@TheDude What is the Deal with Lemmygrad and Are You Going to Block Other Instances for Personal Reasons?
EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
Hi Nahvi.
Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.
Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I've since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.
One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.
That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn't be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the "be a good human" category.
I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.
Hey dude, thanks for dropping by.
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the direction you're trying to herd cats towards.
@TheDude
Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.
I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you've struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.
I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.
I hope Lemmy will one day support defederating from content and users separately. As I wrote in other threads already, and I will just take your word for it that lemmygrad really is promoting hate speech, I can understand and support defederation from instances pr9moting hate speech, but at the same rime, it robs me of the opportunity to engage with tgeir users even on other platforms. As such, if the option to separately defederate from content and users ever becomes available, I hope the lemmygrad users will be federated again.
That's great but please define hate speech and give us some examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
Then how about not lock every discussion post as soon as you see people agreeing with you on who to defederate and actually allow discussion?
Are you planning to actively moderate against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
Why switch accounts? just say no.
I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I'll see if I can find it.
Thank you. I would be interested to read it.
Bear in mind, that lemmygrad.ml is not lemmy.ml. The latter instance is run by the devs.
Ah, thank you. I did overlook that distinction in that comment.
Both instances are run by the Lemmy devs
This is not really true. For the longest time pinging lemmy.ml would return the same ip address as lemmygrad.ml. The same people are hosting it. Lemmygrad is basically the real lemmy.ml. lemmy.ml is just the more public facing instance because they are funded through donations. Lemmygrad is the realization of their goal. Basically to house genzidong and spread CCP propaganda.
Lemmy.ml has a few people that post hundreds of things a day that skew pretty anti west and pro tanky to their worldnews community and a few others.
Yeah but they try to tone it down there. That's them behaving well
Then I stand corrected, thak you for clarifying.
That is quite the interesting thread. Especially that History of Lemmy link. Not sure what I expected but it wasn't that.
I’m gonna park my car here for this.
If this was one of the larger instances that has defederated a bunch of instances like lemmy.world, I wouldn't have blinked that it defederated another one. Sh.itjust.works has exactly two blocked instances, one of which seems to invite pedos the other seems like a political group. In my mind, those are a bit different and worth asking a question or two about before deciding this place isn't as welcoming as it seemed from the outside.
They are supporters of authoritarian regimes who regularly raid comment sections and spam communities to push their views. The above comment said who decided, the instance owners. If you'd like to know who they are you can visit the instances that have them blocked and check who the owner is.
When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml "Introduce yourself" thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying "Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are" (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact words).
When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and "fighting" people isn't something I want to see here.
Well that's a shitty person then. I'm a ML and I joined over there on a different account because I like talking communism without the western prejudices. (ie people using Tankie as a slur but can't define why)
That and communism memes are fun. Good discourse on organizing ect.
That sounds like a good reason to block that idiot or maybe even that community from my own thread, but I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don't need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
On the other hand, blocking burggit so I don't have simulated CP showing up in my feed is not the kind of choice that I need clarification about.
it seems like you have a fundamental issue with instances like sh.itjust.works and would be better off joining a different one, or even better making your own then
Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.
I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.
lemm.ee has not blocked any instances for anything other than bot activity as far as i know, if youre interested
Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world
I hadn't really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.
Lemm.ee is only banning instances that have abnormal growth (i.e. They didn't enable captcha, have maybe 7 active users, and suddenly go from 30 total registrations to 52000 in a couple of days). Other than that there is nothing banned for ideological reasons unlike sh.itjust.works and other instances.
I would argue that even lemmygrad isn't an ideological ban, it's an anti-brigading/trolling ban. There are plenty of marxist-leninist folk on lemmy.ml that share the same philosophy, but don't go full "ATTACK THE HEATHEN" like lemmygrad does.
I hope you find an instance that fits your needs. I honestly do.
What this place is hasn't really been decided yet. The first few days were IT guys and generally techy people that liked the server setup. Then we had a big influx of users and the predictable chaos that follows. Then general ideas and frameworks started being put down by our admin and mods to try and steer that chaos.
You've walked in the door right as we're trying to figure out what we want this place to be and how we want to run it.
Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment.
You would save yourself time by making your own instance, and run it how you like. We did that, and thousands of other people have, too. It’s not hard.
I am not too worried about the technical difficulties of hosting an instance, but I really don't want to deal with the social ones. I would rather sit back and appreciate @TheDave for the trouble he and the other admins go through.
