So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It’s been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It’s now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.
For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It’s very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I’m open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it’s actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it’s fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.
Edit: since my thread was locked and I can’t reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I’m not “a beehaw user”, I’ve barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I’ll be closing that now.
I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That’s enough of that for me.
According to the pinned post, votes go up on Friday and stay up until the following Friday. The same post also indicates these procedures are by no means final.
I agree that it’s clear what the community wants, just call it at this point. A week long vote might be suited to policy changes, but I’m starting to get the feeling that defederation of specific instances should be done quickly - informed by existing policy rather than popular vote. None of us really want to fuck around with bigots and trolls any longer than we have to.
In this case, I would personally advocate for something like this line of reasoning: “the users on this instance have a clear pattern of violating our instance’s first two rules and the administration isn’t acting to remedy it, therefore we defederate effective immediately”.
I do want to echo what @sorrybookbroke is saying, please give the admin team some credit, they are putting in a serious amount of manual mod work. It’s apparent to all of us that the policies still have a ways to go, but it takes time to build a community.