimes and that this entire experiment should be fully unmoderated
I have a secondary at lemm.ee, but i don't think i want to keep it after this. I'm definitely looking into dbzer0. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hey, for the record, bigotry is not allowed on lemm.ee, and I have no problems with defederatating any instance which encourages its users to break that rule in any of our communities (or to harm our users in other ways).
Is there an easy way to carry over my subscriptions to a new account?
I made a script just for that https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it's the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that'd be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you're not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.
If you are interested in doing so I'd be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.
Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don't defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.
Being outside of the US, I wasn't aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it's easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.
If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don't see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.
I'm sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven't already.
I'm strongly considering hosting a KBin instance
I may not be able to help too specifically with that then as I don't have any experience with it, but I would still encourage you to do so. One of the helpful folks in [email protected] would probably know more about Kbin specifically.
It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head. I'll either be able to do a great job of it with my devops background, or a terrible job of it with my devops fulltime job
Ah, hello fellow DevOp. If I were to apply some of the stuff I do for clients, I'd end up with an AWS bill bigger than my car payment... It's really neat to see just how far your dollar can go running on a non "Big 3" cloud provider, or even in my homelab. And then weighing that efficiency and limited feature set with availability... fun times
Last I tired to set one up the docker image just vomits. The install instructions are for ubuntu, but everything in my server farm is all debian and they don't have the same versions of packages so it doesn't work.
I could spin up an Ubuntu instance and try the manual install instructions again, but having a one off system doesn't make me happy.
IMO the best defense is education. Make these people and their bigotry known. I had not heard of them before this post, but now I can be on alert for them, and avoid interacting with them and report them in the future.
Making the basic rules like Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia should be a no brauner. Pls add this rule
German "braun" = brown => nazi
What a beautiful typo.
Absolutely agree that instances featured in http://join-lemmy.org/ should all follow those basic rules:
Concerning to see that both
vlemmy.netandlemmy.worldare federated with them; I'm mainly on these."Yes but who gets to decide that What is racism, sexism and homophobia and transphobia?"
Who watches the watchmen Batman? Who Rorascshes the big blue dong? Hmmm??
We should pretty much give up and let society be nothing but anarchism because trying might lead to failure, and then where would we be??
Ohio. No one wants to be Ohio.
Except maybe Ohio. Disgusting
I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don't permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won't interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don't like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.
I will take action against:
The first rule on my instance is a catch-all "Be welcoming", that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just "racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia".
As an admin I don't have the time or desire to police:
I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the "All" feed, at the very least for anyone who isn't logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.
I really don't want to see that done, because right now that has been my primary method of community discovery, outside of the small number I've discovered through explicit Reddit migrations.
/all should be a feed of everything available to users on your instance. That's...what the word "all" means. Defederating is the way to curate that. An instance being able to block individual communities within another instance could be a good tool to have as well, perhaps, but beyond that I'm not sure I would want to see curation of /all.
I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of "Suggested" feed rather than a replacement for "All", like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I'd just take being able to filter the "All" view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.
Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created "All" is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere... I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.
That's pretty much my philosophy on my instance.
I've only defederated instances for pedo (usually loli) crap - I don't want their communities in the "All" feed. I don't want users joining my instance to access such things (when they upload images, even when posting on remote communities, that gets hosted on MY server).
That and spam.
Yeah, illegal things are sort of an existential threat to any instance, so I will not hesitate to defederate over embracing of and failure to moderate such content at an admin/instance level. That is another one of the rules on my instance.
Even if these servers federate with exploding heads, the individual servers would still moderate content coming from exploding heads users on their servers, no? I agree that there are clearly a lot of shitty users there, but I have not seen a strong argument from you on how federating with them is a problem. Their content here is actively moderated.I could very well be wrong, in which case I will eat my words, but it seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.Just took a quick browse of their instance, eww...
