• Contextual Idiot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    919·
    2 years ago

    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.

          • Contextual Idiot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            181·
            2 years ago

            I guess to some people, tolerance is conditional on whether you agree with what they said.

            I’m not going to tolerate neo-nazis over here. I’m going to call out any of their shitty views and takes. Because they aren’t going away. Racism didn’t die, white supremacists didn’t fade away. Folks like to think they came back with Trump, but guess what? The call was coming from inside the room. It was always there, it was just taking a nap and waiting.

            Cutting them off will just put them back into waiting mode, ready to pop up and spread their shit again. We, the society we, need to push back against their shit to keep regular folk from falling for their lies. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s certainly not a one person job. All of us need to do what we can, even if it’s just a downvote.

            Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to unblock TheDonald to see what’s worth downvoting.

            • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
              81·
              2 years ago

              Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to unblock TheDonald to see what’s worth downvoting.

              I peeked at it earlier. Honestly, really isn’t anything at all of value in there.

              I mean, seriously- it’s just a bunch of really crappy news posts… the kind that looks more like spam then news.

              • Contextual Idiot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                142·
                2 years ago

                Yeah, it was sad. One dude shouting to the void, basically. If that’s all it takes to get an instance defederated, then the Fediverse is doomed to be small oases in an ocean of fear and hatred.

                • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
                  111·
                  2 years ago

                  Fediverse is doomed to be small oases in an ocean of fear and hatred.

                  Tell me about it.

                  I don’t think many people realize how little effort it would take me, to go and create a bot that just creates accounts on their instance, and then posts pro-trump things on other instances.

                  Let that run for, oh. a day or two, and I imagine that would be the end of federation for everyone.

                • God@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  102·
                  2 years ago

                  I specifically choose instances based on their instance block list. If they block a lot of instances, I don’t consider them. My ideal ones are the ones that are a bit free and yet are well connected, but sometimes well connected means “allied to the mass defederators” because people in general become super compliant in the face of isolation.

                  Sh.itjust.works may start banning communities to regain federation to Beehaw, and then Beehaw will ask that sh.itjust.works defederate a “wrong” instance or two, and by the time we know it, we’ll all be banning the same instances, and we’ll be a cute little echo chamber of “tolerance”.

                  By that same measure, I usually avoid any instance of community that claims to be a “safe place”. They’re the likeliest to always be attacking others because that’s how you stay safe, through unending violence.

            • sexy_peach@feddit.deEnglish
              81·
              2 years ago

              I guess to some people, tolerance is conditional on whether you agree with what they said.

              how is downvoting related to tolerance?

              • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
                82·
                2 years ago

                You literally downvoted him, NOT for the content inside of the comment he made- but, because he chose to voice his opinion.

                That is the definition of intolerance, towards any viewpoint that does not specifically agree with yours.

                His comment, that you disagreed with:

                I just posted my comment in the Lemmy.ml thread, so we’ll see how THAT goes…

              • Contextual Idiot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                13·
                2 years ago

                I owe you an apology, @sexy_peach@feddit.de . I didn’t mean to direct that comment only to you, but I see how it came across that way.

                Upvotes and downvotes don’t have modifiers that let you say whether you agree or disagree, whether you think the comment is relevant, or whether you appreciate that someone took the time to respond but you disagree with their points. They’re too broad.

                So without further information, like a reply, no one can really know why an upvote or downvote was cast.

                So, would you care to discuss what I wrote in reply to your post?

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          51·
          2 years ago

          Did you get told about the “paradox of tolerance”?

          People need to chill a bit. The defederate hammer is being thrown around a lot lately without allowing admins time to respond. One moron setting up a community named thedonald isn’t the same as that same Reddit community seeing up base here.

          Seems like it’s gone now either way? I can’t find it.

    • crowlemo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1110·
      2 years ago

      And the same goes for anything else. You don’t like r/politics being a bastion for US democrat biased ans bullshit propaganda? Block it. You don’t want to see republicans talking about being republican (the horror), block it.

      And don’t pretend we all need to agree on everything and be as shittily outraged with the next US centric Google manipulated narrative.

      • God@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        102·
        2 years ago

        Same. I’ve blocked like 50 communities so far. Yet I don’t go around calling to defederate because “omg I just don’t like US news, US has committed atrocities, anyone who posts a US news will get their server defederated!”. Block and keep walking. Life’s too short to spend it crying about the perfectly evitable.

