this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

founded 4 years ago
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The screenshot shows the recommendations from https://join-lemmy.org/.

Still being federated with exploding-heads does not mean the instance supports them. But it means that shit-heads are allowed to take part in the discussions on their communities. They do intoxicate the discussions we will have. They will attack minorities. Maybe you will not be harassed by them, more vulnerable people will be. They are allowed to moderate communities on these instances. Exploding-heads members actively guide young and unknowing people to their hateful instance.

They try to start discussions about the holocaust https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268. They create communities only to crosspost exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma They take over discussions against them https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189 "WHY are vulnerable people joining a decentralized system? Isnt this why you want a closed, not for public eyes community?"

This was a link to exploding-heads, because when someone copies a permalink of a comment from them on another instance, it will be a link to their instance.

Are we building a place where vulnerable people are welcome and safe or are we building a place where nazis are welcome and safe?

They want you to block them, they comment that everywhere. They block people who are in favor of defederating them https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 When their opponents won't see them anymore, they can harass and recruit without being noticed.

Blocking will not solve the problem. They will spread even when you close your eyes.

~~Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now~~ there is a post with a list of 'health communities on Lemmy' with the first entry guiding to exploding heads. https://lemmy.world/post/396561

It is still possible that some of the mentioned instances do support them. The owner of sh.itjust.works says that because of “free speech” all other instances would be allowed. It is suspicious to me that his line is drawn only for lemmygrad https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474

The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.

I’d like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that’s all about and report back?

At the same time they seem to ignore the call and vote to defederate with exploding-heads https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483.

They rejected to delete The_Donald from sh.itjust.works until they feared to get isolated from the other instances: https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored early warnings. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248). TD was more important to them than keeping the only mod of their 4th biggest community c/patientgamers (https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747, https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922)

Since The_Donald was removed, I did not find more racist content on the mentioned servers. That is part their tactics. They act harmless but recruit to their instance, attract likeminded people and chase others away. Discussions on sh.itjust.works about such topics are very toxic already, soon they might be able to do more harm.

(My research is very limited, as i could not search for all exploding-heads member content on other instances by entering their domain. I know there are nice communities on sh.itjust.works.)

What can be done? On joinmastodon.org there is a Mastodon Server Covenant with very few useful rules, one of them is "Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia". https://joinmastodon.org/covenant It would be a first step to implement these rules for join-lemmy.org. At least instances that want to be recommended on there should have to agree to that rule.

More actions should be taken now. Please make suggestions. Things will only become more complicated. The next reddit wave is incoming.

For those who did not already know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone

This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?

-Share/crosspost

-Contact admins

update: lemmy.word defederated eh

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[–] antik@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Exploding-heads.com has been blocked by lemmy.world

Full list of linked and blocked instances can be found here: https://lemmy.world/instances

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[–] MrComradeTaco@lemmy.fmhy.ml 54 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Fucking christian fundamentalists fascists. They are a fucking cancer in every social media platform.

[–] MrComradeTaco@lemmy.fmhy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

The worst thing it's they are being funded by the conservative elite nations to speak fascist hate all over the internet.

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[–] Belgdore@lemm.ee 43 points 1 year ago

IMO the best defense is education. Make these people and their bigotry known. I had not heard of them before this post, but now I can be on alert for them, and avoid interacting with them and report them in the future.

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They're playing the traditional Alt-Right playbook, and they're playing a bunch of instance admins like fiddles. I've noticed a consistent pattern of abusive trolls being from that instance. My secondary account is on sh.itjust.works, and I'm looking for another instance to be my secondary instance that I use to look at lemmy.world content I can't see from this, my primary account. Thus far, there aren't any instances I can find that have a federation / defederation list that matches my ideal list, so for now, I have my happy account and my "it stresses me out" account.

It seems like there are two camps here in the threadiverse. People who are excited to find an instance admin who moderates the way they like, and people who think an instance admin is only responsible for uptimes and that this entire experiment should be fully unmoderated

[–] IsThisLemmyOpen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Join us at lemmy.dbzer0.com. We're federated with most instances including Beehaw. And no Tankies or Fascists are here. lemmygrad and explodingheads are both defederated.

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[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it's the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that'd be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you're not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.

If you are interested in doing so I'd be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 8 points 1 year ago

Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don't defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.

Being outside of the US, I wasn't aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it's easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.

If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don't see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.

I'm sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven't already.