Join an instance that does not allow local communities. Then you can subscribe remotely to whatever you want and block whatever you don't.
"First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me"
Watch for those instances that choose to defederate from the communist instances, for the most effective anti-fascists have been the communists.
10 million fascists were killed, wounded or captured during the Second War War on the eastern front.
Watch for free speech absolutists, centrists, and those who claim to be apolitical. Silence is violence. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
yall got defederated because defending genocides, supporting political killings and telling folks to go kill themselves is entirely allowed on your instance
openly supporting and arguably calling for the killing of political opponents, highly upvoted and left up for days now
explicitly and unambiguously telling people to kill themselves with 0 repercussions despite moderator action later in the thread
So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?
Is there much of a difference nowadays?
That comment sounds a little bigoted.
Not to me. It sounds quite sane.
A little of column A, a little of Columbine
Sharp!
Interesting
Tiny, edgy instance. I haven't found any nazis yet.
ELI5 (because I signed up about an hour ago) - what's wrong with the Exploding Heads instance? I thought about joining up because I suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome (really)
Theyre basically the_Donald: fediverse edition. They troll, raid, and generally cause problems across the threadiverse in the name of promoting their authoritarian world view
Oh, fuck that. I'm so tired of that shit.
I'm not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.
Sounds like you're pretty anti-one side, even if you don't want to admit it
Thinks... Well, one side generally annoy me more than the other side.
I can generally be around right wingers longer than left wingers and traditionally the right have been more tolerant of libertarians like myself, so I guess maybe.
It's not about that they are Christian fundamental fascists
Yeah you know what? I've had enough of fundies, I'll leave that thought there.
Good to see that my admins already dealt with it.
Here's the thing, while I don't think Nazi views should be supported this is a general instance and as such there are going to be a lot of shitty people here, Nazi's included. The strength of the fediverse is that we can make our own instance "with blackjack and hookers" so to speak. There are already instances, in fact, that are a lot more strict in who they allow. Again, this is not a support for these views as I don't support hate for anyone. It's the paradox of tolerance dictates that the intolerant will eventually take over, which is why we cannot be tolerant of fascism, hate, Nazi's, etc.
As a lemmy.one user I will move to somewhere else after bringing this up. Any recommended places to move to?
sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net, beehaw.org, or lemmy.dbzer0.com are the current instances that have moderation styles I appreciate. Take that with a grain of salt that you and I may be different people and may like different things. Sopuli and Beehaw are general purpose. Sopuli federates with more (non-nsfw) instances. Beehaw is more actively moderated (and doesn't defederate from lemmynsfw.com, if that's something you're into). slrpnk is ecological friendliness focused, and dbzer0 is internet piracy focused.
They don't? I thought they did? I don't see it in their banned instance list.
For which one? Here's Sopuli's, and as you can see, lemmynsfw.com is listed as blocked. Here's Beehaw's, and as you can see, lemmynsfw.com has not been blocked. Unless you're asking about exploding-heads, in which case all four block exploding heads
Ah I meant lemmynsfw, I thought you were saying that beehaw blocked it which it doesnt show as blocked for me. Is there any reasoning why sopuli blocked lemmynsfw? I never saw any announcement that they did about that and am curious as to why.
Haha nah, I was trying to say the opposite. If I had to guess at why the different stances on lemmynsfw.com, I'd guess that sopuli.xyz explicitly forbids porn in the rules, whereas beehaw's rules don't make any such direct provisions. Part of it, I'm sure, is just the legal ramifications. All of these instances are run on volunteer compute hours, and if the sopuli admin doesn't think they can deal with the legal parameters of porn, then it would make a ton of sense to look at the porn instance and say "Yeah no, I don't have time to figure out what the legalities of caching that, or not collecting people's ages are on my instance before they head over there, just gonna defederate and stop worrying."
bless our lords at Sopuli for pre-removing these apparent EH people before I even knew they existed <3
I'm building that list and no, it wasn't intentional. It being first is completely accidental. As you can see, "general health" communities are at the top, and well the one from xheads is the most general purpose (another one is on Midwest US and the other is Mander so more scientific).