  • narp@feddit.deEnglish
    649·
    2 years ago

    I’m surprised the admin gives it so much thought. Just delete “the Donald” and be done with it. Who is going to complain that they don’t want to give fascists a platform? That’s how you handle them, by not giving them a second thought, all this discussion is already giving them way too much publicity.

    • hukurowl@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      207·
      2 years ago

      Correct, which is why any waffling on that decision makes a lot of people suspicious of the admin’s stance on the subject.

    • mr_washee_washee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      yea. instances admins should have open communication with each other about what is bothering one another and take action for the good of the majority. dont fall for the ‘divide and conquer’ plan

  • Negatively_Positive@kbin.social
    606·
    2 years ago

    It does feel that many people here on lemmy are experiencing 1st hand of “feeding the troll”. The Donald community created is probably done by less than a handful of people and it drove hundred times more amount of users to turn against each other.

    This is why I frown upon the idea of defederation and I blame the users for opening that pandora’s box. People, including mods, are too busy getting at each other throats and praising the value of their bubble communities rather than having any sort of planning.

    • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
      281·
      2 years ago

      The sad part- I believe it was only a single account which sparked this conflict causing everyone to be at each other’s throats.

      • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        They’re constantly changing their display name too. Whether it’s to be more elusive or to make their numbers look greater.

        • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
          52·
          2 years ago

          Suppose the best solution for this problem- is a better system for handling banned/toxic users…

          Would need to be prob a third party script, distributed amongst multiple instances. But- that would also require a certain level of trust between admins too.

          If memory serves me- back in my minecraft days- we used mcbans, pretty effectively for this purpose.

          For websites / forums, I used cleartalk, which actually worked pretty effectively… but, for spammers.

          I’ll have to take a look and see the level of effort to integrate that into here.

  • code_is_speech@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    5918·
    2 years ago

    Defederation is not the answer. Honestly, it’s such a powerful and destructive tool that I question whether it should exist period.

    Users should be treated like adults who are capable of determining by themselves what content they are comfortable with seeing.

    If I don’t want to see an extremist political community on my feed, I block that community myself. If an instance is full of such communities, I block that instance myself.

    I don’t want or need some other random on the internet to make judgement calls on what content I can or cannot interact with.

    Defederation is a tactical nuke, that if used incorrectly will destroy the freedom, decentralization and openness of Lemmy, and replace it with a far more centralized series of walled gardens.

    I fear that people are trying to recreate the reddit model on Lemmy. Lemmy is not reddit, Lemmy is better than reddit. Reddit is top down, Lemmy is bottom up. We don’t need more mod control, we need more user control.

    I would love to see more features built for user moderation of content. Perhaps I could subscribe to another users blocklist, or follow their ‘recommended communities’. Instances themselves could maintain suggested block lists, and users could chose to enable or disable them at their own discretion.

    I’m really not sure that defederation has any place at all. Even things like spam and bot instances I think would be better handled by a blocklist (enabled by default even), that users can turn on or off as they see fit.

    • wxboss@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      275·
      2 years ago

      I joined the fediverse for the fediverse experience. That is it’s touted interconnections and interoperability with other services and platforms so that I could discover and dialogue with people of similar interests who weren’t directly subscribed to the same service/instance/platform I was currently using.

      I originally subscribed to beehaw.org which soon afterwards began defederating from other instances. I soon deleted my account with them as that was antithetical to the reason I signed up with them in the first place. I wanted exposure and access to all that the fediverse offered.

      I have no problem with people and communities creating spaces for themselves while excluding those who don’t hold similar interests, but in light of all the current squabbling, I just want to join a fediverse instance that isn’t going to defederate.

      • hawkwind@lemmy.managementEnglish
        62·
        2 years ago

        Defederation should be just “read-only” and users should be blocked from posting or commenting. In its current state it just creates a fragmented broken network with silos that users don’t really know about because it silently fails.

    • iSharted@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      162·
      2 years ago

      Here is the answer.

      Autoblock spam and illegal content Make a “not cool” communities list and allow users to check a button upon signing up to block instantly.

      Problem solved.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
        121·
        2 years ago

        and illegal content

        I am massively against defederation when at all possible- However, I will draw the line at illegal content.

        The reason being- when content is federated, a copy of it is stored on all subscribed instances.