There isn’t much to worry about. We made our instance at the same time as sh.itjust.works but didn’t get popular, and also had all the restrictions for account creation in place. So we barely have any users, run our own show and fly under all the radar.
Sounds like you would be happier swapping instances. For the most part, the people here want it to remain a civil place without having the side project of keeping up with which instances are trash and manually having to block things. I'm sure there's instances with much more liberal views on defederation that suit your personal preferences better.
I am not so sure that you read my post. This was the new instance that I went to because it had less blocked instances.
I will tell you that the more of these comments I read the more I am starting to think that I never left reddit and that few people, if any, bothered to read anything besides the title.
Maybe I misunderstood but this is the section that I was referring to.
Turns out that I completely misunderstood the community structure here. There is a good chance that I was the one being confusing.
You can always make an account at lemmy.sdf.org. I was checking them out a few days ago and they have no servers blocked at all, and sdf is a really great organization to boot. This server will in time defederate other instances, of that there is no doubt. Discussions and voting on it have already happened, and may or may not be implemented, or invalidated. If you're looking for an instance that haven't defederated others, there are many options to choose from like the one I posted above, or you can choose to stay here and try to change minds, but you'll likely be facing an uphill battle.
Thanks, I will have to check them out later. I am almost a bit surprised that I don't recognize SDF. I spent some time using a few telnet sites some years ago.
I should clarify that this wasn't just 1 user that was isolated. This was an upvoted comment, with many other users congratulating him on his commitment to "trolling the libtards".
Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.
Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don't have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren't, given how many instances have defederated them.
Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don't speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.
You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.
We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.
I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there's anything I left out.
You've been here 3 weeks and 3 of your first 6 comments, weeks ago, are also asking why lemmygrad was blocked, on multiple different servers. Didn’t Lemmy.one and lemmy.fmhy.ml already tell you why? You're not asking in good faith.
They advocate for authoritarian communist governments and are a consistently disruptive influence on other communities. They are tankies.
Seems like they might not want to say, but the overall point is that it seems like they don't have to. If that is bothersome to you, you may want to move to a different instance, warn people about the fact that this can be done without explanation or any number of things that you can do for you, but simply calling them out over and over doesn't seem terribly productive.
Edit: What I mean to say it's that you seem to be complaining about the fact that they can defederate without explaining themselves, but instead of saying that you seem to be passive-aggressively just posting an observation insinuating that that is the problem. Not every post is going to be a direct explanation of why they did a thing and picking one post and complaining that there aren't other posts with the answer you want is poor conversational skills.
Have you seen the comments there?
It's all extreme liberal hate.
I'm not really interested in hearing about why trans people deserve to die, or people complaining about a trans influencer being on a beer can. If I wanted to hear that, I'd visit my parents.
You can be a right wing person without resorting to such extreme hate. There's really no need for that shit.
right wing? they are marxist-leninist communists, they're as left wing as it gets.
Okay, well I don't know much about politics. I just know liberals are left, conservatives are right, and lemmygrad is hating on liberals and LGBTQIA+, so I figured they were right wing.
Either way, whatever they are, they are disgusting. Like I said, I don't care to see posts about why trans people deserve to die. No need for such extremism.
What are you talking about? Lemmygrad is explicitly extremely pro-LGBT. They aggressively ban transphobia.
"I just know liberals are left, conservatives are right, "
You "know" wrong then, sorry. Liberalism is only considered left-wing in the United States and other similarly conservative countries.
I am Canadian. I know correctly for whats relevant for my country.
Why are you being so toxic? Can't we have a conversation where you inform me without being rude about it? Leave the toxic attitude on Reddit.
From my experience, they've used a ton of slurs and posted hate towards LGBTQIA+. Not sure why I would be seeing those posts and comments if they were extremely pro-LGBTQIA+?
I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude's intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.
I really don't care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn't had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?
It's a single event. Anything else?
Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse's mouth.
It's going to be hard for TheDude to run the server and also his real life if he constantly needs to be addressing hypothetical questions from users who joined within the past 24 hours.
That's why I'm here.
Now that I know who you are, I have checked out The Agora and a lot of what you are saying has a bit more context. It seems I posted this in the wrong place and misunderstood the community structure here.
Thank you for your time responding. Once I spend a bit more time looking through The Agora, I may end up asking another question or two.
Ok I'm sorry I'm at work and had to step away for a bit.