I didn't know or even care where the communities come from. In the post I clearly state I don't vouch for any of them, and people can let me know if they think some don't belong.
I called for help or advice on multiple occasions, guess how many people offered any? Zero.
Honestly until this post I didn't even know there's any controversy with that instance. I never visited it, it's just been under my radar. I know some instances don't like other instances and it just becomes noise to me, honestly.
I don't know what would you have me do here? Remove the link? What other links should I remove because some instances have some oddball users? Should I remove Lemmygrad links too?
I'm not claiming to be the Red Cross or anything, but I was hoping to have a neutral list that's as complete as possible.
This may seem like a problem specific to this list of mine, but see how easy to suddenly be indirectly accused of supporting nazis or something. Let's not be so hasty alright?
Btw, I was just about to try to figure out how or if to include lgbtq+ matters in the health community, and wanted to go ask some actual lgbtq+ people because I want their input rather than just guess myself. Now I'm wondering if I'd also be accused of being a provocateur or something else for trying to be open to everyone.
This isn't so complicated as you are making it. You didn't write the comment in stone-- now that you have been informed, remove any links to the instance.
And not for nothing, it takes 30 seconds to see that the most prolific user in that health community is the admin of the entire server, and maybe about 30 seconds to find a post where they complain about "globalists". A little due diligence wouldn't have hurt.
I know. My point was that everyone has some political disagreement with someone else, and I can't care about those feuds or I'd have no list.
The snowflake people literally cannot handle neutrality. Their heads start exploding.
I think most lemmy devs are focused on preparing for the expected surge of new users on July 1st. I suspect after that they will have more time to turn there attention to issues like this.
Shit, to what server should I move that doesn't federate with nazis? Idc how they call themselves these days, you know what I mean with nazis
Also I see the name lemmygrad thrown around, what's the story with them?
The questions aren't specifically for OP
Lemmygrad.ml is an instance for Marxist-Leninists and other Socialists who are broadly pro-AES (Actually Existing Socialism, i.e. the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, East Germany, etc.) and anti-West. Criticism of AES is fine; but the assumption is that you're there because you think AES is better than Actually Existing Capitalism. If you've ever heard of podcasts like TrueAnon or The Deprogram (or even Chapo Traphouse, to some extent, though they're more "ML-sympathetic" than "Outright Marxist-Leninists"), it'll give you a general idea of what sort of politics they're about.
Lemmygrad is where Leftist Redditors go when their favorite subs (/r/ChapoTrapHouse, /r/MoreTankieChapo, /r/FULLCOMMUNISM, /r/GenZedong) get banned or quarantined.
I'm not a big Lemmy-head, but I saw this post on lemmygrad so I assume that means your instance is federated with lemmygrad.
I fucking love Chapo.
Let's say I'm technically affiliated to the biggest ML party of the country where I come from, am I going to find marxists, or is it more of an American leftist thing?
You're gonna have a preponderance of users from the imperial core (hard to avoid that on the internet), but a significant number of users are from the imperial periphery.
Most of the posters are Americans, but more "PSL" American Leftists than "DSA" American Leftists.
lmao gottem
Also it looks like lemmy.world (your home instance) has elected to defederate from exploding heads. They're becoming an interesting sociological study as I noticed a pattern early on of them having a lot of chud-y types, but it seems like the admin staff at lemmy.world is not interested in being an instance that tolerates that kind of behavior (which I realize now, looking at the code of conduct on mastodon.world, should have been expected eventually to become the norm). This gives me high hopes for Beehaw and lemmy.world being refederated with eachother sooner rather than later. Lemmy.world is probably still fighting an uphill battle with how rudimentary moderation tools are on this platform, but it warms my soul to see
Lemmygrad is a pro-authoritarian socialist instance
As far as instances that don't federate with exploding heads, there's sopuli.xyz, beehaw.org, slrpnk.net, and Lemmy.dbzer0.com
The first two are general purpose instances. Sopuli is kinda the most traditionally run instance. Its actively moderated, but its unlikely to defederate from an instance just because its big and moderating traffic from it is more than they can handle. Beehaw DOES defederate from instances that generate more traffic than they can manage. This is where my primary account is because the moderation style of "make the community a pleasant place to be regardless of the popularity of other instances' popularity" is definitively my speed.
