Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you’re not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I’ve linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn’t the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
Wholly against defederation for anything beyond procedural shit like bot instances. If someone doesn’t want to see content, they can block it themselves. Why should everyone be inconvenienced because a handful of crybabies are too lazy to just curate their own feed
If you’re asking that in good faith, then the answer is because even minimally curated content is worth searching out for some people. Sure I and a hundred thousand other users could all carefully curate our own content, but if there is an instance that allowed everything and I curate everything myself, and there is another instance who curates things down to a niche community who doesn’t federate with anyone that allows swear words, and many, many dozens of reasonable popular communities in the middle somewhere, we can all settle into community where we feel comfortable with the curation. Just because this place isn’t that for you doesn’t mean it isn’t that for several thousand other people, and ‘your’ comfort level is somewhere else.
Personally if there is a site that suddenly starts shoveling out CP or ads for nazi memorabilia I’d rather the site have a policy for dealing with that and I don’t have to bother with it. If it turns out they’re a little heavy handed with the defederation stick, I’d express my interest in them lightening up but at the same time I’d check in with accounts I have on other instance that are more lenient. The fact that you want this to be the place you park your butt and complain about any form of moderation is someone infringing on you or another sites ‘rights’ looks more like laziness than your accusation that others are giving up others rights in order to avoid the work of self-curation.
Your first sentence illustrates the point perfectly…‘anything beyond procedural shit like bot instances’ is your threshold, a thousand other people have a thousand other thresholds and insisting every instance everyone settles on should somehow magically bow to the threshold held by the loudest complainer is just ridiculous when a little shuffling can just put you in a better instance and you won’t be inconvenienced. Or, like others have said, start your own and only defederate instance for ‘procedural shit like bot instance’ and see how easy that is to track, define, maintain, update and defend and see how long it take before you wish someone would do all that admin stuff for you, and maybe if you disagree with them a little, maybe it’s not that big of a deal on that side of the fence.
And I’m perfectly fine with there being instances that heavily moderate content/users on their instance. I may not agree with it, but it isn’t that difficult to get around. To that extent, “just go somewhere else” is am easy solution.
My problem with defederation is that it effectively bans my account from just going somewhere else to view content that wasn’t here in the first place, such that I need a new account there, which means just having a multitude of accounts to cover a patchwork of instances that are and aren’t federated. I currently have six separate accounts to deal with instances defederating with each other since they still have content I want to browse.
And yeah, I genuinely fucking am considering just setting up my own personal instance so that I don’t need to manage a whole stack of accounts to use the platform. But that’s a pretty significant investment just for convienience, so I’d rather not if possible.
It’s true, it is a significant time investment. Now imagine doing all that, people joining your instance, and then insisting that you moderate it the way they want instead of the way you want because they don’t want the inconvenience of doing the thing you did.
They are a bot instance, though. And a Nazi instance.