EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn’t follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn’t take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don’t fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn’t seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
Hi Nahvi.
Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.
Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I’ve since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.
One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.
That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn’t be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the “be a good human” category.
I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.
Hey dude, thanks for dropping by.
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the direction you’re trying to herd cats towards.
@TheDude
Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.
I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you’ve struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.
I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.
I hope Lemmy will one day support defederating from content and users separately. As I wrote in other threads already, and I will just take your word for it that lemmygrad really is promoting hate speech, I can understand and support defederation from instances pr9moting hate speech, but at the same rime, it robs me of the opportunity to engage with tgeir users even on other platforms. As such, if the option to separately defederate from content and users ever becomes available, I hope the lemmygrad users will be federated again.
Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked
Then how about not lock every discussion post as soon as you see people agreeing with you on who to defederate and actually allow discussion?
will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech
That’s great but please define hate speech and give us some examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation”.
Are you planning to actively moderate against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
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Why switch accounts? just say no.
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I’m gonna park my car here for this.
I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I’ll see if I can find it.
Thank you. I would be interested to read it.
I think this is the thread https://sh.itjust.works/post/37624
Bear in mind, that lemmygrad.ml is not lemmy.ml. The latter instance is run by the devs.
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Lemmy.ml has a few people that post hundreds of things a day that skew pretty anti west and pro tanky to their worldnews community and a few others.
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Then I stand corrected, thak you for clarifying.
Ah, thank you. I did overlook that distinction in that comment.
That is quite the interesting thread. Especially that History of Lemmy link. Not sure what I expected but it wasn’t that.
To be fair I had the same feelings about it being defederated when I joined and went to check it out. The top post was pretty much talking about killing liberals. Tankies and fashys are pretty much the same rhetoric at the end of the day. They both have no place in civil liberal democratic society and poison everywhere given enough time.
When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml “Introduce yourself” thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying “Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are” (paraphrasing, don’t remember the exact words).
When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and “fighting” people isn’t something I want to see here.
Well that’s a shitty person then. I’m a ML and I joined over there on a different account because I like talking communism without the western prejudices. (ie people using Tankie as a slur but can’t define why)
That and communism memes are fun. Good discourse on organizing ect.
That sounds like a good reason to block that idiot or maybe even that community from my own thread, but I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
On the other hand, blocking burggit so I don’t have simulated CP showing up in my feed is not the kind of choice that I need clarification about.
I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
it seems like you have a fundamental issue with instances like sh.itjust.works and would be better off joining a different one, or even better making your own then
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Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.
I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.
lemm.ee has not blocked any instances for anything other than bot activity as far as i know, if youre interested
Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world
I hadn’t really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.
Lemm.ee is only banning instances that have abnormal growth (i.e. They didn’t enable captcha, have maybe 7 active users, and suddenly go from 30 total registrations to 52000 in a couple of days). Other than that there is nothing banned for ideological reasons unlike sh.itjust.works and other instances.
I would argue that even lemmygrad isn’t an ideological ban, it’s an anti-brigading/trolling ban. There are plenty of marxist-leninist folk on lemmy.ml that share the same philosophy, but don’t go full “ATTACK THE HEATHEN” like lemmygrad does.
I hope you find an instance that fits your needs. I honestly do.
What this place is hasn’t really been decided yet. The first few days were IT guys and generally techy people that liked the server setup. Then we had a big influx of users and the predictable chaos that follows. Then general ideas and frameworks started being put down by our admin and mods to try and steer that chaos.
You’ve walked in the door right as we’re trying to figure out what we want this place to be and how we want to run it.
Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment.
You would save yourself time by making your own instance, and run it how you like. We did that, and thousands of other people have, too. It’s not hard.
I am not too worried about the technical difficulties of hosting an instance, but I really don’t want to deal with the social ones. I would rather sit back and appreciate @TheDave for the trouble he and the other admins go through.
There isn’t much to worry about. We made our instance at the same time as sh.itjust.works but didn’t get popular, and also had all the restrictions for account creation in place. So we barely have any users, run our own show and fly under all the radar.
Sounds like you would be happier swapping instances. For the most part, the people here want it to remain a civil place without having the side project of keeping up with which instances are trash and manually having to block things. I’m sure there’s instances with much more liberal views on defederation that suit your personal preferences better.
Sounds like you would be happier swapping instances.
I am not so sure that you read my post. This was the new instance that I went to because it had less blocked instances.
I will tell you that the more of these comments I read the more I am starting to think that I never left reddit and that few people, if any, bothered to read anything besides the title.