Slrpnk and dbzer0 are focused instances. Slrpnk is focused on ecological friendliness, sustainability, and making the physical world a more survivable space. They describe themselves as not trying to create a Utopian (impossibly idealistic) society, but rather a eutopian (acheivably idealistic) society. Dbzer0 is focused on digital anarchism. The slogan on their instance admin's website alludes to the 90s slogan "You wouldn't download a car" by effectively saying "yes I would, and I intend to." I would say their mission is also eutopian in nature, but less focused on making our physical world more sustainable, but instead on the idea that the world would be more diverse and interesting if we put everything, and I mean EVERYTHING into the public domain. I'm not 100% sure I agree, but I definitively respect the ethos and the dedication to it. I guess what I'm saying is check it out, here them out, they're not harmful or abusive. They're filled with convictions, and I'd probably enjoy hanging out with them
Shoutout to dbzer0 for keeping the piracy megathread alive!
Im just glad that lemmy.dbzer0.com exists where everyone, who want to download a car, can gather around.
Regarding the authoritarianism question. It is impossible not to be authoritarian. If anything I suggest reading the short pamphlet On Authority by Frederick Engels.
Thanks, that was really informative. Beehaw sounds more like my kind of thing, as my Mastodon instances (the ones I'm in, not that I own them) are also small, chill places that prioritise user wellbeing over popularity. I'll need to look into migration, or just directly opening a new account, as this one isn't that long lived. Thanks again
They have an Andrew Tate tweet as the second post, pass
There’s no feasible way to stop people of a specific ideology from using an open source piece of software. You say blocking isn’t the answer but I’m not sure what more you can expect. Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector, what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?
The most realistic solution I can think of is letting instances or users subscribe to curated blacklists. Something akin to Adblock or email server spam blacklists.
Defederation, that's one of the key concepts of the fediverse
It keeps them from participating by demoting them to the kids table, but you're still in a glass house to some extent.
I think this is the right answer, but the structure is going to require some amount of frequent drama just like this every time. You can keep an open federation policy until proven malicious, or you can verify partners, but I don't see the way around discussions.
Blocking an entire instance is still blocking.
A thing you can do apart from blocking is talking about it and raising awareness.Thight balancing though with doing "outrage marketing" for or making a self fulfilling prophecy.
If you are engaged, you could document malicous behaviour from them, so they can't work in the shadows and their real intends are widely known. Truth is: few people like Nazis
As interesting a problem as this might be (my final year undergrad project was similar in nature), the nuance of written word can be significant and difficult to detect. Making a good product and then ensuring multiple communities would adopt it is not realistic in 2023.
What is realistic, however, is a zero tolerance policy against such individuals. What we should be doing is ostracizing them. You take away their platform, you take away their power. They can only do so much damage if they're all gathered up in a single community with no ties or influence to the rest of the world.
Who enforces your zero tolerance policy on a decentralized platform? What action do they take to enforce it that isn’t blocking the offenders?
To be clear I’m saying that blocking is the only realistic solution so efforts should be focused on ways to make that easier and more effective. The only issue I have is the suggestion that blocking is somehow insufficient. '
Thank you for working hard at making this a place I like to be.
I think I am missing something here, can someone explain a few terms for me by chance?
What the hell does Fediverse mean? What the hell does Federated mean? What the hell does Defederated mean?