Yes, the Agora is the platform for community input and decision making, and I'm one of the moderators.
No problem at all, happy to help.
Who are you? A few posts back, when you responded "anything else?", I checked to see if you were a mod of this community or admin of the instance but I don't see you in either list.
He's a mod of the Agora, our (very new) democratic decision-making platform.
Ah, thank you for filling me in.
Good answer and thanks bro
I have nothing to add to the topic for you OP, but I have to underline the irony of seeing some anti-defederation people suddenly resorting to the same arguments they were previously waving away, and this in order to justify the blocking of lemmygrad 😂 (which I'm not trying to defend; them being blocked is one of my criteria for selecting an instance).
That's okay. I appreciate the response anyways. It seems that I stepped in quite the pile today.
Essentially, I have no tolerance for lies (dis/misinformation, deceit...) and hatred (discrimination, apology of violence...); there's a trove of that on lemmygrad *cough*
and exploding-heads*cough*.Youre in an instance hosted on stolen land, get over yourself.
My home instance is hosted in Germany...
I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be defederated. I will say they openly brigade. That is just my personal observation, and you shouldn’t trust a random comment without data to back it up. But maybe keep an eye out and you’ll see it.
FWIW, my original response here was 7/0 upvoted and then I checked a few minutes later and it was at 11/6. Certainly an unusual upvote pattern.
Yep. I’m thats usually how it goes. Once of of them makes a comment or posts about a comment they don’t like they show up. And then the downvotes begin. They are openly narrative driven, and the way they “discuss” things comes off as digital warrior-esque. They’re here to for the showdown of their lives.
I actually wouldn’t mind their odd positions if they weren’t so hyper aggressive and unwilling to discuss facts. I’ve been banned from threads over there for pointing out that while I see their frustrations with western interventionism, it’s odd how they don’t seem to mind BRICs members also intervening in conflicts worldwide.
Yeah, its not their political positions, it's their behavior. I have absolutely no problem debating the merits of communism and capitalism. But they don't necessarily seem interested in debate, or really objectivity in general.
lemmygrad.ml is generally defederated.
To explain it, remember r/thedonald?
lemmygrad.ml is the communist equivalent. (literally). Its an extremist group.
Edit- @[email protected] and @[email protected]
Please do explain your disagreement (downvote). Are you saying lemmygrd.ml is not an extremist group? Or are you defending them?
You said the community that mainly contains the following message would be as extreme as TD.
https://lemmy.world/post/108227
Thanks for letting me add this
I just read a few poses on the community. Maybe this is there somewhere, but there's a shitton of what many would consider hate speech in there.
(i am not a conservative and don't support their cause, simply an independent observer)
Just one example from here https://lemmy.world/post/105545 :
How the hell is that hate speech?Conservative is not a protected group. It’s not an inherent quality of a person, like being gay or black.
It’s not hate speech to say conservatives are evil and their actions and beliefs actively harm the world. That’s just facts.
Do you have to be protected for it to be hate speech? Lmao.
and hate speech is only for people's inherent qualities?
i'd say ideology falls right next to religion in the spook system of "things ppl believe about the world and can't change on a whim because it's part of their inherent dogmatic system of understanding"
ah yes, "facts", "evil", absolute morality, moral dogma, they are "inherently evil", that's just moral absolutism and it's as dumb as religious dogmatic beliefs of "the gays are bad" or "degenerates deserve to die". You're just fighting dumb dogmas with dumb dogmas.
Do consider that they consider themselves not to be harming but protecting the world from those who they believe harm the world. Life is not black and white, "i'm right and you're wrong". There are many perspectives, and "harm" is subjective, the ideal state of how things should be is a hotly debated topic, and thinking that, because you think you're "right", your speech of hate toward a certain group of people defined by their beliefs is not "hate speech", is just, in my opinion, not a very enlightened perspective.
pinned post:
I’m sorry but we’re past the point of “let’s all talk and understand our differences”. People have had enough time to understand reality. If they are still supporting transphobic, anti-communist, racist and fascists parties, organisations and individuals, they deserve nothing but to be publicly humiliated. I mean maybe not nothing…
Thing is, you're wrong.