…I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
Maybe I misunderstood but this is the section that I was referring to.
Turns out that I completely misunderstood the community structure here. There is a good chance that I was the one being confusing.
You can always make an account at lemmy.sdf.org. I was checking them out a few days ago and they have no servers blocked at all, and sdf is a really great organization to boot. This server will in time defederate other instances, of that there is no doubt. Discussions and voting on it have already happened, and may or may not be implemented, or invalidated. If you’re looking for an instance that haven’t defederated others, there are many options to choose from like the one I posted above, or you can choose to stay here and try to change minds, but you’ll likely be facing an uphill battle.
Thanks, I will have to check them out later. I am almost a bit surprised that I don’t recognize SDF. I spent some time using a few telnet sites some years ago.
I should clarify that this wasn’t just 1 user that was isolated. This was an upvoted comment, with many other users congratulating him on his commitment to “trolling the libtards”.
Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.
Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don’t have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren’t, given how many instances have defederated them.
Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don’t speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.
Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.
You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.
I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there’s anything I left out.
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You’ve been here 3 weeks and 3 of your first 6 comments, weeks ago, are also asking why lemmygrad was blocked, on multiple different servers. Didn’t Lemmy.one and lemmy.fmhy.ml already tell you why? You’re not asking in good faith.
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They advocate for authoritarian communist governments and are a consistently disruptive influence on other communities. They are tankies.
Seems like they might not want to say, but the overall point is that it seems like they don’t have to. If that is bothersome to you, you may want to move to a different instance, warn people about the fact that this can be done without explanation or any number of things that you can do for you, but simply calling them out over and over doesn’t seem terribly productive.
Edit: What I mean to say it’s that you seem to be complaining about the fact that they can defederate without explaining themselves, but instead of saying that you seem to be passive-aggressively just posting an observation insinuating that that is the problem. Not every post is going to be a direct explanation of why they did a thing and picking one post and complaining that there aren’t other posts with the answer you want is poor conversational skills.
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right wing? they are marxist-leninist communists, they’re as left wing as it gets.
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What are you talking about? Lemmygrad is explicitly extremely pro-LGBT. They aggressively ban transphobia.
"I just know liberals are left, conservatives are right, "
You “know” wrong then, sorry. Liberalism is only considered left-wing in the United States and other similarly conservative countries.
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I don’t understand so much fuss about defederation, just crate account overvthere and you will miss nothing
Except your goal is to influence others, in which case you should be defederated.
Would beehaw or lemmy.ml be angry about being blocked be some random instance? No, because we don’t care.
If The dude or some other admin does something you don’t agree with - just make account on some other instance. Or create your own.
All is well, don’t overthink it, you are not getting married.
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I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude’s intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.
I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?
I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
It’s a single event. Anything else?
Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse’s mouth.
It’s going to be hard for TheDude to run the server and also his real life if he constantly needs to be addressing hypothetical questions from users who joined within the past 24 hours.
That’s why I’m here.
Now that I know who you are, I have checked out The Agora and a lot of what you are saying has a bit more context. It seems I posted this in the wrong place and misunderstood the community structure here.
Thank you for your time responding. Once I spend a bit more time looking through The Agora, I may end up asking another question or two.
Ok I’m sorry I’m at work and had to step away for a bit.
Yes, the Agora is the platform for community input and decision making, and I’m one of the moderators.
No problem at all, happy to help.
Who are you? A few posts back, when you responded “anything else?”, I checked to see if you were a mod of this community or admin of the instance but I don’t see you in either list.
He’s a mod of the Agora, our (very new) democratic decision-making platform.
Ah, thank you for filling me in.
I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be defederated. I will say they openly brigade. That is just my personal observation, and you shouldn’t trust a random comment without data to back it up. But maybe keep an eye out and you’ll see it.
FWIW, my original response here was 7/0 upvoted and then I checked a few minutes later and it was at 11/6. Certainly an unusual upvote pattern.
Yep. I’m thats usually how it goes. Once of of them makes a comment or posts about a comment they don’t like they show up. And then the downvotes begin. They are openly narrative driven, and the way they “discuss” things comes off as digital warrior-esque. They’re here to for the showdown of their lives.
I actually wouldn’t mind their odd positions if they weren’t so hyper aggressive and unwilling to discuss facts. I’ve been banned from threads over there for pointing out that while I see their frustrations with western interventionism, it’s odd how they don’t seem to mind BRICs members also intervening in conflicts worldwide.
Yeah, its not their political positions, it’s their behavior. I have absolutely no problem debating the merits of communism and capitalism. But they don’t necessarily seem interested in debate, or really objectivity in general.
