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.

M̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ w̶a̶s̶ n̶o̶t̶ d̶o̶n̶e̶ i̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶, b̶u̶t̶ n̶o̶w̶ 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

https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone

This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?

-Share/crosspost

-Contact admins

  • Scrappy Duncan@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?

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    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.

    • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me

      • gabuwu@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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 Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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?

    • Rhabuko@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      It’s this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷‍♂️.

      • fragmentcity@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • gabuwu@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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… :(

      • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          That’s why I moved there from lemmy.world. I’d rather not have somebody else tell me what to think or see.

          • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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

    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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      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.

      • MrMonkey@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            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

            • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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              1 year ago

              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

    • Deleted@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Join us at lemmy.dbzer0.com. We’re federated with most instances including Beehaw. And no Tankies or Fascists are here. lemmygrad and explodingheads are both defederated.

  • eating3645@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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…

  • Belgdore@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Making the basic rules like Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia should be a no brauner. Pls add this rule

  • hawkwind@lemmy.management
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    1 year ago

    Join an instance that does not allow local communities. Then you can subscribe remotely to whatever you want and block whatever you don’t.

  • Atarian@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    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)

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      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

      • Atarian@vlemmy.net
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        1 year ago

        Oh, fuck that. I’m so tired of that shit.

        I’m not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.

          • Atarian@vlemmy.net
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Atarian@vlemmy.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah you know what? I’ve had enough of fundies, I’ll leave that thought there.

  • skiba@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      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

      • skiba@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          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)

          • skiba@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            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

            • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              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?

              • skiba@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                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 :)

  • wer2@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Thank you for working hard at making this a place I like to be.