It was banned on Reddit because it is racist, hatefull and spread Conspiracies.
In my new community I expect the exclution of racist communities. It is easy now with defederation. Nazis can do whatever they want on their instances, but the instances I want to be part of should not amplify their shit and flush it into our timelines.
The instance-admin of [email protected] did not reply to my message. Big instances seem not to defederate with them.
The new TD may not be a success, the point is not to give Nazis a platform like it is happening now. Fans of TD are racists.
Where are the instances that show face against racism?
Definitely better to just block the community in other instances instead of total defederation. Admins can do so pretty easily. I know beehaw is usually pretty proactive about this kind of stuff.
And yeah…fuck Donald Trump. He’s fucked up the US so hard and has put our country into such a mess. I hope they nail his ass straight to jail.
Seriously. Defederation should be a last resort against spammers and outright attacks on other instances, not because you dont agree with a single community.
Historically this group has been responsible for an absolute shitload of spam and outright attacks.
I was doxxed by them. They had links to a discord group that included my full name, address, email, and phone number. There was a whole list, it’s one of the first reasons they were quarantined. There was a comment that read “anyone with spare bullets can send them here”.
This is a lot more than “I simply don’t agree with that community”. They are trash who will trash up any platform they can reach.
Sounds like a great place to practice OPSEC. But sucks if you get doxxed for real. I hope you’re safe.
And it was absolutely a case of negligent opsec.
I suspect what happened is that I posted pictures on reddit that I also posted on Facebook. A reverse image search links my reddit account to my facebook account, and therefore a real name and name of city. With that, the rest is public information.
It was a wakeup call that the internet contains the best and the worst of humanity, and the worst will come after you at the earliest opportunity.
Defederation should be a last resort against spammers and outright attacks on other instances, not because you dont agree with a single community.
100% agree
Also, it should be noted that this ‘The_Donald’ community is literally just one user making posts.
Just blocking the community doesn’t prevent the users in that community from harassing minorities and generally spreading disinformation and hate. It’s offloading extra moderation work to every instance who federates with them. Unless that instance is also okay with fascists interacting in bad faith, of course.
It could be extra moderation work, but I think it’s a bad line to cross to assume everyone on an instance is guilty before they’ve actually done something bad.
Bad comments can come from anywhere though and mods still have to remove them.
No one is saying everyone in the instance is guilty; people are saying that the instance is going to become toxic to the point where it becomes hard to tell.
If you are in that instance and don’t want to tied to this rhetoric, talk to your admin about banning the Donald.
No one is saying everyone in the instance is guilty
Defederation is basically treating them like so. I mean, I get it, moderation is hard AF, but pre-emptive defederation when we haven’t even seen a ton of toxicity from sh.itjust.works yet is not a good precedent.
You’ve got a good point. Ultimately every instance is responsible for its users and their behavior. Harassment should not be tolerated.
SIJW needs to make a decision. IMHO it’s perfectly fine to say that your instance is not prepared to deal with that kind of shit regardless of how open and accommodating you want to be.
If they believe there’s a space for “moderate trump supporters” that’s their decision but they are on the hook for any harassment caused by their users.
the users in that community is one person
Yes! Hold the instance owners accountable for allowing that shit to fester and be rebroadcast.
Nine people dining at a table with a Nazi means you have ten Nazis.
Nine people dining at a table with a Nazi means you have ten Nazis.
This doesn’t make any sense.
One of my long time friends is a genuine racist. Am I a racist then too because I’m friends with him even though our views on this topic (and many others) differ quite dramatically?
Depends. Do you just keep your silence or do you call them out when they’re being shitty?
I agree that it depends. However such nuance was not included in the original statement. It was absolute
Oh, no, it is absolute: if you say and do nothing, then at best, you’re allowing the harm they cause to happen, and at worse reinforcing their behavior.
So yes, if you have racist friends and you sit silently then yes, you’re a racist supporter.
I support defederatiom personally because it sends a stronger message from the community. Blocking the community is “I don’t want to see this.” Defederating is “we don’t want to see this.”
So, from what I’ve gathered, many consider the broad lesson learnt from various defederation dramas over on mastodon is that making a genuine attempt to voice concern with the instance admins prior to defederation is almost always the better way to go. It avoids drama and inconvenience while promoting a better ecosystem of cooperation between instance admins and their users.