Let's start with federation. Federation is a concept where in two socially enabled sites can send eachother updates about hosted content so that users of one site can see content from the other without leaving their preferred site. Defederation is when a site elects to no longer send or receive updates to another site. The fediverse is a vast topology of many sites that use a shared protocol to federate with eachother
So just to clarify, as I migrated from the other website I refuse to mention, I assume that site is not Federated, and Lemmy is? And Exploding***-Heads is another instance?
Reddit is indeed not a federation capable platform. It is purely centralized. Lemmy and Kbin are both part of the Fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol, along with other social media platforms such as (but not limited to) mastodon, pelorma, calckey, misskey, and pixelfed. Exploding-Heads is, indeed, an instance separate from the instance you're on (lemmy.ml) or the one I'm on (slrpnk.net)
Thanks for the response. I just have more questions now >.<
Am I able to login to any of these instances with the same account? I.e. this skiba account I am on?
If they are not the "same" then why are you able to view Lemmy.ml from the instance of Slrpnk.net?
Sorry for asking for an ELI5 but my curiosity lingers
Sure! So, you cannot log in to any server using the same identity. For better and for worse, your identity is attached to a server (or more accurately, a server is attached to your identity) so your login will only work with one server. As far as how we can both see each other's stuff, that answer likes within the ActivityPub specification. I haven't read fully into the spec, but the executive summary is that your server just displays information it has cached, and that other servers send it information to cache.
When you look at any feed, comment section, or thread, you are looking at an aggregated presentation of content from many servers that your server sends and receives messages to. As such, your feed is a reflection of both the content you have expressed an interest in by subscribing to it or clicking into it, but also the moderation style of the admin of the instance attached to your identity. As such, it is important to distinguish that it is factually inaccurate to say that which server you join when you sign up doesn't matter.
Finding a server that is run the way you would want a server to be run will not be an instant process. The first step is to read the documents that an instance you've found has socialized. Do the rules sound good? The second step is to look at the local feed on that instance. Are you interested in the posts? Do any of them raise red flags? The third step is to sign up for the instance and try it out. Does it feel good to be there?
Obviously, since we're already having this conversation, you've signed up for lemmy.ml. No matter how rigorous your vetting process, you still did enough to say you were interested in what was going on there, even if you didn't fully understand it. Imagine if someone's first impression of Lemmy was slrpnk.net. It would look like there isn't that much activity, and all of it is about ecology and climate change. Meanwhile, you went to lemmy.ml and didn't notice anything off. Done. That was a step.
So now. That final step after you've signed up for an instance where you decide if you're going to stick around. This is where you pay attention to if there are consistent moderation issues with the instance you are on. To describe my personal experience, slrpnk.net is the third instance I've signed up for. The first instance I signed up for was on beehaw.org, and that remains my primary account. But about 3 weeks ago, Beehaw decided to defederate from a pair of large instances because they didn't have the capacity to moderate the onslaught of content coming from those instances. I was subscribed to a few communities on those instances. I had been enjoying content coming from them. Most of the users weren't problematic. So, I figured I'd set up a secondary account on another instance to view the content I was missing out on. I would just do my own blocking of content I would rather not see, since Lemmy and KBin provide better blocking tools than Reddit ever did.
That secondary account quickly ran into problems as the moderators from that instance let too much slide, by far. This is where the other part of deciding if you want to stay on an instance comes into play. I noticed in my time on that secondary instance a pattern of liking what people from slrpnk.net had to say about things (as well as disliking what people from exploding-heads had to say). I decided I wanted to be on an instance where I wasn't constantly blocking content from one instance because it was already defederated. When I saw slrpnk.net was in fact defederated from exploding-heads, I knew it was a good landing place since I already felt a spirit of agreement with their userbase, so I joined.