There is no absolute moral right or wrong. If their understanding is different from yours, they simply have a different perspective. Sure, it is not compatible with yours, and you can decide to cut yourself off from them, and wage war against them, and even insult them, threaten them with death and execute them publicly if you want. None of that means that their belief system is not a belief system, or that their religious beliefs are not religious beliefs, or that the hate speech you will wield against them is not hate speech. It just means you deem it appropriate because your belief system dictates this, just as their belief system could dictate that they will do the same with you and those you protect. The fact that people justify it in their minds, throwing random moral facts and calling them true, doesn't make hate speech not hate speech.
The fact that a bunch of other instances also defederated something has no bearing at all on my thoughts or opinions.
I do remember r/thedonald. Though it has been awhile the thing that stands out in my memory is that reddit seemed to ban it because other redditors couldn't stand it being around, not because it violated their TOS.
lemmygrad.ml might be filled with extremists and is definitely not my cup of tea, but blocking any and all groups that are a little different from mainstream standards is not the kind of thing I can get behind.
Most of our beloved democratic, republican, and liberal ideals were extremist views not so long ago.
And just so we are clear, I downvoted you because of this kind of you have to agree with me or you are defending me enemy phrasing.
Dude. You're late to the party. This has already been posted about and discussed to death.
You don't have the background info to understand yet. Hang back a bit, read older posts. There are very good reasons that there are several instances that are damn near universally defederated.
I both looked around and did a search. The only comment I found from @TheDude was the one linked in my post. I am just asking for a little clarification as to whether this is a one-off or typical fare.
Edit: Just re-read the last bit. I don't want to wait around for weeks or months only to find out that I should have realized on day one that this was a bad fit.
Is it really so wrong to ask for a little clarification about one of two total Instances that have been blocked here?
Do you have a thread over on lemmygrad asking about all the instances they have blocked? Just curious if you only concern troll in one direction
Try reading my post and asking a good faith question if you would like it answered.
Reading your post - it should be a DM. You are literally only asking for theDudes opinion.
try DMing thedude directly instead of making a public discussion post thats clearly aimed to generate discussion and questions exactly like mine.
You might be right about that DM thing. I thought I was in a small enough instance to get a direct response that would be useful to future users who wanted to move over. It seems I have misjudged that.
I didn't mind a bit of discussion and question answering, but to be frank being thrown red-herrings and called a troll was definitely not my goal.
There is now @goat doing a "lemmygrad findings" collection here: [email protected] for anyone who is interested in those gems.
I know goat pushes some buttons (whether just due to being contrarian but earnest or actively trolling - I'm still kind of on the fence about that beyond 'they're kind of a dick'), but I've said this would be an interesting concept before, so it's neat to see it in practice.
Will reserve judgement until I see what's being curated, though.
what's your opinion now?
Two thrusts to this: re: your community, haven't followed it too closely, but from what I did see it's mostly just shitting on tankies. That's fine I guess, though my thought was more sifting through the garbage and sharing posts of decent quality/worth seeing despite defederation or the larger tenor of the instance.
Re: you specifically - also haven't followed too closely (have reverted to lurking more in fewer communities - bad Cracks!), but maybe the binary I mentioned is a little too stark. From what I have seen, you're opinionated, maybe contrarian for its own sake sometimes, but apply it evenly. I saw you getting in people's faces over at EH too, and it looks like you don't care which side of any given divide you piss off - gotta respect that.
And moderating FoxNews? Obvious but legitimately hilarious bait, and I have to tip my hat. Edit: Though you might not anymore?
sorry, but moderating fox news? I'm a lil confused at that one
Going off a vague memory at this point, but didn't you moderate/create a community somewhere called FoxNews that was news about foxes?
Recall when people where going at you this was brought up ("This fuckin' guy, he moderates FoxNews! Of course eye roll" kinda thing), though that may have been someone else. Apologies if misattributing.
nuhuh, wasnt me, that's a clever idea tho!
federating with lemmygrad means opening your communities up to the same behaviour displayed there, such as active calls for political violence, suggesting users kill themselves, ableist slurs etc
having personal convictions against this sort of behaviour seems entirely reasonable
So then block people instead of trying to shovel your personal feed curation onto everyone
alternatively, dont go on an explicitly curated instance
That would be perfectly reasonable. It might also be perfectly reasonable if @TheDude's grandmother was killed by communists. It might also be perfectly reasonable that he and the main admin at lemmygrad.ml have known and disliked each other for years.
My concern is that I don't know which one of those things that it is or if it is none of them. Before I settle down here, I would like to have a better idea of what here is.