Obviously at some point when there aren’t better options and users need to be protected, use defederation, that’s what it’s for.
But at this point, I’d try to talk or have our admins talk to the instance admin first.
Exactly, defederation is a nuclear option that affects everyone on both instances.
Yeah I guess it does put pressure on instance admins to remove the offending community from their instance. I am just not sure if we want to cross that line into penalizing everybody on an instance for simply being near a bad community though. I also think doing this kind of proactive censorship also forces these people into deeper echo chambers as they get more and more isolated.
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While I understand where the sentiment is coming from and hate Trump with the passion of a thousand suns, I have never once found that to be a way forward in real life. It leads to the kind of divisive politics that we see in America today, where people draw these hardcore lines that divide us and as a result we don’t actually talk and figure out the root cause of our issues and instead seem content on screaming our side is better, our side is right.
Fascism is a disgusting thing, but there’s a socioeconomic reason why people in the US are getting radicalized towards it and we aren’t going to figure that out if we’re all busy generalizing that group as disgusting people. Just my two cents.
I agree. It may help send a message that the community isn’t tolerated, hopefully getting it removed.
Unfortunately, users don’t have the option to block entire instances. We need to rely on our moderating overlords to do it for us.
It would be pretty easy to filter content from specific instances in a Lemmy app without Lemmy explicitly supporting it on the server side. I’m working on an Android app right now, as soon as all the basic stuff is done I’ll implement it.
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Difference between instances (Facebook) and communities (DT). Latter is easily blocked by users themselves, former might threaten the longevity of the fediverse.
Not saying I agree with that, but comparing the two is not fair.
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Facebook attempts to join- “We must stop this to prevent corporate power and growth.” Bigots join- “Let’s hear them out.”
Hey all,
This community is being reviewed and will likely be a discussion point to in our Agora community where we discuss about issues like this as a community.
Post that are breaking rules will be removed. If its a regular occurrence so will the TheDonald community. Please continue reporting inappropriate posts and its difficult to maintain visibility on everything that is going on at all times.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Reading through the replies and I have to say ya’ll don’t take prisoners here. sheesh.
Anyway, I went through went through the community in question and reviewed not only the posts in the community and the comments made by the mods of the community and they weren’t aligned with the kind of negativity I want to see on the instance. I have since purged the community and the mods.
Thank you
Thank you for doing so. It is important that we keep what we have here and you doing that is a very important step to that.
Admin management of instances is important.
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@trump2024 aka Frisca was mod in TD today.
Fwiw, I hereby volunteer to take the c/ over, and dedicate it to the worship of our disney duck overload, the real Donald.
That’s not a joke. The best way to deal with the history behind the subreddit is to defang it. There’s always gong to be some troll or someone that actually worships the cheeto trying to make that community somewhere.
If instances preempt that by making communities with that name that are about some other Donald explicitly, it ceases to be able to be weaponized.
And there’s a ton of Donalds worthy of a c/. There’s the duck, there’s the amazing actor, Mr Glover, the other great actors Cheadle, and Sutherland; the McDonald’s even.
You pick which Donald you prefer, I’ll take the heat from the c/existing.
dedicate it to the worship of our disney duck overload, the real Donald.
A noble cause worth pursuing.
and dedicate it to the worship of our disney duck overload
I refuse to believe this was a typo.
I may be dyslexic, or duckslexic as the case may be
Thanks for the reply. I’ve been side-eyeing instances that have open community creation due to how easy it is for bad actors to come and start shit, especially if instance admins aren’t constantly on top of things.
As other people in this thread have pointed out, if you allow Nazis to hang out in your bar for long enough, you become a Nazi bar. Given your instance’s stated rules against bigotry, I would advocate for proactive action in cases like this. Donald Trump is a champion of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia - all the things you don’t allow. I wouldn’t think you’d want a community that champions him as a dogwhistle for all of those things.
Have you considered disabling open community creation and having it be a function of your Agora discussion space?
Blocking open community creation is a mistake and that will be absurd down the line. It’s also taking power away from users to make Lemmy their own.