I hope that clears things up. As much as possible, I want to reduce how intimidating all of this can seem. I've been interested in the fediverse for a long time. It's only recently really gotten a way to interact with it that both has enough people on it to seem worthwhile AND matches the ways I like interacting with the internet (on forums). I realize it can look a little odd for someone with young accounts (@[email protected], @[email protected] , and @[email protected] are all me) to speak at length about these topics. I first signed up for a mastodon instance in 2016, and I had many of the same questions and confusion you did. I want to give people a more comfortable on ramp than I had.
Does all of that help?
Uhhhhhhh, absolutely! This is a massive reply and I am appreciative of that. I am sure that many other people reading are also sort of in the same mindset or (where the hell am I really?). I still am a tad confused as to why this account will not work on other instances, but I guess you do explain why here in this response.
Appreciate the time and effort :)
The only instance I’d ever recommend my friends to join is beehaw.org and that’s why I love it. Otherwise it’s the wild Wild West.
My instance is so far to browse Lemmy Fediverse. There are no local communities. It is for a bunch of friends only.
Does it make any damages if it doesn’t de-federate from these or other problematic instances? Genuine question.
Only you and your friends would notice, so that's up to you and them to decide
These people can kick rocks. Defederate, whatever, I won't be missing anything.
This is exactly why I expect the Fedipact holders to end up talking only among themselves. In order to truly defederate from Meta, they would have to recursively defederate from everyone that does not explicitly block Meta as well.
the insane irony of leaving reddit, a place that has fallen to rampant censorship in order to become profitable, to make our own place only to do exactly what they're doing, but no one is getting paid for it. you're not going to get rid of these people just because to defederate with them.
I think the main reasons reddit censored people is power and they can't take people not thinking like they do. Sadly, at this point in time Lemmy is a same.
the only reason any of these companies do anything when it concerns profit or jail time. they delisted all the porn subs because of the advertisers, and the site has never been the same since.
Okay. Power, remove wrong think, & money are the reasons.
After thinking about. Lemmy not has bad as reddit. But it can be. Defederation can be used has a weapon against people.
no one at reddit banned NSFW content from the front page because of a power trip.
I added profit/money to the list of reasons reddit censor users. I'm on your side on this.
no you're not, you don't understand what i'm saying.
Federation is broken, if you're not on lemmy.world you're not in the real Lemmy
So stop doing a mastodon Lemmy. Shit's getting too complicated. If it matters which instance you join, that means you have to choose which one, that means you have to read each instance manifesto for the right fit. That means 99% of new users already realized this isn't going to work out and returned to Reddit
lemmy.ml is where the real ones are !
Then Lemmy is another centralized Reddit like
Federation is broken, if you're not on lemmy.world you're not in the real Lemmy
So stop doing a mastodon Lemmy. Shit's getting too complicated. If it matters which instance you join, that means you have to choose which one, that means you have to read each instance manifesto for the right fit. That means 99% of new users already realized this isn't going to work out and returned to Reddit
The problem is that the articles from exploring heads take an average of two sentences to reach an obvious and malicious lie. There is no room for discussion under those circumstances.
For those who don't respect the authority of conservatives as the arbiters of reality, they have no purpose except as a glimpse into the abyss. It's like having your stream of memes interrupted every few pages by a graphic crime scene photo, only with the dread that comes with knowing that the criminal has a wide support base.
Because we can't block an entire instance as users. We have to do it piecemeal, which is a major pain in the ass when every c/ on there is bloated shit.
Once lemmy ships that as a function, defederation isn't necessary for this kind of situation.
And, there's also the factor that it's easier for people who want to deal with their shit to intentionally find it than it is for everyone else to block it.
Because the same legion of full-time Eric Cartman impersonators smears the same hateful dogshit over normal comment threads. This is a lot more effective than individually banning every member of the inevitable asshat brigade. There's room for instances that federate with them, but it probably shouldn't be the default.