Let me pill out an analogy:
Right now, I am sitting in a comfortable lounge with pretty chill people and all along one wall are a bunch of doors with windows in them, but for some reason two of the doors are locked and have their windows covered. One has a little note near it that says, "beware pedos beyond this door" which is all I want to know. The other door has a note that says, "beware politics beyond this door" which leaves me with a couple curiosities. After asking around all I hear is that it goes against the hosts personal convictions. Is it really so wrong to go ask the host what is going on?
I am not arguing the door should be unlocked or telling anyone that they are wrong. I am just asking what are the odds that he is going to lock more doors, and if so, what kind of doors should I expect to get locked in the future? Oh and as a side note if he is interested in engaging my personal curiosity, "what made this particular political door so bad in his eyes?"
Sounds perfectly normal. :)
thats fair
If you want to ask TheDude specifically there's no need to open a comment thread here, you can just PM him directly.
That makes sense and I probably should have considered it more, though I also thought it would be useful if the response was public. Since I went searching for it myself, I thought other new users might do the same.
When I skimmed the announcement where he created the Agora, I missed that part completely. I thought it was just about people donating. Based on the link in the post, I thought he was making all these decisions himself while maybe considering input from others.
Doesn't seem like there is much point in DMing him now.
This shit is so tiresome already. If you don't like the atmosphere of one instance then find another. It really is that simple. Quit harassing the instance admins they don't owe you shit.
I don’t see @[email protected] harassing anyone but asking questions I also personally find interesting. I started my life in the fediverse on this instance since a) I wanted to distribute the load new users were (still are?) generating moving away from Reddit b) the rules were good (upvote/downvote, nsfw, etc) and c) the name. I didn’t bother about checking the instance-admins preferences and only now learning about de-federation. And now I am wondering if I should ease down my enthusiasm because I might need to switch to an other instance (later than sooner).
So yes, maybe a few personal words about the instance and especially about other federated instances I would be curious to read.
Please keep up the good work though @[email protected] . I can’t imaging how much work is involved in keeping this instance alive and have great respect.
Seems like you didn't actually read my post.
This is the new parking lot that I am checking out. It seems pretty nice so far, but there is a weird statue in the corner. If it is just a one off that is cool. If it is the first among many then maybe I need to keep driving around.
Edit: Seems like I combined the two posts when responding, but I think I am going to leave it as is.
You're asking a person with a day job who is doing a cool thing for the fediverse community and set up a community in sh.itjustworks (Agora) to handle these possible future blocks to give you a granular breakdown of the blocking of one instance in a justification they don't really owe you.
The community itself is trying to be chill and just vibe. If what we're doing fits what you're looking for, welcome.
And you are repeating my own words back to me in a different order as if it will surprise me into keeping my questions to myself.
Pardon me for trying to find out if I just wandered into an environment that is as chill and welcoming as it seems from the outside or another reddit where many genuine questions will get shouted down.
Genuine apologies, as that's not my intent.
We've had what has seemed (to me) an influx of just really bad faith and downright trolling type stuff going down recently and it's perhaps colored my take on things more than I realized, and it probably has for others as well.
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like "yeah, this works for me."
Other things may get added to that block list in the future, yes. I pointed you to the Agora because you may not, as a new user, be aware of it, as the Dude set it up as the place where these kinds of decisions will most likely be made in the future and where community discussions tend to be focused.
However, as a Canadian based instance, they have different laws on what does and doesn't put them at risk, so there are times where those calls may be his and his to make alone (which is why there are two where there was only one on the list of defederated).
Is that so? On this instance or in general? So far, I did not perceive that. On the contrary, I enjoy the discussions around here so far.
It started with a discussion on sh.itjustworks, but due to the open nature of federation, anyone can wander in to the discussion, as you can see with input from users outside our instance.
There was some confusion, some trolling, but I think if as a user you weren't really active in our Main or Agora communities it may not have been something you would have been aware of, if that makes sense.
Honestly in my experience, most (I'd say as close to all as you can get) of sh.itjustworks users are really just here to chill and make an awesome experience.
If you are of the opinion that I am not active Ilin the Agora, clearly you don't follow it that well. I am sorry.
That is why I am here too.
I am hoping that some of the more acerbic comments in this thread are just an expression of those frustrations and not the same old social media junk. Hopefully time will show this instance to be as chill as it seemed at first.
They're asking a question without demanding anything in a very chill manner. It would seem you're the only one getting twisted about it. Ease up and let people ask questions. You can get heated again if they won't take "no" for an answer.