First off, community creation is not the problem here. Anybody can make a community called the Donald, the problem are the people that will fill it. Those people are coming here regardless of what community they find themselves in. Blocking community creation doesn’t stop them, only actual monitoring of individual users will do it.
There really has to be a line here between combating this kind of toxic hateful bullshit and completely locking down a social media platform so that everything must be pre-scanned and approved before it sees the light of day.
I just generally don’t care for the overall notion that Lemmy needs to be carefully curated like a garden right out of the gate. Ban the obvious shit like the Donald but there has to be a fundamental acknowledgment that the users, the people, need to have the ability to make the space their own without some council pre-judging them.
I think we can handle these things on a per case bases no? That is just adding another roadblock in having someone interact with the community. If it becomes a problem where someone spams these then yeah I can see the issue.
If they were acting in good faith they would not have started in such trappings. The Donald has an ugly history and it started with harmless memes. Will the next antisemitic tiki-torch march organized on your instance? The next 1/6? It’s not worth the risk.
It’s also not worth giving them attention to get started. While I mostly agree with the OP, I’d rather they just languish in obscurity for now. Come back to it if/when they become a problem.
Ban, defederate, whatever, I don’t mind the method – I do not want this server to have these “people” on our server and able to interact with/see us.
Defederating from an entire instance for one community seems a bit overblown tbh. Blocking would prob be effective enough. That said, beehaw will likely be most proactive in removing td nonsense from its feed
Leave it to Redditors to be OK with everything turning into a Nazi bar.
No it’s not that. Lots of us never interacted with that sub. Just block them no need to defederate a while instance
If the instance won’t kill the sub, the members of the sub will take over that instance.
I’m seeing some people testing the waters of some subs to see what they can get away with.
so because the donald was on reddit, the entire reddit community was taken over?
At the height of it, yes. It filled up the front page every single day and made the site absolutely reek.
It’s what made me stop browsing /r/all, drop off most default subs, and stick to only my subscribed subs. Brigading and spamming is the whole point.
It had a massive impact on the “culture” of the website and would have kept spreading quite effectively if the admins weren’t pressured to quarantine it for PR reasons.
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Users need the ability to block entire instances. Problem solved.
Dude, it is one community with a whopping 9 subscribers and every single post is sitting at negative.
Y’all need to calm down.
Have you read the linked story? Because it stands exactly counter to what you are saying.
a better analogy is dropping the whole town the nazi bar is in
Yes, the vast universe of Lemmy is like a fucking bar lmao. Great analogy
sh.itjust.works hosts it. They should kick them out.
As soon as they brake rules they absolutely should be banned.
Nah. Users need to ability to block entire instances. It’s crazy this is overlooked.
You can on kbin, but I don’t know how to on lemmy yet.
I don’t think it’s overlooked. It’s probably just not been implemented yet.
Yeah, defederation isn’t an answer to this, or if it is, it’s an absolute last resort. First they have to do something wrong, then the instance should ban them, if they fail to act and the community is doing something wrong, then you talk about defederating.
Hm, is it possible the community was already kicked by the instance? I don’t find it.
I don’t think it is. R/The_Donald was a cancer on Reddit, spreading around and harming other communities. If an instance is willing to tolerate a community like that, I don’t see the value of anything else in that instance.
when i was a christian there was this story that would be told that went something like this:
“one day a kid was caught by their parent doing something they knew they weren’t supposed to do. it was just a small thing with no real consequences, but it was against the rules of the house and therefore the kid was being disobedient. when the parent confronted the kid about the behavior the kid argued that it was harmless and that it was ok. the parent, seeing an opportunity to teach the kid a lesson, said ‘ok’ and left. several hours later the parent called the kid into the kitchen where they’d made brownies. the parent offered the kid a brownie who readily accepted. as the kid reached for a brownie the parent stopped them and said ‘oh, but first you should know, theres a small piece of cat poop in there, but it’s ok, it’s just a small piece and i put it in that corner over there’. the kid reeled in disgust and said they didn’t want the brownies anymore. ‘why?’ the parent inquired, ‘it’s just a small piece and won’t hurt anyone as long as they stay away from that small corner’. the kid, then realized the importance of obedience in every way.”
total bullshit story, but like all christian bullshit there’s a kernel of truth in there. one small nazi ruins the whole batch of brownies.