        I REALLY don’t want the feds knocking on my door. So- I will take a strict stance there, for protecting my own well-being. My server isn’t hosted in a country where anything goes.

        If- it is content which is against the rules of the instance where it was posted- by all means, I will give the admins a chance to handle the issue. Otherwise- nuclear option.

        • hawkwind@lemmy.managementEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          You are right to be concerned here. Since it touts self hosting, storage should’ve been decentralized and encryption designed in a way to legally protect hosters. Alas, we have what we have, which will require a lot of moderation until it matures more. Fingers crossed. Being responsible is the best we can do right now.

      • Derproid@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        61·
        2 years ago

        There shouldn’t be one “not cool” list on signup, that’s just /r/popular then. Every user should be able to make their own list. And every other user should be able to subscribe to any other user’s list if they don’t want to manage it themselves. But it shouldn’t bet set up and defaulted by the admins. If you aren’t able to at least do the bare minimum to curate your experience then just go back to facebook or reddit with their recommendation engines.

        • iSharted@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          I will elaborate. Every user can and should make a list of instances they personally don’t like, but admins/mods are also users. They’re just telling you that we don’t like these instances, but it’s your choice on whether you want to block them or not. Maybe they shouldn’t show it to you upon signup, I sort of agree there but a new user showing up and needing to start by cleaning up the place to their liking is a bit of friction for them. Will make a stronger selling point for another server that just defederates by default.

    • yarr@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      105·
      2 years ago

      Some people are so fragile that the MERE EXISTENCE of ideas they don’t agree with are an existential threat, whereas I am proud to have friends and neighbors that we do NOT always agree. Ironically, having people around with different thoughts and ideas is actual diversity, which is the opposite of these ‘curated safe spaces’ that these overly ban-friendly instances seem to crave.

      • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.caEnglish
        125·
        2 years ago

        It’s not a difference of opinion, it’s spewing of hate and misinformation. By the time you address one thing, they’ve spewed another ten. So you stop and then it goes unchecked. I suggest you watch the “innuendo studios” channel on YouTube.

        • yarr@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
          32·
          2 years ago

          So you stop and then it goes unchecked.

          But de-federating ENSURES it goes unchecked…

          • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.caEnglish
            122·
            2 years ago

            Only in that little sub, and doesn’t spread to the rest of the fed. Or shut it down like it was in this case.

            But you’re missing 2 points:

            It’s not merely a difference of opinion, which many people welcome. It’s the spewing of hatred and misinformation.

            There’s no countering it because of the asymmetry of bullshit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini’s_law It goes on and on and on, just flooding everything.

            • code_is_speech@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
              54·
              2 years ago

              So block them and move on. Or if you disagree with them that badly, push to have that instance/community added to a public blocklist/filter. Defederation, besides being an overly authoritarian solution, damages the network in a way that can and will make Lemmy into a worse place for its users.

              As instances start to defederate, it will matter more and more which instance a user signs up to. This will push users towards larger instances. As instances get larger, they will become less and less reliant on 3rd party instances for content, those instance admins will be incentivized to defederate from them, as they will a) not have as much control over those instances, and b) start to view them as competitors rather than collaborators.

              The beauty of Lemmy and federation generally, is that information appears centralized to it’s users, despite being decentralized in reality.

              The more defederation is used, the more centralized Lemmy becomes, whilest giving a more fractured, confusing, and disorganized experience to its users.

              Defederation will kill Lemmy. It needs to removed from the protocol before it becomes too widely abused.

              I see Lemmy going down in one of two ways:

              In fighting and fragmentation with overzealous use of defederation leading to walled gardens, and a terrible user experience.

              Or

              A major player like google or microsoft sees the potential in Lemmy. Starts their own highly funded instance that is full of useful features and a wonderful smooth UX. (That is all proprietary and only usable on their instance, naturally) Then when the majority of users are on their instance, defederate from everywhere else. (If you don’t think this can happen, just look at what google did to xmpp).

              • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.caEnglish
                53·
                1 year ago

                My own personal blocking does not solve the problem.

                I think you’re on a slippery slope argument, taking it from 1 to 100 awfully quick.

  • Frz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    456·
    2 years ago

    Seeing people here pushing back for once against the trigger-happy defederating mindset actually gives me hope in the future of this instance.

    • oldfart@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      Yes! This has been a disaster on Mastodon, hopefully Lemmy will not repeat these mistakes

  • megabucks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6931·
    2 years ago

    I’m out of here if the community stays up. I’ve already blocked it, but we cannot be tolerant with the intolerant.

