Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
Definitely better to just block the community in other instances instead of total defederation. Admins can do so pretty easily. I know beehaw is usually pretty proactive about this kind of stuff.
And yeah...fuck Donald Trump. He's fucked up the US so hard and has put our country into such a mess. I hope they nail his ass straight to jail.
Seriously. Defederation should be a last resort against spammers and outright attacks on other instances, not because you dont agree with a single community.
Historically this group has been responsible for an absolute shitload of spam and outright attacks.
I was doxxed by them. They had links to a discord group that included my full name, address, email, and phone number. There was a whole list, it's one of the first reasons they were quarantined. There was a comment that read "anyone with spare bullets can send them here".
This is a lot more than "I simply don't agree with that community". They are trash who will trash up any platform they can reach.
Just blocking the community doesn't prevent the users in that community from harassing minorities and generally spreading disinformation and hate. It's offloading extra moderation work to every instance who federates with them. Unless that instance is also okay with fascists interacting in bad faith, of course.
It could be extra moderation work, but I think it's a bad line to cross to assume everyone on an instance is guilty before they've actually done something bad.
Bad comments can come from anywhere though and mods still have to remove them.
Hey all,
This community is being reviewed and will likely be a discussion point to in our Agora community where we discuss about issues like this as a community.
Post that are breaking rules will be removed. If its a regular occurrence so will the TheDonald community. Please continue reporting inappropriate posts and its difficult to maintain visibility on everything that is going on at all times.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Reading through the replies and I have to say ya'll don't take prisoners here. sheesh.
Anyway, I went through went through the community in question and reviewed not only the posts in the community and the comments made by the mods of the community and they weren't aligned with the kind of negativity I want to see on the instance. I have since purged the community and the mods.
Thank you
Fwiw, I hereby volunteer to take the c/ over, and dedicate it to the worship of our disney duck overload, the real Donald.
That's not a joke. The best way to deal with the history behind the subreddit is to defang it. There's always gong to be some troll or someone that actually worships the cheeto trying to make that community somewhere.
If instances preempt that by making communities with that name that are about some other Donald explicitly, it ceases to be able to be weaponized.
And there's a ton of Donalds worthy of a c/. There's the duck, there's the amazing actor, Mr Glover, the other great actors Cheadle, and Sutherland; the McDonald's even.
You pick which Donald you prefer, I'll take the heat from the c/existing.
dedicate it to the worship of our disney duck overload, the real Donald.
A noble cause worth pursuing.
Thanks for the reply. I've been side-eyeing instances that have open community creation due to how easy it is for bad actors to come and start shit, especially if instance admins aren't constantly on top of things.
As other people in this thread have pointed out, if you allow Nazis to hang out in your bar for long enough, you become a Nazi bar. Given your instance's stated rules against bigotry, I would advocate for proactive action in cases like this. Donald Trump is a champion of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia - all the things you don't allow. I wouldn't think you'd want a community that champions him as a dogwhistle for all of those things.
Have you considered disabling open community creation and having it be a function of your Agora discussion space?
Blocking open community creation is a mistake and that will be abused down the line. It's also taking power away from users to make Lemmy their own.
First off, community creation is not the problem here. Anybody can make a community called the Donald, the problem are the people that will fill it. Those people are coming here regardless of what community they find themselves in. Blocking community creation doesn't stop them, only actual monitoring of individual users will do it.
There really has to be a line here between combating this kind of toxic hateful bullshit and completely locking down a social media platform so that everything must be pre-scanned and approved before it sees the light of day. Pre-approving content means moderation controls the site directly and obliquely. Before users can even cast a vote, mods can unilaterally and silently strike it down.
I just generally don't care for the overall notion that Lemmy needs to be carefully curated like a garden right out of the gate. Ban the obvious shit like the Donald but there has to be a fundamental acknowledgment that the users, the people, need to have the ability to make the space their own without some council pre-judging them.
If they were acting in good faith they would not have started in such trappings. The Donald has an ugly history and it started with harmless memes. Will the next antisemitic tiki-torch march organized on your instance? The next 1/6? It's not worth the risk.
Defederating from an entire instance for one community seems a bit overblown tbh. Blocking would prob be effective enough. That said, beehaw will likely be most proactive in removing td nonsense from its feed
Leave it to Redditors to be OK with everything turning into a Nazi bar.
No it's not that. Lots of us never interacted with that sub. Just block them no need to defederate a while instance
If the instance won't kill the sub, the members of the sub will take over that instance.
I'm seeing some people testing the waters of some subs to see what they can get away with.
Dude, it is one community with a whopping 9 subscribers and every single post is sitting at negative.
Y'all need to calm down.
I don't think it is. R/The_Donald was a cancer on Reddit, spreading around and harming other communities. If an instance is willing to tolerate a community like that, I don't see the value of anything else in that instance.
I think deleting the sub is the right call simply because it’s trying to replace a community that did enough in the past to deserve a ban on any platform.
Tired of all the calls for defederation though.
It is easy now with defederation.
De-federation isn't the tool to solve this specific problem. That community has 34 posts, all by a single user, and under 30 total comments across all threads. I cannot find a single post or comment in that community that would violate any rules on lemmy.ml.
A single user posting content in a community that shares a name with a banned community on another social media platform seems like a very very low bar to push for de-federation.
