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.
If everyone starts defederating instances just because there is a community they don’t like, then eventually, every instance will be isolated.
Yup, there’s plenty I don’t like on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, but I don’t raise a fuss, I just don’t sub to those communities.
I don’t get why everyone is being so dramatic. In this case, it was one user trolling. Just report, block, and move on. It’ll happen again, we don’t need to jump to defederation every time someone decides to troll…
It’s both amusing and frightening how just one or two users could cause this much discussion and controversy across instances.
Can’t help but feel like we gave them exactly what they wanted.
Exactly. The community in question is a couple of trolls. This is the drama they wanted.
Not only that, a couple of trolls that were banned and their community deleted.
It’s insane to me that there’s so much drama and craziness over a community that’s already been removed.
I think people just like being outraged. Makes you feel like you’re standing up and solving a problem without actually doing anything. Kinda like how talking about a goal can give you a sense of accomplishment without achieving it.
Hmmm… Yeah perhaps we need a report button lol
There is one for users.
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I’m sure there will be an instance for that if there isn’t one already.
I wouldn’t want to be the one trying to moderate it though. Politics gets into everything.
I hosted my own instance specifically so I can keep political bs out of it, and ban any users that start in with it on no political threads. I don’t care one bit about politics, and if I can keep it out of my instance, I will.
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I used lemmy-easy-deploy to get it installed on a vps I use. Then I just use that to connect to the other communities I’m interested in, and just those communities. It was pretty easy to get up and going if you are familiar with running a VPS.
You can also host it locally. I think there are instructions on the github for doing so. It just allows me to have a nice place to get all of my stuff instead of having logins at different places or worrying about an instance suddenly going down and taking my account with it.
I just block people locally that keep posting political bs, or constantly post crap about whatever is going on with the latest reddit drama in /c/technology It keeps my instance much cleaner.
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I joined mastodon.radio specifically for that reason - it’s radio-focused.
And if they move to your instance, will you petition the greater community to defederate yours? Fuck the fascists, but they are going to find their corners of the internet.
Edit: not that you have an instance. Its just generally this feels kinda BS to give so much power to the name of a small community no one likes anyway.
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.
I totally agree with you. Reddit was authoritarian and removed communities it didn’t like. Lemmy is supposed to be open. I am disappointed by the discussion on this topic. People lose their level-headedness and rational thinking in situations like these. Their inner caveman comes out. It’s so disappointing.
Reddit was authoritarian and removed communities it didn’t like
After scandalous media attention perhaps.
I obviously don’t know how long you were on the site, but most of reddit’s worst actors lived long and healthy lives, while some interesting ones (e.g. Unidan) got zapped on easy technicalities.
Unidan was intersting but he still used alts to manipulate votes
Yeah, it’s not to say that he didn’t violate ToS — more that a user like Violentacrez had to go down like the Hindenburg for their account to be removed while the funny trivia guy is permabanned for vote manipulation. Just saying that reddit isn’t authoritarian, they’re corporate; they hide their ugly niches and collect revenue from them until they become unprofitable.
It is certainly authoritarian now. It might have been different 10 or 15 years ago but now it is authoritarian.
I think a lot of people just use alts to escape algorithms and data nets, get to see the world from different perspectives so to speak
Wasn’t Spez a mod on Jailbait, or did someone just make that up to make him look worse?
I didn’t migrate from reddit in order to give Nazis a platform. If instances don’t want to federate with instances that don’t police hate speech/ advocating cruelty/violence to people who are different then those instance are well within their rights.
This is why the block button exists. Your line isn’t the same as everyone else’s line. Outside of illegal content, spam or targeted harassment, there is going to be ambiguity and debate which doesn’t call for full isolation of servers that don’t comply with a particular set of ethics.
I personally have no horse in this race, though I can’t say I advocate for emotionally driven decisions.
Hasn’t the offending community already been removed?
I think it might have been. I can’t keep track because I’m operating Field Day.
Out of the loop. But nevermind, the internet is arguably for everyone, if an AI doesn’t like racists or misogynists then it should limit it’s own exposure or find better company
An AI?
I understand this platform is still young so the community hasn’t really decided on standards but imo there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between this and email. And with email, blocking an entire domain is usually strictly to deal with spam.
For a platform like this, we should probably extend that to illegal content but no further than that imo. Objectionable content should be handled via moderation, blocking, and just not subscribing to that content in the first place.
Just my $0.02
I like this.
Defederating and outright banning other instances has become an issue at https://lemmy.radio for sure. You have to stay up on the issues that other instances create. Your example of a net control station is spot on.
I think we’re fortunate as a broader amateur radio “community” that we understand how to police ourselves.
You’re more than welcome to mod at [email protected]
I can appreciate your dedication to universal goodwill and what steps might be needed to proliferate such ideals.
Here’s to this community not needing to move.
I really don’t want to move. It is easy to block a community as a user but I think the rush to judgment leads a lot of the internet mob, though well intentioned, to get out the pitchforks and torches and burn down their own houses. One instance, as I understand it has already defederated sh.itjust.works.
Correct. That would be the mods at Beehaw. However, there are plans in place to refederate at some point in the future. (Basically as Lemmy grows and gets more moderation features.)
So far the community you are referring to has 2 users actively posting, and all of their content is getting down voted to oblivion.
I am anxious about the next steps. You are right regarding the velocity of mob rule.
There are logical reasons for defederation and also for relying on community blockage. Freedom of expression cannot supercede respect for your fellow living bean.
I think a big part being missed is that this community isn’t reddit and never will be (thank heavens). I
hope for cooler heads.
“Okay, we’re almost ready to throw out the bath water, just gotta get the baby.”
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Well from what I’ve seen, I don’t think we’re very fascistic or misogynistic, at least none of the user comments from myself or others have been.
Yeah I agree, this surprises me a lot.
Why?
Like the OP above me mentioned, I haven’t really seen any toxicity coming from this instance personally (but I could of course have missed that, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen)
That’s the double edged sword of federation. The owner of the server has ultimate control over the content hosted on it. There are other servers who’s administrators will ban users using hate speech. Look around they are easy to find.
They are not so easy to find. You’ll need to be very familiar with modern bigot / authoritarian dogwhistles. Obvious things like slurs or calls for the death of an entire group are damaging, but far more damaging are the sneaky smart ones who say things like “Are you disagreeing with statistical facts?” or “You’re delusional if you think there’s any significant hatred towards [targeted_group]”.
In case of defederation, what happens to the user comments from the outside instance that was defederated?
Defederation is a bit of a mess right now. Posts and comments remain, and users can still interact with them with no indication that the instance has been defederated.
Lemmy developers will probably improve the user experience around defederation over time, but for the moment it’s pretty primitive.
I think they stay? I don’t know.