    They need to go, and other instances would be right to ban. That’s the only way this model works.

    • marmalade@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2011·
      2 years ago

      Then you’ll always be led around by the nose by people you don’t like. Block, move on. Be an adult. Other people don’t need to decide on what everyone else can see. If you don’t want to see it, you won’t.

  • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    393·
    2 years ago

    I’m gratified that a lot of the conversations over there seem to point out that you shouldn’t defederate entire instances because of a few bad actors. Realistically we can’t all move to a new server every time a troll shows up, and the bigger the server the more likelihood of trolls.

    I havent seen the donald or exploding heads content. if I was the admin of this instance id probably want to see blatant rule breaking examples to be able to remove them. is there blatant racism and whatnot over there or is it typical stuff meant to trigger liberals?

    if there is blatant racism etc, have we reported it?

    • justastranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      409·
      2 years ago

      Honestly, the long-standing history of t_d’s behavior, rule-breaking and brigading, on other platforms should play heavily into the decision on this one. This instance’s admins should not wait until they cause issues here to prevent them from turning this place into a Nazi bar.

      • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        177·
        2 years ago

        its just a dangerous precedent in my opinion. Are you okay with similarly vaguely worded arguments being used to have your favorite community banned?

        Can we do a thought experiment?

        You favorite community is up for ban. What evidence would result in your agreeing to ban it?

        In my opinion whatever standard you would have for that question should apply to every community.

        • b_mcschmee@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
          214·
          2 years ago

          I mean that community does have a history so it’s not really nothing. Just cause they haven’t done it on this platform doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered. If the kkk created an instance but never broke any rules I’d think they’re history as an organization should be grounds for a banning. The donald is not the kkk but I still their past behavior should be considered.

            • hschen@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              13·
              2 years ago

              Wait till they find out its not just lemmy that the donald people are on, they actually exist in the world too. Can we defederate the earth too? haha

    • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
      121·
      2 years ago

      Honestly- I think its just somebody trolling.

      The username sounds like a troll, and the news posts they were sending were… comically bad.

    • drascus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      83·
      2 years ago

      I agree with you. However there should be recourse if the wider community on an instance agrees that there is a bad actor or community that needs to be banned. I’m fairly certain if we did a poll that the community would be banned.

      • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        13·
        2 years ago

        just so you know we are rapidly setting up a community within sh.itjust.works to do just that at theagora community. There have been discussions of defederation.

        I think we are trying to get some mods in place and a voting / polling process before hitting the defederation nuke / blocking communities etc

        https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora

  • ItsJason@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    372·
    2 years ago

    Let’s just all take a breath. This instance has its rules, and I expect them to be adhered to for content on this instance.

    Let’s give moderator time to get involved, and the community time to navigate precident setting actions. I think it is cool this instance is being set up to be self governing. But it’s just getting set up. And people work and are otherwise not constantly available.

    • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
      218·
      2 years ago

      I’m not from this instance but I’d caution heavily against letting an instance with open signups in a fediverse with a bot problem be ‘self-governing’.

      • Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        19·
        2 years ago

        We’re not just running polls and blindly following the results. I think the the goal of having a community discussion place is to help identify the people who are actively trying to participate in the process and then take their views into account in deciding the future of things.

        Ultimately, like all instances this is functionally a dictatorship because @TheDude runs the server and has the ultimate say in everything. He’s created an area where people can voice their opinions and his intentions appear to be to parse the discussion and make an informed decision based on the results.

        I doubt he’d be fooled by some position suddenly having 2500 bot comments saying ‘Nay’.

        • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
          131·
          2 years ago

          I just briefly looked at an agora post and it seems like that’s exactly what’s happening: lots of “Aye” with no discussion. Scrolling through more, people seem to be using upvotes/downvotes for voting.

          By all means if you have a system in place to handle bots that have access to chatGPT then don’t mind me, I’m just saying that bots should be taken into account lest humans get outvoted.

          • Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            10·
            2 years ago

            It’s not an easy problem to solve and I agree that it has the potential to become a large problem going forward (LLMs make the bot problem even more difficult to deal with).

            I’ve no idea how TheDude decides what opinion to follow but, so far, he’s piloted the instance as well as anyone could expect so I’m willing to keep riding along to see where things go.

          • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            There are votingg threads and discussion. lemmy doesn’t have a flair system.

  • InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    383·
    2 years ago

    I didn’t even know this “community” was even here, mostly because that’s just one guy and a half talking to themselves.

    1-2 angry contrarians is hardly a community but still,
    I’m not a big fan of being associated with that.
    Defederation as the one and only step is a bit nuts to me, as there are 6k+ other users here.
    By that logic, anyone that ever had a reddit account also supported /r/thedonald back then, which is just not the case.
    As for what to do with that troll, I couldn’t care less if they get the boot, yet evading a ban on here isn’t exactly hard.

    • Trekman10@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      164·
      2 years ago

      IDK I think the community should get shut from the instance for violation of the no bigotry rule, given the litany of things Trump has said, a place allowing for only “Only high energy pro-trump posts.” will inevitably break that rule.

      • frontleftnippletit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        135·
        2 years ago

        Definitely, why wait? Free speech is free speech, but there is demonstrably nothing about this specific free speech that would make it valuable to the community. Keeping them around will just turn this instance into a nazi bar.

      • InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        22·
        2 years ago

        For clarity I’m fully behind yeeting this junk from here.
        Nothing of value would be lost.
        Didn’t mean to downplay what they’re trying to be nor how we should react.
        I do think defederation is a bit much, or more accurately, it is worrisome that defederation would be the best tool for a remote instance to deal with that.
        All the more reason for us to deal with it.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          2 years ago

          Nah, that’s just giving in to bully tactics. If we’re banning communities because other instances threaten to defederate, what exactly is the point of running a separate instance?

          We should ban users and communities because they break our rules, not because someone else on another community doesn’t agree with how we decide to run this instance.

          • InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            31·
            2 years ago

            I’m not saying to ban them because of outside pressure, I’m saying to ban then because there’s absolutely no value in having them here.
            Like the only possible reason for that troll doing good thing was to stir shit.
            It’s like some random guy taking a shit in your living room, maybe your family won’t come over maybe they will, but it still smells like shit.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              2 years ago

              I don’t get your analogy. Someone starting a community doesn’t impact me at all because I don’t have to ever see it. Someone trolling in comments is annoying, so I just report and block them and don’t see it anymore.

              So it’s more like a channel existing on my TV that I absolutely hate, so I just don’t ever watch that channel.

              I never saw that person’s posts, and the only reason I even knew about it was this thread, and within a day it was gone. It’s the definition of non-news. Things like this are annoying for a day or so, and then the community takes care of it and it’s done.

              So it seems like this person achieved their goal of riling people up. Instead of making drama, just report, block, and move on.

  • HaveYouTriedCats@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    33·
    2 years ago

    I don’t know but it seems that this particular community didn’t exist until the dust-up regarding explodingheads and the discussions that have occurred afterward, including the Agora vote.

    So, to me it seems that it was started in retaliation to that particular discussion/event.

    The active user at the core continually changes their display name, making it more difficult to know that you’re replying to the same person unless you’re checking the account, as they only mod the one community.

    That alone makes it bad faith or trolling, however you want to phrase it, and it seems both the user and the community are at odds with the overall environment that many users came to this instance for.

    I think it actively hampers the conversation we were having with beehaw regarding refederation, and don’t disagree with their observation in the matter.

    Yes, we as users can block them. And?

    Call it growing pains call it whatever you’d like but I think that ignoring the larger context behind why it’s here and here now is missing the point of why “just block it as a user” isn’t the ideal solution.

      • this@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        261·
        2 years ago

        I’m not worried about seeing their content, that’s something I can control. I’m worried that these trolls are going to get us defederated from the majority of lemmy. That is not something I can control, and it would suck to have to look for a new instance, make a new account, and redo all my subscriptions just because a bunch of red hats decided to make this server their home base for some reason. I don’t want to be associated with them, so if they stay and we get defederated, I’m probably going to have to leave, even though I have so far liked this community.

  • PeachyMcPeachface@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4818·
    2 years ago

    Allowing hate speech and telling people to decide for themselves what to follow is moderate argumentation that gives more power to fascists. Taking the middle road always gives power to those willing to take it.

  • Leer10@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    338·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been using this instance more than beehaw cause i wanted a more broad federation view, but i don’t want this place to become a Nazi bar. That small sub may grow. If it isn’t banned then I’ll probably move again and welcome the defedration