Exactly. There’s so many instances for anyone who don’t like one to migrate to
I fully agree and if you read through my post you will notice this is not my first instance. It is just one that seems like a pretty good fit and has a name I like. I am hoping this one oddity is just that and not an indicator that @TheDude plans to block a bunch of other political instances later.
"I want someone else to pay for hosting and maintaining an instance for me, to admin it and moderate its communities, but when they make a choice I disagree with that's not okay."
Well, good thing there's a way for you to stand up your own instance that you can federate or defederate whatever instances you want.
Thank you for literally putting words in my mouth, quotation marks and all.
If you had bothered to spend one minute reading the post, that I literally spend thirty minutes typing up, you would have noticed that the first sentence was to express appreciation for the time and money @TheDude on creating and maintaining this instance. At no point did I say he was wrong or even that I disagreed with his choice. I just asked for clarification on the matter.
I assume you raise the same concerns under each and every post calling for further defederation from instances since they aren't being posted by the person/people in charge of hosting?
I vote we ban 'can we ban "can we block x" posts' posts.
Kidding.
Or am I.
You can unsub from the Agora then. Discussing shit like that is kind of the point of it.
What? We're not currently on that community. Your reply does not make sense.
I assumed your original comment was in reference to the posts on the Agora, as that's where I've seen them. In that context my comment makes plenty of sense. I don't really understand why you're responding in this way.
Your comment refers to posts asking if an instance can be blocked, and this post is asking why an instance was blocked. Those are not the same thing. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.
That instance is full of sympathizers of Mao Zedong, Stalin, they're in favour of a authoritarian regime. If you are in favour of that stance may as well migrate there if you don't believe in the so called free world.
If you or anyone else doesn't like an instance then leave. Go find another one. No one needs to be holding your hand as you ask a million questions to evaluate if an instance is "right for you" or some other such nonsense.
If you prefer to remain ignorant until you accidentally stumble across the truth then that is your problem.
You can also see previous discussion in this post: [Vote] Clear the federation blacklist
That is interesting.
Edited since I mixed up which comments were for which poll.
For example, I don't perceive ![email protected] as extremist, but rather as insightful. It's the one sub for which I need an alternative account.
@[email protected] I support your decision. Those guys at lemmygrad suck
thank you @[email protected], avid thedonald poster
im sure youve got an experienced opinion on getting defederated for repugnant behaviour
Welcome
-to the D&D world?
-to your doom?
-to Arstotzka?
-to Zombocom, obv.
Go look over lemmygrad.ml and decide on how much you want to argue with passionate communist and tankies everywhere. Lemmygrad.ml will brigade posts and comments on other instances they are allowed on to spread their beliefs and they are not interested in the same happening on their own instance.
I don't make a habit out of arguing with people online; experience shows me that it is neither enjoyable, nor productive. I am also not above filtering out communities that I consider irritating. That said, I don't want to be a part of a community that is going to block any voices that are different from their own.
I am just trying to find out what kind of community this is before making it my home base for the foreseeable future.
It’s not about you wanting to argue - they want to argue. When I first got to Lemmy I was “confronted” with shocking commentary basically arguing to me the justification of Russia killing women and children in Ukraine.
Are those your beliefs? Then you know where to find them.
It won't matter if you block communities from lemmygrad they will come to your posts and comments especially if they are pro west, leftist, capitalist, anti china etc...
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/229915
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/444856
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/714337
If you are those things they literally hate you, if you post in their instance and are anti china you will be banned. It's a giant echo chamber and they want to be able to post in your instances and communities. There is not point talking to them since they are hyper fixated on that, just browse their instance. Most other spicy instances at least know and tell their users to keep spicy shit inside their own instance and not take it elsewhere.
While I want to blow off this comment with something like, "zealots will be zealots", that first link reads almost like a fantasy novel description of cartoon bad guys. It is a bit weird seeing it laid out like that, and that is from someone who spent a bit too much time in church during my late teens.
I think it's just a sign that echo chambers are bad, while yes you should block some communities that are bad actors or host illegal content. You shouldn't block everything that you don't like. Reddit almost feels the same way these days but from the left perspective. Politics does crazy stuff to people, it's wild.
Welp looks like its time to swap instances, admins are damn cops, sure ban the loli shit but defederating with ppl because they hold the same views as a billion+ ppl on the planet is borderline insane