It is fascinating to watch a lot of people who got purged from social media for being too leftist and flocked to a defederated forum created by free speech enjoyers go on to immediately start complaining about the lack of censorship and damning the concept of free speech having learned nothing in the process.
The most popular suggestion here seems to be isolating yourselves from any part of the Fediverse which doesn't accept your demands. Now, if we could just get the Nazis to be stupid enough to follow in your footsteps and curtail their own methods of ideological propagation, this place might actually start to be kind of chill.
Instead they keep fucking talking to people and trying to convince them of stuff, which has proven vastly more efficient in achieving their goals. I am severely disappointed in all of you for making Nazis look intelligent by comparison.
I welcome your down votes, as disapproval from you is a mark that my brain is not grossly malfunctioning.
I'm so bigoted and alt right that I'm an anti capitalist far left Jew in a gay marriage who wants to see a revolution.
Are you beginning to see why I take pleasure in your disapproval? You are so materially fucking stupid that I consider it a mark of approval by the universe itself.
Yeah, except I am and literally everyone who knows me knows that I am and it's a well documented fact because I have a presence on the internet that you can literally just google and see for yourself.
I know this is fucking surprising for you, but Jewish people exist and can also be married to other men, and the majority of the present generation is on the left one way or the other.
Statistically speaking, you were bound to meet one eventually, and based on your behavior you were bound to inappropriately call them something they're not.
You have two paths here: You can remain in fantasy land fervently huffing your own farts and disbelieving the reality that sits in front of your face, or you can accept that you just called a pansexual anti-capitalist jewish leftist alt right and take the L for being such a trigger happy fucking moron.
Either way?
Suck my Jewish balls bitch! 😸
Why not fuck off to 4chan? Why are you even here?
"Created by free speech enjoyers"
Broski they could figuratively not be any more far left
It is difficult to find someone further left than me, and I enjoy free speech.
The problem with "Far left" is you could be talking about communists, or anarchists, or fucking stalinists, or me. There's a few other ideologies that you could label that way too.
Were you meaning the people who made [email protected] are communists? Because I don't really mind as long as I can say what I like here. I've never given an extraordinary amount of fucks what the ideology of a person hosting something I use is, so long as the thing works and they don't fuck with it too much.
I find centrists and liberals to be just as, if not more, frustrating than ML roleplayers. At least the ML roleplayers are similarly pissed off at landlords and capitalism. Yet, I take part in centrist/lib boards all the time and get plenty out of it. So why would I be upset the people who made a board are commies if that belief they hold isn't actively fucking me over?
Worst case scenario, if they do start fucking with it, I'll just ignore the board and use another one.
100%. Work together on stability, resilience and privacy while ignoring trolls? Hell no! Let’s focus on creating silos and sniffing our own farts first!
Telling the racists to get out is sniffing our own farts? Yeeeee, ok...
Then I hope you won't take my upvote as a mark that your brain is grossly malfunctioning :D
Trying to transitively get the world to defederate from everybody you don't like is a terrible idea. That will just lead to over moderation and the community becoming bland. Everybody will want somebody else defederated from everybody else which will destroy the interconnectedness of the fediverse. Pushed to it's extreme, citing the paradox of tolerance leada to Nazi or USSR levels of totalitarianism and fascism against any perceived thought crime.
They are defederated, that's a reasonable measure to get rid of most of it. Now just ignore it.
enjoy your echo chamber
their admin says clearly that “racism, bigotry, sexism is allowed" there.
Oh no! Anyway. Welcome to the internet. Not everyone is going to be nice.
No, but why should they be tolerated?
You are tolerated and you are the same as other people.
Given that at no time in human history has shit ever "just worked" without looking from an extremely narrow viewpoint, I think it's fairly easy to discern this Instance's goals: to be a bridge from the extreme right to the rest of the community.
Certainly fits the pattern.
That's a bit far-fetched. The name "shit just works" doesn't have any right-wing connotations. If you google it you get Bethesda memes and some Apple stuff.