I don’t know what they do, nut even thou I agree with some of their opinions, I have blocked their communities long time ago, so this is verry unimportant topic.
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That’s okay. I appreciate the response anyways. It seems that I stepped in quite the pile today.
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Youre in an instance hosted on stolen land, get over yourself.
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This shit is so tiresome already. If you don’t like the atmosphere of one instance then find another. It really is that simple. Quit harassing the instance admins they don’t owe you shit.
I don’t see @Nahvi@sh.itjust.works harassing anyone but asking questions I also personally find interesting. I started my life in the fediverse on this instance since a) I wanted to distribute the load new users were (still are?) generating moving away from Reddit b) the rules were good (upvote/downvote, nsfw, etc) and c) the name. I didn’t bother about checking the instance-admins preferences and only now learning about de-federation. And now I am wondering if I should ease down my enthusiasm because I might need to switch to an other instance (later than sooner).
So yes, maybe a few personal words about the instance and especially about other federated instances I would be curious to read.
Please keep up the good work though @TheDude@sh.itjust.works . I can’t imaging how much work is involved in keeping this instance alive and have great respect.
Seems like you didn’t actually read my post.
This is the new parking lot that I am checking out. It seems pretty nice so far, but there is a weird statue in the corner. If it is just a one off that is cool. If it is the first among many then maybe I need to keep driving around.
Edit: Seems like I combined the two posts when responding, but I think I am going to leave it as is.
You’re asking a person with a day job who is doing a cool thing for the fediverse community and set up a community in sh.itjustworks (Agora) to handle these possible future blocks to give you a granular breakdown of the blocking of one instance in a justification they don’t really owe you.
The community itself is trying to be chill and just vibe. If what we’re doing fits what you’re looking for, welcome.
And you are repeating my own words back to me in a different order as if it will surprise me into keeping my questions to myself.
Pardon me for trying to find out if I just wandered into an environment that is as chill and welcoming as it seems from the outside or another reddit where many genuine questions will get shouted down.
Genuine apologies, as that’s not my intent.
We’ve had what has seemed (to me) an influx of just really bad faith and downright trolling type stuff going down recently and it’s perhaps colored my take on things more than I realized, and it probably has for others as well.
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like “yeah, this works for me.”
Other things may get added to that block list in the future, yes. I pointed you to the Agora because you may not, as a new user, be aware of it, as the Dude set it up as the place where these kinds of decisions will most likely be made in the future and where community discussions tend to be focused.
However, as a Canadian based instance, they have different laws on what does and doesn’t put them at risk, so there are times where those calls may be his and his to make alone (which is why there are two where there was only one on the list of defederated).
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like “yeah, this works for me.”
That is why I am here too.
I am hoping that some of the more acerbic comments in this thread are just an expression of those frustrations and not the same old social media junk. Hopefully time will show this instance to be as chill as it seemed at first.
influx of just really bad faith
Is that so? On this instance or in general? So far, I did not perceive that. On the contrary, I enjoy the discussions around here so far.
It started with a discussion on sh.itjustworks, but due to the open nature of federation, anyone can wander in to the discussion, as you can see with input from users outside our instance.
There was some confusion, some trolling, but I think if as a user you weren’t really active in our Main or Agora communities it may not have been something you would have been aware of, if that makes sense.
Honestly in my experience, most (I’d say as close to all as you can get) of sh.itjustworks users are really just here to chill and make an awesome experience.
If you are of the opinion that I am not active Ilin the Agora, clearly you don’t follow it that well. I am sorry.
They’re asking a question without demanding anything in a very chill manner. It would seem you’re the only one getting twisted about it. Ease up and let people ask questions. You can get heated again if they won’t take “no” for an answer.
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Exactly. There’s so many instances for anyone who don’t like one to migrate to
I fully agree and if you read through my post you will notice this is not my first instance. It is just one that seems like a pretty good fit and has a name I like. I am hoping this one oddity is just that and not an indicator that @TheDude plans to block a bunch of other political instances later.
lemmygrad.ml is generally defederated.
To explain it, remember r/thedonald?
lemmygrad.ml is the communist equivalent. (literally). Its an extremist group.
Edit- @Menu@slrpnk.net and @Tsinc@feddie.de
Please do explain your disagreement (downvote). Are you saying lemmygrd.ml is not an extremist group? Or are you defending them?
lemmygrad.ml is generally defederated.
The fact that a bunch of other instances also defederated something has no bearing at all on my thoughts or opinions.
