All:
As the mod for this community I just wanted to drop this note:
A community purportedly a clone of an overtly political, fascistic, misogynistic, and trolling subreddit was set up on this instance and, as a result, there has been discussion in the greater fediverse to defederate sh.itjust.works.
When I am a net control station, as when I’m operating any radio, I do not discuss politics and follow good amateur practice. When I was a kid I was taught that the hobby was to facilitate emergency communications, enhance technical progress, and promote international goodwill. I’m firmly of the opinion politics messes up that last point, in particular.
While, I don’t want our hobby affiliated with hateful and violent content, I also want discussion to reach as broad an audience as possible. To that end, defederation would be unacceptable. Should sh.itjust.works be defederated I will be terminating my account and moving elsewhere. Should someone else choose to be a mod, I’ll leave it up to you to decide but I will not be sticking around and will either delete this community (if possible), set up another amateur_radio community, or join an already existing one.
I appreciate you understanding and consideration.
Defederation happens on an instance to instance level. There will always be instances which do not approve of those who conduct themselves differently. It is not worth it to make decisions based on threat of defederation, because you essentially cede community control to those who would make those threats.
I’m not saying the community in question should be free to be assholes, but if they are to be banned, it should be because they are breaking the rules of this instance, not anyone else’s. In my opinion, a better way to frame the discussion is “should we allow this content/these users?”
It’s worth looking at the content in question. AFAICT it’s a handful of trolls reposting “liberal tears” memes. They don’t violate anyone’s ToS, or even informal community standards. They look like they’re trying to provoke a reaction without posting anything that their moms would disapprove of.
In this case defederation plays into the trolls agenda: maximal drama, damaging the Fediverse, and weakening our post-Reddit community.
Most importantly, the instance mod has been responsive in other threads. The admin (in general) has been pretty good. No legit tankies. No legit fascists.
It’s apparently possible to avoid syncing communities. Do that. Block the community. Block the users. But don’t tear down the links that bind the Fediverse without a really good reason.
This makes sense to me.