If they want that community on their instance I don’t want to interact with their instance. I guess at this point I should just spin up my own instance and federate via whitelist.
it’s really easy, I spun up my own instance in a morning. Ok, I am a sysadmin and programmer, but it really wasn’t very difficult and didn’t require much beyond creating a VPS and DNS entry along with basic abilities at the command line to use the ansible playbook.
The problem isn’t just that community, it’s the people who follow. They’re not the kind of people we should try to attract here.
They’re probably the same people who were active in fatpeoplehate and other malicious subs too, and it’s better not to wait for that to happen. If it doesn’t get handled now, their toxicity will likely spill over into other communities
FWIW, I certainly don’t support that shit even though I made that instance my “home”, not knowing that one guy’s cesspool even existed there.
I chose that one because it’s near me, hosted in a local datacenter, uses hydro power and has good performance.
I will be glad to let my voice be heard when we discuss and vote about this troll’s fate in the Agora over there (which feels very much like the polar opposite of that troll’s bullshit).
As far as I can tell it has no support from the instance’s members.I think our admin was busy upgrading to 0.18 while this was posted, hopefully this gets addressed soon and I’m prepared to move on from there if it isn’t.
Having interacted with decent people there, I hope we’ll sort this out.
It’s not overblown. It’s sending a message to the admins of that instance.
Blocking the community itself is the smallest Band-Aid in the world. The kinds of users who join that instance for that community aren’t going to be quarantined to just that community.
its entirely overblown, the smallest band-aid in the the world is entirely appropriate for one user shitposting
I think deleting the sub is the right call simply because it’s trying to replace a community that did enough in the past to deserve a ban on any platform.
Tired of all the calls for defederation though.
It is easy now with defederation.
De-federation isn’t the tool to solve this specific problem. That community has 34 posts, all by a single user, and under 30 total comments across all threads. I cannot find a single post or comment in that community that would violate any rules on lemmy.ml.
A single user posting content in a community that shares a name with a banned community on another social media platform seems like a very very low bar to push for de-federation.
This is like saying that it’s no big deal if you only have a little cancer.
It’s more like saying that we shouldn’t jump to amputation as the first step after diagnosis.
Everyone keeps repeating that defederation should be a last resort. Fine, but we should also acknowledge that the list of resorts is very short:
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Server admins talk to the admins of the server hosting the offending community, in an attempt to get them to clean their house. If they don’t;
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Defederate.
There really isn’t anything else for server operators to do that isn’t just letting the offending community continue unabated.
Offloading the responsibility to individual users to block users / communities is lazy. Most of us don’t want to spend our limited time playing whack-a-mole.
I suspect we’ll see user accounts shuffling around so that they land on a home server whose defederation policy matches their preferences.
I think instance owners need to be able to block specific communities in other instances instance-wide.
So, if lemmy.ml wants to block c/the Donald!sh.itjust.works they should be able to block that community for all users of lemmy.ml, but not the rest of the sh.itjust works instance.
Best of both worlds IMO
this is already an option, as shitjustworks pointed out in the update post
It’s not about ignoring them or not having to see the content. It’s about not providing them a platform.
They would seep into other communities
You’re probably right that blocking a single community should probably be an option.
That said, if an instance is willing to allow hateful communities like TD, I expect their comment sections will be more toxic than other instances. I like the idea of defederating from instances that allow hateful communities.
its 3 people
suggesting that shitjustworks is bound to be more toxic because the modteam didnt immediately ban a shitposting community consisting of 3 people is ridiculous
I wasn’t talking about this one specific instance really. I was using it as an example while talking about the tools needed for managing federation and what a user sees.
nothing about ‘if an instance is willing to allow hateful communities like TD, I expect their comment sections will be more toxic’ or ‘i like the idea of defederating from instances that allow hateful communities’ indicated that you werent actually talking about the instance currently under fire for supposedly (but not actually) allowing hateful communities like TD
To be fair I’ve been reading a lot of hateful comments about reddit CEO and certain billionaires during the past few days so I’d say that our stance on such content is a bit hypocritical.
“Go see the titanic” meme is a good example
Are you seeing angry comments about /u/spez or hateful comments? While I can understand and condone angry comments I would hope that hateful or threatening comments are being moderated appropriately.