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm strongly considering hosting a KBin instance

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[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Making the basic rules like Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia should be a no brauner. Pls add this rule

[–] foleac@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago

should be a no brauner

German "braun" = brown => nazi

What a beautiful typo.

[–] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely agree that instances featured in http://join-lemmy.org/ should all follow those basic rules:

Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia

Concerning to see that both vlemmy.net and lemmy.world are federated with them; I'm mainly on these.

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[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don't permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won't interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don't like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.

I will take action against:

  • Local users harassing someone
  • Local users breaking local rules
  • Local users repeatedly breaking remote rules
  • Local communities that break local instance rules
  • Remote users harassing local users
  • Remote users repeatedly breaking local rules
  • Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to break local rules
  • Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to harass my users

The first rule on my instance is a catch-all "Be welcoming", that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just "racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia".

As an admin I don't have the time or desire to police:

  • Local users interacting on remote communities, so long as they are following remote rules
  • Remote communities
  • Remote users interacting with remote users/communities

I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the "All" feed, at the very least for anyone who isn't logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the “All” feed

I really don't want to see that done, because right now that has been my primary method of community discovery, outside of the small number I've discovered through explicit Reddit migrations.

/all should be a feed of everything available to users on your instance. That's...what the word "all" means. Defederating is the way to curate that. An instance being able to block individual communities within another instance could be a good tool to have as well, perhaps, but beyond that I'm not sure I would want to see curation of /all.

[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of "Suggested" feed rather than a replacement for "All", like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I'd just take being able to filter the "All" view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.

Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created "All" is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere... I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.

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[–] eating3645@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

~~Even if these servers federate with exploding heads, the individual servers would still moderate content coming from exploding heads users on their servers, no? I agree that there are clearly a lot of shitty users there, but I have not seen a strong argument from you on how federating with them is a problem. Their content here is actively moderated.~~

~~I could very well be wrong, in which case I will eat my words, but it seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.~~

Just took a quick browse of their instance, eww...

[–] hawkwind@lemmy.management 18 points 1 year ago

Join an instance that does not allow local communities. Then you can subscribe remotely to whatever you want and block whatever you don't.

[–] scrappy_Duncan@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts

Is there much of a difference nowadays?

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[–] Zehzin@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A little of column A, a little of Columbine

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Don't care, my captain already defederated them. Y'all need to pressure your admins to defederate them. An outsider like me ain't gonna influence policies of instances I'm not a member of.

[–] HRDS_654@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Here's the thing, while I don't think Nazi views should be supported this is a general instance and as such there are going to be a lot of shitty people here, Nazi's included. The strength of the fediverse is that we can make our own instance "with blackjack and hookers" so to speak. There are already instances, in fact, that are a lot more strict in who they allow. Again, this is not a support for these views as I don't support hate for anyone. It's the paradox of tolerance dictates that the intolerant will eventually take over, which is why we cannot be tolerant of fascism, hate, Nazi's, etc.

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There’s no feasible way to stop people of a specific ideology from using an open source piece of software. You say blocking isn’t the answer but I’m not sure what more you can expect. Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector, what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?

The most realistic solution I can think of is letting instances or users subscribe to curated blacklists. Something akin to Adblock or email server spam blacklists.

[–] possum@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?

Defederation, that's one of the key concepts of the fediverse

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Blocking an entire instance is still blocking.

[–] cakeistheanswer@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

It keeps them from participating by demoting them to the kids table, but you're still in a glass house to some extent.

I think this is the right answer, but the structure is going to require some amount of frequent drama just like this every time. You can keep an open federation policy until proven malicious, or you can verify partners, but I don't see the way around discussions.

[–] MakuNagetto@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector

As interesting a problem as this might be (my final year undergrad project was similar in nature), the nuance of written word can be significant and difficult to detect. Making a good product and then ensuring multiple communities would adopt it is not realistic in 2023.

What is realistic, however, is a zero tolerance policy against such individuals. What we should be doing is ostracizing them. You take away their platform, you take away their power. They can only do so much damage if they're all gathered up in a single community with no ties or influence to the rest of the world.

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A thing you can do apart from blocking is talking about it and raising awareness.Thight balancing though with doing "outrage marketing" for or making a self fulfilling prophecy.

If you are engaged, you could document malicous behaviour from them, so they can't work in the shadows and their real intends are widely known. Truth is: few people like Nazis

[–] wer2@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Thank you for working hard at making this a place I like to be.

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