this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don't find appealing (there's even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).

We don't want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.

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[โ€“] Rottcodd@lemmy.one 101 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don't want other people to control what I see.

That's it. That's my entire position on the matter.

[โ€“] JasSmith@kbin.social 48 points 1 year ago

I am dismayed with how many people want to control what others can see.

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[โ€“] dart@lemmy.fmhy.ml 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Just throwing my opinion in... Since we can block communities on our own, we don't really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it's not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might've decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I'd still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.

[โ€“] amcjv12@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Completely agree with this. I can block anything I don't want to see, and I'd rather not have someone else decide that for me

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I think the issue here people posting things in BeeHaw's communities that they don't want. The only way to stop that is to block users on a case by case basis, and since people can create unlimited free accounts this is ineffective given the low numbers of mods they have. The only way to work around this was to ban the two instances that had the most bad actors and easy registration.

I have floated the idea of a whitelist of users for their communities, but have been informed this isn't supported by Lemmy at the moment.

[โ€“] Watcher@discuss.tchncs.de 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my point of view it's a kind of censorship. Just let the user himself decide what he wants to see.

[โ€“] MisterFrog@aussie.zone 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a second language speaker where "user" is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use "themselves" instead.

[โ€“] Woozy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Akchually, since we're being annoyingly corrective, shouldn't it be "themself"?

OR is it able-ist to assume the commentor does not express multiple personalities?

[โ€“] MisterFrog@aussie.zone 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah I guess I reordered it "Just let the user decide themselves..." in my head.

As I guessed the commenter was a German speaker. This is a very common occurrence and not something malicious (check like every boardgame from Germany referring to "the player" as "he"), just lost in translation.

Never meant to be annoying or holier-than-thou, people can genuinely misunderstand that it's some sexist remark, and so I pointed it out. Just said it so the commenter hopefully isn't misunderstood in the future.

So, if you feel that's some woke-ass snowflake nonsense, be my guest lol

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[โ€“] Watcher@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea okay. In German you mostly use the masculine noun

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A bit facetious innit

Live and let live

[โ€“] inventa@lemmy.fmhy.ml 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for this. It's recomforting and makes me thing I chose the right instance to sign up

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[โ€“] Joker@lemmy.fmhy.ml 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don't like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It's annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don't want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.

I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.

I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol

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[โ€“] OldGitPhil@feddit.uk 33 points 1 year ago

The problem at the moment is that the community moderation tools are pretty limited. At some point there will be coordinated attacks on some communities and the moderation tools are not yet sufficient to defend against that sort of thing.

[โ€“] HonorableScythe@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It's a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they'd never remove anything hateful towards trans people.

On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There's no way to bar them from making a new server.

[โ€“] dreadgoat@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's important to choose your home wisely.

I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.

Bear in mind that defederation ~~isn't bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don't care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins.~~ This isn't true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?

To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn't see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn't even realize it.

[โ€“] zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that defederation is in fact bidirectional. lemmy.world can't see new posts from beehaw after the announcement.

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[โ€“] zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think it's different with Lemmy since people make posts in communities and it's in the community moderator's power to remove problematic comments.

If an entire instance supports or encourages such behaviour though, then you're right and such instances should be defederated.

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[โ€“] knife@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

thank you for not being a drama queen and railroading this whole thing by leveraging the small amount of power you have to make some bullshit point about your social views.

[โ€“] FermatsLastAccount@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.

Why is lemmygrad blocked, but not exploding heads?

[โ€“] mambabasa 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because lemmygrad is a tankie hellhole. They support all kinds of authoritarian nonsense.

[โ€“] Mac@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That doesn't answer the question.

[โ€“] mambabasa 14 points 1 year ago

Sorry I didn't know what exploding heads was when I commented. That's also an authoritarian hellhole, and should also be blocked.

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[โ€“] ondoyant@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago

I think that structures that permit people and communities to do literally whatever they want is how lemmy can thrive. The people in beehaw (myself included) are on the whole perfectly chill with the defederation, and the specific reasons and conditions for that defederation. The admins have been open about the fact that they want more moderation tools for our community before refederating with those instances, it isn't a permanent state of affairs. I like beehaw. Its chill. Maybe other people wouldn't like that, but then maybe just don't host your account there? There are tons of other places to be. This isn't reddit, if you aren't inside beehaw, its management doesn't affect you.