I guess I don’t see “go see the titanic” memes as “hateful” given that they’re coming from a acute sense of betrayal rather than something like racism or nationalism. That’s probably because I’m angry too and see some of the distasteful comments and memes as somewhat justified in this case. I don’t post shit like that but I don’t see it as the same as the hate speech that used to come from /r/the_donald.
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Have you looked at the content of that sub? There are a total of 3 posts about the twice-impeached, twice- indicted, single-term, sexual predator.
I was on Reddit when the_donald was spewing their bile and have no wish to see it duplicated on Lemmy or anywhere else. Even so, I think that any alarm at this point is extraordinarily premature.
I disagree. Shit like this needs to be snuffed out in its infancy.
Not arguing with that, but sounding an alarm about defederation when there are instant fixes to the issue is absurd.
I just don’t get it.
Block the c/TheDonald community. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.
When it gets no visits, no views, and only it’s handful of users meme-ing each other, it’ll die. One of the big reasons TheDonald took off on Reddit was because of all the attention it got.
So, don’t give them attention. Don’t feed the trolls.
I’m not saying to tolerate neo-nazis. But running from them isn’t exactly a time proven strategy, either. They will exist, and it’s up to all of us to remind them that their views are garbage.
Exactly. I don’t feel obligated to read all the subs on an instance, I just read the ones I’m interested in.
I never knew that community existed since I don’t read All (too spammy) nor do I search for alt-right topics. No idea how OP found it unless they were simply looking for shit to stir up.
I’m guessing it’s as you suggested, they looked for a reason to be offended.
I don’t think I’ll ever see any content from it even though I don’t block it (not going to put in the effort to find it so in can block it). I have my subscriptions and largely stick to those.
So eh, I don’t really care. However, if the cause problems in places I frequent, I’ll report and block them.
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AFAIK, the community is now gone. The user was deemed in violation of the instance’s rules and banned from the instance. It wasn’t banned because the community name matched a troublesome community on Reddit, it was because of actual rule breakage.
And that’s how moderation should work imo, and that’s why I stick with that instance. I appreciate transparency and restraint. I like how the admin is giving up a lot of decision making to the community instead of deciding everything himself (see [email protected]). The only intolerance I’ve seen has been from users responding to posts like these, and those users end up either deleting their accounts or getting banned (not sure which, I’m still learning about lemmy moderation).
In short, it isn’t a problem and it likely won’t be a problem. Don’t bail on a community because it takes a day or two to respond to an issue, bail because the admin isn’t resolving concerns at all. I’ve heard email signups are also live on sh.itjust.works, and I’m guessing 2FA will be an option soon as well (haven’t checked, I’ve been heads down working on lemmy-adjacent projects).
Taking swift actions to oppose neo-nazis being able to spread their ideology is not running from them. Quite the opposite. Anyways it’s banned now so this is all moot.
OP may come across a little alarmist, but it’s really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren’t carefully weeding out the ne’er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.
And yeah, they follow “the rules”, and free speech and all that, until they don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.
Actively purging communities of reactionaries is pretty important and the hands-off attitude that some Free Speech Warriors inherited from Reddit advocate for is only going to spread reaction. If they care so much about Free Speech, they can go back to their pedophile website and talk about how r/jailbait needed to be kept up for the sake of free speech.
Wasn’t The Donald originally a subreddit making fun of trump? I saw that TD was created here but my assumption was they wanted to restore the original purpose. I haven’t looked at it since then though.
Edit: Nope. It is in fact a pro trump community.
Trump was a joke until suddenly he wasn’t.
He’s still a joke, just one that stopped being funny a long time ago.
No, he’s still a joke. It’s just America is a joke too.
At the very beginning, yes. The tricky thing with having fun pretending to be bigots is that you eventually find yourself surrounded by actual bigots who very much missed the fact that you were joking.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
… Albert Einstein.
just joking, it was Descartes.
see also: gamersriseup
Maybe for the first few weeks, then it stopped being a joke.
theres a antifascist placeholder on https://lemmy.world/c/the_donald
Friggin hilarious that one
This community exists solely to document Trumps crimes. If you support tr*mp. If you were a member of reddit’s biggest hate community, then you will cry. You. Are. Not. Welcome. Here. Fascism is a curse on this world. This is a safe space for those who oppose conservatives scum. support abortion rights. support trans rights. support women. support minorities. Destroy fascism. Destroy hate.Amazing sidebar
I think that’s the one I saw originally.