I just don’t get it.
Block the c/TheDonald community. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.
When it gets no visits, no views, and only it’s handful of users meme-ing each other, it’ll die. One of the big reasons TheDonald took off on Reddit was because of all the attention it got.
So, don’t give them attention. Don’t feed the trolls.
I’m not saying to tolerate neo-nazis. But running from them isn’t exactly a time proven strategy, either. They will exist, and it’s up to all of us to remind them that their views are garbage.
Everyone keeps repeating that defederation should be a last resort. Fine, but we should also acknowledge that the list of resorts is very short:
Server admins talk to the admins of the server hosting the offending community, in an attempt to get them to clean their house. If they don't;
Defederate.
There really isn't anything else for server operators to do that isn't just letting the offending community continue unabated.
Offloading the responsibility to individual users to block users / communities is lazy. Most of us don't want to spend our limited time playing whack-a-mole.
I suspect we'll see user accounts shuffling around so that they land on a home server whose defederation policy matches their preferences.
I think instance owners need to be able to block specific communities in other instances instance-wide.
So, if lemmy.ml wants to block c/the Donald!sh.itjust.works they should be able to block that community for all users of lemmy.ml, but not the rest of the sh.itjust works instance.
Best of both worlds IMO
this is already an option, as shitjustworks pointed out in the update post
OP may come across a little alarmist, but it's really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren't carefully weeding out the ne'er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.
And yeah, they follow "the rules", and free speech and all that, until they don't. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.
Have you looked at the content of that sub? There are a total of 3 posts about the twice-impeached, twice- indicted, single-term, sexual predator.
I was on Reddit when the_donald was spewing their bile and have no wish to see it duplicated on Lemmy or anywhere else. Even so, I think that any alarm at this point is extraordinarily premature.
I wouldn't de-federate sh.itjust.works for that now. But stuff like this doesn't look good and the "Just ignore it bro" crowd shows that they never had to deal with organized harassment themselves. The_Donald wasn't just a harmless sub with a little bit of trolling, it was responsible for extreme radicalization and people died because of it. The reality is that such hate groups never stay in their place and behave everywhere else. They brigade and harass every time. Should the community grow and attract more people, it's just a disaster waiting to happen. People are responsible for their own instance and are free to choose whatever they want but that's the same for other servers if they should decide to de-federate.
And that was indicated when they migrated to Voat. Nobody else used Voat, it was just them. Also when reddit changed their policies to prevent one sub from appearing on the front page more than once.
The whole point is to be obnoxious in spaces where it isn't welcome. When they realized they couldn't do that on a platform that only consisted of them, there was no incentive to engage. The whole point is to shit up a platform enjoyed by others, and that's exactly what they'll do here.
Wasn't The Donald originally a subreddit making fun of trump? I saw that TD was created here but my assumption was they wanted to restore the original purpose. I haven't looked at it since then though.
Edit: Nope. It is in fact a pro trump community.
At the very beginning, yes. The tricky thing with having fun pretending to be bigots is that you eventually find yourself surrounded by actual bigots who very much missed the fact that you were joking.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
theres a antifascist placeholder on https://lemmy.world/c/the_donald
Friggin hilarious that one
This community exists solely to document Trumps crimes.
If you support tr*mp. If you were a member of reddit’s biggest hate community, then you will cry. You. Are. Not. Welcome. Here.
Fascism is a curse on this world.
This is a safe space for those who oppose conservatives scum.
support abortion rights.
support trans rights.
support women.
support minorities.
Destroy fascism. Destroy hate.
Amazing sidebar
Nazis shouldn't be able to do what they want on their own instances either, they should be crushed there as they should in every space
But also blacklisting is a basic first step that everyone should do, so you aren't wrong there.
In defense of some instance admins, I think they can just literally not know because it's hard to keep tabs on every instance that gets made, but that also means that, if you use that instance, you should totally DM them to let them know (I've had to do this with certain other instances). If the admins persistently ignore those warnings, they should be treated as complicit.
So this is a quick way to ruin the fediverse: Create a The_Donald community on the big instances.
Defederate their asses. Fascism is a cancer.
Anyone who's been on Reddit or Twitter knows what happens if you give those psychopaths an inch.
Deplatforming works. That's why the chuds whine about it.
I'm not informed enough on Trump to know if "Trump supporter" automatically implies "Nazi". The r/TD community itself was cancer, I believe. Still - for the sake of the argument, let's pretend that all Trump supporters are Nazi, and that the comm is about people genuinely supporting Trump.
The main problem here is that you got exactly two subscribers in a rather large instance. From the PoV of other instances, to defederalise shitjustworks is the same as using a nuclear bomb to get rid of a cockroach. At least at this stage, IMO actions in other instances should be towards that community and its users, not the whole instance.
And, within shitjustworks: if the admins have a laissez faire approach, I think that actions are up to the users.
Also I wouldn't generally link my own blog here, given that I use it mostly to vent, but this might be food for thought for the folks here. I think that analogies between ants in a kitchen and undesired users are specially useful: you don't want to nuke the kitchen because of a single ant, but you don't want to leave it do as it pleases either.
I'd imagine this is one of the many reasons why beehaw went ahead and defederated from sh.itjust.works. It's a bit TOO lenient over there in some ways.