Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called “exploding heads”, I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here
I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.
So far I’ve basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we’ve got?
So far, that’s it in a nutshell - barring one account of potential cybersecurity risks coming out of that, which still makes some assumptions re: motivations I’m not 100% convinced on.
I think there’s people on the ‘perhaps defed’ side who would want to argue it on points 4 from your immediate defed list, or 1 on the call to vote list - but personally, I’m not convinced the evidence is strong enough to do so compellingly.
Regardless of the current discussion, it’d be wise for us to revisit your proposed policy as a group and see if we can make that official (with any relevant revisions from pre-vote scrutiny). I stand by what I said back then - it’s a solid list, and IMO worth being made official and saved somewhere broadly visible for later reference.
Because if the complaint is “They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test” the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.
Yeah, I think establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happen to be hosted on ml should be the priority here.
something something blackjack and hookers.
Another large instance deleted some of my posts and hid it, I think it’s more common than most understand.
I also think this post has been good at calling attention to them and that it might not be good to post there if you care about your stuff being moderated. They don’t seem to be outwardly malicious, just closed and authoritarian on how they run their instance.