Except for the fact that defederating is bidirectional at the moment. It would be nice if the platform's defederation and the user's defederation were less tied together, but as far as I can tell, the beehaw admins only defederated because there wasn't a compromise between "do nothing" and "ban everything" available to them.

[โ€“] tartarsauce@lemmy.fmhy.ml 19 points 1 year ago

I very much appreciate this philosophy. It looks like this is the right instance for me :)

[โ€“] RyanHakurei@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don't see anything of value being lost. They can wall off into their own echochamber and the rest of us can communicate freely.

[โ€“] Biorix@lemmy.fmhy.ml 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.

I don't think they did it happily

But we're not concerned since this instance is smaller and probably not as much targeted

[โ€“] techno156@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

They not happy about it, but it was the only way for them to stop users circumventing their account creation restrictions by registering an account at places that didn't have those, and just posting over there.

According to their post, they basically did it as a last resort, since Lemmy doesn't have good enough moderation tools to deal with the influx, and they don't have the manpower either.

[โ€“] JasSmith@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.

I don't agree. They appear to have a lot more moderators than kbin.social or lemmy.world. They didn't have any higher number of trolls. What they want is to remove more comments. Comments which they think offend people. This is all about a point of view. They want a safe space. An echo chamber. They want to be protected from diversity.

[โ€“] ondoyant@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

Beehaw has been pretty darn open about exactly why and under what circumstances they defederated. Try to be a little more charitable here. They're in open communication with the mods of both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works as of now, and are trying to start development on more nuanced moderation tools. As far as I know, the intent is to refederate once things get figured out.

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[โ€“] Otome-chan@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it's important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we're still federated with them and things seem fine?

[โ€“] 0x4E4F@lemmy.fmhy.ml 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.

It's nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don't defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don't like that, you can just block their communities ๐Ÿคท.

Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else's, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so... basically, they're human, just like the rest of us.

Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they'll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they've got to say, they're just tankies anyway - defederate ๐Ÿคท.

If you don't like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them... at least I can't see a reason.

[โ€“] TiredSpider 28 points 1 year ago (18 children)

I don't know why you're insisting people who don't like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.

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[โ€“] coolin@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you're probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.

If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they've read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren't authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.

The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. ๐Ÿ’€), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don't exist and are "western propaganda" while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism ๐Ÿ˜ก.

When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don't think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after "years of propaganda pushed by western countries" to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.

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[โ€“] tallwookie@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

nice to hear that about open federation. I feel that the real benefit of the concept of federation is decentralization - and de-federating like beehaw did just ruins that.

[โ€“] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Instances that defederate are at a disadvantage though, because it hurts their users. There is a natural incentive to stay federated. Defederation is really a nuclear-scale moderation tool, and it's one of the founding principles of the fediverse: independant administration. If you don't like some administrators, vote them out by joining an instance that better matches your needs instead.

In any case, the admins of these instances are collaborating and have stated that this is a temporary measure untill better mod tools become available. I'm not worried at all.

But no doubt by, some communities are going to be just so at odds, that it's probably best if there are mechanisms to keep them separated. And you know what? That's just fine.

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[โ€“] Angleslam@lemmy.fmhy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why did lemmygrad get blocked?

[โ€“] AtomicAria@kbin.social 34 points 1 year ago (16 children)

It's full of tankies (fascists who like the color red).

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[โ€“] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances

I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That's the beauty of the model and that's why kbin and lemmy with thrive.

[โ€“] BrotherCod@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the general idea behind Lemmy and activity pub was not to have all the instances and groups on one server to begin with. It's just that some of the older users of Lemmy/kbin/mastodon, already had the servers up and running instead of people creating own self-hosted instances.

The intention was more for one server to host one instance on a specific topic and then federate with the rest of the community. That server would just be in control of that one instance, like a subreddit on Reddit's main site.

Instead what you had was three or four people who were used to the back end software, creating a bunch of groups or letting be created a bunch of groups on their instance. This is going to centralize the population to certain servers instead of ending up with thousands of small federated servers.

And once the personal belief systems and moderation start seeping into all groups on that server we're going to see problems. The more control one single person has, the higher the likelihood is that they're going to start abusing the power in some way, even if they don't think it's an abuse their selves.

[โ€“] Awhiskeydrunker@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The fact that users can easily move to another instance will serve as something of a check and balance against this kind of behavior by mods and admins though, wouldnโ€™t it?

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