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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Exactly. I don't feel obligated to read all the subs on an instance, I just read the ones I'm interested in.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I'm subscribing to the belief that the fediverse's attribute of "true censorship is impossible" is a benefit, not a curse. Every prior example of censorship has just morphed into "advertiser palatable". Which is bad for everyone.
More than happy to have access to instances that will take the kind of drastic action you're suggesting, access to my own "block" function, etc. Let them come.
The fediverse will inevitably host some messed up stuff. Counting it a blessing that those people have a clear place to go to and sequester themselves off.
So ultimately? More than happy to have an instance that agrees with this extreme anti-censorship posture. Sh.itjustworks is fine in my books. I can block the community, just like I could block subreddits on Reddit without abandoning the whole platform. Hell, even write a script to block everyone who's subscribed to the community. The power is yours now, and nobody can take that away. That's the fediverse.
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.
Mate just block it and move on. # You can't stop communities from being what they want to be. It will just form somewhere else. There's a fine line between keeping illegal stuff, harmful trolling and bots off the instance and just straight up policing free speech. At least there everyone knows where they are and can block them once.
I'd much rather that than play whackamole everytime the Donald pops up under a new banner.
Perhaps cool down a bit. You can always block a community that you don't want to see. Taking the nuke out on a whole instance (which is btw. about to install full democracy), just because you dont like a fringe group on there? That's just not the purpose of the defed tool. -- And TD is definitely fringe there and constantly mocked. Sh.itjust.works buddies are making a sport of it, just going there and trying to get thrown out as quickly as possible. They did not break the rules yet so there was no reason to kick them off. If cou want to start a discussion on the topic, you can do so at https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
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 just preemptively blocked the community for my account. I'd recommend everyone do the same until, and if they prove to be a problem.
I think instead of calling for pre-blocks or defederation of entire instances, we have to be vigilant and keep a close eye on the discussions going on around us.
I'm saying this not because I'm an "enlightened centrist" living in a delusion of tolerance or a fascist in disguise. I am as left leaning, antifascist, and antiauthoritarian as they get. I'm just saying this as I know from experience that there's no real way to eliminate people with bigoted views from our communities other than on an individual basis.
Ban an entire instance, you'll still have to block the individuals if they come one by one to stir shit up on your turf. Just skip the first part and go for the individual communities and users. They will simply find each other and form groups, as instances or otherwise anyway.
I know it's not ideal, but there's no real way to prevent these fascist groups from forming anywhere there's a large enough number of people. We can only block our own interaction with them and form counter groups, and actively fight against their bigotry.
I believe this is the sad truth we all have to live with, at least for the time being, because I can't see defederation as an effective tool.
Maybe you should switch to beehaw. I think they align more with your interests