I wouldn’t de-federate sh.itjust.works for that now. But stuff like this doesn’t look good and the “Just ignore it bro” crowd shows that they never had to deal with organized harassment themselves. The_Donald wasn’t just a harmless sub with a little bit of trolling, it was responsible for extreme radicalization and people died because of it. The reality is that such hate groups never stay in their place and behave everywhere else. They brigade and harass every time. Should the community grow and attract more people, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. People are responsible for their own instance and are free to choose whatever they want but that’s the same for other servers if they should decide to de-federate.
And that was indicated when they migrated to Voat. Nobody else used Voat, it was just them. Also when reddit changed their policies to prevent one sub from appearing on the front page more than once.
The whole point is to be obnoxious in spaces where it isn’t welcome. When they realized they couldn’t do that on a platform that only consisted of them, there was no incentive to engage. The whole point is to shit up a platform enjoyed by others, and that’s exactly what they’ll do here.
Voat was about 50% fatpeoplehate, 35% T_D, and 15% ‘free speech’ enthusiasts. The 15% were quickly pushed out by the overwhelming amount of content generated by fatpeoplehate, but eventually they got tired of posting the same things over and over and only T_D was left.
Well said @[email protected].
This is a single user, not the ghost of The_Donald subreddit, who appears to be trolling. If that’s the accepted bar for de-federation then lemmy.ml is going to quickly become a single instance federation.
If it develops into something that breaks the instance’s rules, it should be shut down. Until then, don’t just assume because of the name that it’s going to break the rules.
If it’s supporting some shitheel Republican’s cult of personality and names itself after the most infamous online instance of the cult of that shitheel, it doesn’t need to be given benefit of the doubt. If it’s some wholesome uwu satire, then it can bear that fucking cross and negotiate being removed from blacklists.
A Hilldawg 2024 instance should be treated in just the same way, before some stupid American asks.
Nazis shouldn’t be able to do what they want on their own instances either, they should be crushed there as they should in every space
But also blacklisting is a basic first step that everyone should do, so you aren’t wrong there.
In defense of some instance admins, I think they can just literally not know because it’s hard to keep tabs on every instance that gets made, but that also means that, if you use that instance, you should totally DM them to let them know (I’ve had to do this with certain other instances). If the admins persistently ignore those warnings, they should be treated as complicit.
So this is a quick way to ruin the fediverse: Create a The_Donald community on the big instances.
There’s one on lemmy.world I believe, but it’s not what you’re expecting.
I was kinda hoping it would just be dedicated solely to Donald Duck but I guess this is also fine, haha
I was expecting a community about Donald Duck, but it is even better.
No, why would it? The instance could simply enforce its moderation guidelines and block the community.
It would ruin the Fediverse because, if this post is any indication, it takes nothing but a user shouting ‘Nazi!’ to get people ready to accept de-federation. Most users who are commenting appear to not have looked into the issue or viewed the community before giving their opinion. They’re more than willing to buy the ‘Nazi bad, de-federate’ argument with zero evidence.
If you look into the community that the OP is referring to… it is made up of a single user’s posts and less than 30 comments across the entire community (most by the same user). None of the posts or comments in that community/by that user violates any rules on sh.itjust.works or kbin.
There is no there there, as they say. This is a ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ tale. There’s no wolf, there’s no Nazi bar. One user created, one community and now we have a 200+ comment thread discussing de-federation. I cannot find any other word to describe the situation other than: kneejerk.
I’d imagine this is one of the many reasons why beehaw went ahead and defederated from sh.itjust.works. It’s a bit TOO lenient over there in some ways.
Nah. Beehaw just has an agenda to push. I’m glad they defederate though. I want nothing to do with those Nazis.
Agreed. And Beehaw didn’t say they were kicking any instance to the curb permanently. They’re simply waiting on Lemmy to add more effective moderation tools, like the ability to defederate communities rather than entire instances, and for bot checks to become the norm.
Users aren’t tied to communities, but instances.