I think the admin is just one dude who wasn't prepared for their instance to become so big. So far they've done the right thing given a couple days. Yesterday I saw an "anti vax" community on sh.itjustwor.ks, I reported it, today it's gone.
Until I see an actual "actually we should debate the Nazis" comment from them or maybe like a week has passed without action I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
It's not a meme. It's a paraphrasing of a basic philosophy that runs contradictory to most others in the modern world. You know it when you see it.
You can give the benefit of the doubt to whomever you like. But this is not some universal open communication platform like some may wish it to be. (we already have one of those, it's called 4chan) It's just a social media organization, just like dozens before it. That's why we have the tools that we do.
why does everything/everywhere have to be a "safe space"? just join at beehaw if you're so speshul that words literally wound you.
you know you can just block them yourself right? you don't have to force your opinion on everyone. if most people block them they will become just as isolated as if they were defederated anyways.
Why give them a platform and an audience to begin with? They're the scum of the earth. Fuck them.
Specifically, any fascist group is a conspiracy to commit murder. As such, there is no "free speech" reason to tolerate fascist organizing.
Edited to add: Discussion of fascist views is a different matter. I specifically mean people using your stuff to organize fascist groups or activities. If they're trying to rally people into a group that wants to murder Jews or LGBT+ or socialists or liberals, then they're not just discussing views — they're conspiring crimes, and you don't have any good reason to support them under "free speech" principles. Even the libertarians object to "force and fraud".
So, can we extend that to any communist group as well then?
no, conspiracy to commit murder is not an inherent aspect of communist ideology in the same way that it is integral to fascism
How's that? Every time I've pressed a communist about how they will deal with non conformity should their revolution succeed, they eventually agree that the plan is to kill them.
To be fair, if you don't conform with the laws in a liberal-democracy, you might eventually get killed too. Ideas like "property lines" and "don't drive on the wrong side of the road" are ultimately backed up by force.
If you go around driving on the left side of the highway in a country where the law says to drive on the right, eventually someone's gonna come stop you and you're lucky if that is somehow peaceful.
But that's a far cry from organizing a movement around "that ethnic group there, that sexual minority over there, and those miscegenators over there, must be exterminated for the purity of our nation".
I think that's just tribalism, not fascism. Merriam-webster defines fascism as:
You need to tick all the boxes to qualify.
because regardless or anecdotes, a communist ideal does not by definition necessitate a conspiracy to commit murder
even if not a single pacifist communist existed, and they do, itd still be totally possible to be both a pacifist and a communist
in contrast, violence is a fundamental part of what makes fascism fascism. a fascist party will never be pacifistic, because it would no longer be fascist
Come back down to the real world. People don't want communism unless you force them into it under the barrel of a gun. Communism means my individual wants, needs, and property is decided by the will of the people, which in reality translates to the will of a few dozen elite Party members at the top of the scheme. I'm not an ant in a colony.
As someone whose family has been massacred by Stalin's repressions while every single possession was stolen, I'm going to go ahead and not join your cult. Thanks. I bet if it happened again, you'd be cheering in support.
Indeed we should. To tired of reading the famous "eat the rich" speech. If you want to eat people, you are just a cannibal
because the power is in your hands? by ignoring them you are removing their influence. you don't pick up your baby every time it starts crying because then they will just start crying to get your attention.
Dude, your baby isn't a group of nazi's what are you on?
i don't think you have ever looked into why people join these kinds of groups.
sure some of them want attention, but others really do want to kill "undesirables" and people that make them uncomfortable
Yeah, but I gotta wonder why I should be a part of a community that federates with a hive of block fodder.
Then dont?
Cheers mate, good idea.
and that is your prerogative.
Worked for Hitler.
/s
this is the internet not the holocaust.
MOM!!! People are disagreeing with me!!!! :(
Pwease defederate
Lick my unwashed taint chud
Gross, you really want their tongue touching you?
Good point