Yes, but what we’re talking about here is how to effectively target and limit violence, bigotry, hate speech, etc., and that happens best at the community level not the instance level. Let’s say you have something like this:
- MixedBag.social - a popular fictitious instance that has some good communities and one really bad one
- MixedBag.social/c/BigotsRUs - a community of bigoted content that YourInstance.com doesn’t want to deal with
- Users of MixedBag.social - a mixed bag themselves, who mostly flocked there because of open signups
How do we limit harm to YourInstance.com?
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The Users: Most of the MixedBag users are harmless and contribute to the growth and diversity of the fediverse (including YourInstance), so defederating them is a last resort. But what about the BigotsRUs subscribers? On Reddit, some mods use bots to ban or mute people subscribed to problematic subreddits. We could try something similar here, but that’s not the only option. After all, I live over here, not in the community where they’re trash-talking. It’s when they bring their shit into my house that I get pissed. If they put on their Sunday Best over here and want to have actual conversations, I’m fine with that. That more tolerant approach has the benefit of not ostracising and radicalizing users who are on the fence and just hang out there on occasion for the memes. So basically, ban the bad actors when they cross the line while on your turf, but leave the rest alone.
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The Community: If BigotsRUs is poorly moderated, frequently spews hate, and its inclusion in All harms YourInstance’s users, that’s what Remove is for. As an admin, you can remove communities from the feed without affecting users or the instance, which feels like the first and best step to handling most issues.
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The Instance: Like I said, defederation is the nuclear option that impacts all communities and all users on MixedBag.social, so I’d rather limit that to a last resort. However, sometimes the instance itself if the problem by either encouraging bad actors or centering around a topic that has no place in your instance’s vision. For example, what if you’re running an orthodox religious instance for your friends and want to defederate from the porn-only lemmyNSFW.com? Or what if your instance is being overrun by bots from LaxSignUps.social and you don’t have a big enough mod team to separate out the trash? For me, that’s the ideal use case for instance-wide defederation, and it’s the main reason Beehaw is defederating from others. Yes, they’re protective of their culture, but right now it’s mostly about the small mod team’s inability to filter out spam from instances with lax signups.
It’s an absolute lie that they are just concerned about hatespeech – albeit one that the admins themselves very actively promote. They pretend to be ideologically neutral, even going as far as saying “beehaw is just a collection of individuals”, an ironically Thatcherite statement that suits them quite well.
That’s a pretty big accusation. I don’t have enough information to say one way or the other and have just read a handful of posts from the Beehaw mods, so I’d appreciate some context and direct evidence if there is any. From what I can tell, they’ve never pretended to be ideologically neutral, and seek to actively defend minority rights and push back against what they view as fascist movements.
Thankfully they had the evidence pinned for some time:
Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation.
Later:
Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it.
And there’s more but you can just read it yourself:
https://beehaw.org/post/524300?scrollToComments=true
Obviously I support cracking down on hate speech, you can see my activity throughout this thread, which consists entirely of me doing that while taking maybe two or three asides to knock beehaw when someone else mentioned it. What I don’t support is taking the absurd position that it’s not a political stance.
Of course, this all works as an excellent bit of smoke and mirrors for an audience of credulous radlibs to whom you don’t want to confess you are splitting with instances that are decidedly to your left – such as Hexbear.net , the only instance which actually has site-mandated use of self-identified pronouns, which was put on the blacklist pre-emptively before it had federated with anyone (and it still hasn’t) for reasons that the userbase are left to conclude are “hate speech” or its “endorsement”.
Personally, I’m subscribing to the belief that the fediverse’s attribute of “true censorship is impossible” is a benefit, not a curse. Every prior example of censorship has just morphed into “advertiser palatable”. Which is bad for everyone.
More than happy to have access to instances that will take the kind of drastic action you’re suggesting, access to my own “block” function, etc. Let them come.
The fediverse will inevitably host some messed up stuff. Counting it a blessing that those people have a clear place to go to and sequester themselves off.
So ultimately? More than happy to have an instance that agrees with this extreme anti-censorship posture. Sh.itjustworks is fine in my books. I can block the community, just like I could block subreddits on Reddit without abandoning the whole platform. Hell, even write a script to block everyone who’s subscribed to the community. The power is yours now, and nobody can take that away. That’s the fediverse.