To explain it, remember r/thedonald?
I do remember r/thedonald. Though it has been awhile the thing that stands out in my memory is that reddit seemed to ban it because other redditors couldn’t stand it being around, not because it violated their TOS.
Its an extremist group.
lemmygrad.ml might be filled with extremists and is definitely not my cup of tea, but blocking any and all groups that are a little different from mainstream standards is not the kind of thing I can get behind.
Most of our beloved democratic, republican, and liberal ideals were extremist views not so long ago.
Are you saying lemmygrd.ml is not an extremist group? Or are you defending them?
And just so we are clear, I downvoted you because of this kind of you have to agree with me or you are defending me enemy phrasing.
You said the community that mainly contains the following message would be as extreme as TD.
I support freedom. I support individual right to choose.
What does that even mean? I know a lot of republicans struggle with this concept. Don’t bully them. Their smooth brains struggle.
Guns kill people. Every other country has solved this problem. Control who has access to guns. Do you really think you will stand up to the entire government, military, with a single assault rifle? Grow the fuck up. Make your community better. Stop living in perpetual fear.
Women have a right to decide for themselves. Abortion is always an option. A ball of cells is not a baby. Its not murder. Stop forcing rape victims to birth.
Christian ministers, priests, reverends. These are the single biggest perpetrators of molestation. Supporting christianity is supporting the destruction of childhoods.
How many drag queens have been arrested abd charged? How many catholics?
look inwards. take a moment to consider why you’re being built, pushed, towards hate.
You can change. You can open your eyes. You can be accepted. I have forgiveness for those who are genuine. Reality is here for you.
do you not consider why you’re attacked or ostracised from society? Its because your views are toxic. Your views are hateful. Your views go against what the majority of humanity wants and stands for.
You can be better. You can grow and learn.
Hand in your fascist card. We can accept you. Just let go of your hate and anger.
Propaganda has blinded you. Its your choice to simply turn away. Help exists wherever you reach out.
Open your eyes.
Open your eyes
We are here for you. We are here to support your journey back to reality.
It’s scary. But you have support. Just ask.
https://lemmy.world/post/108227
Thanks for letting me add this
I just read a few poses on the community. Maybe this is there somewhere, but there’s a shitton of what many would consider hate speech in there.
(i am not a conservative and don’t support their cause, simply an independent observer)
Just one example from here https://lemmy.world/post/105545 :
Republicans are scum. You are not welcome.
I’m not even american. I have my own local conservative bullshit to deal with. Which is handled elsewhere.
The conservative belief is nothing more than “no change. Live in the status quo”.
You are history. You are the bottom of society. You will be left in dust, in the history books. But they will remember you. You will be documented for generations to come as enemies of humanity.
Conservative beliefs are humanity’s cancer.
How the hell is that hate speech?Conservative is not a protected group. It’s not an inherent quality of a person, like being gay or black.
It’s not hate speech to say conservatives are evil and their actions and beliefs actively harm the world. That’s just facts.
Do you have to be protected for it to be hate speech? Lmao.
It’s not an inherent quality of a person, like being gay or black.
and hate speech is only for people’s inherent qualities?
hate speech, speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others.
i’d say ideology falls right next to religion in the spook system of “things ppl believe about the world and can’t change on a whim because it’s part of their inherent dogmatic system of understanding”
It’s not hate speech to say conservatives are evil and their actions and beliefs actively harm the world. That’s just facts.
ah yes, “facts”, “evil”, absolute morality, moral dogma, they are “inherently evil”, that’s just moral absolutism and it’s as dumb as religious dogmatic beliefs of “the gays are bad” or “degenerates deserve to die”. You’re just fighting dumb dogmas with dumb dogmas.
Do consider that they consider themselves not to be harming but protecting the world from those who they believe harm the world. Life is not black and white, “i’m right and you’re wrong”. There are many perspectives, and “harm” is subjective, the ideal state of how things should be is a hotly debated topic, and thinking that, because you think you’re “right”, your speech of hate toward a certain group of people defined by their beliefs is not “hate speech”, is just, in my opinion, not a very enlightened perspective.
pinned post:
I’m sorry but we’re past the point of “let’s all talk and understand our differences”. People have had enough time to understand reality. If they are still supporting transphobic, anti-communist, racist and fascists parties, organisations and individuals, they deserve nothing but to be publicly humiliated. I mean maybe not nothing…
Thing is, you’re wrong.
people have had enough time to understand reality
There is no absolute moral right or wrong. If their understanding is different from yours, they simply have a different perspective. Sure, it is not compatible with yours, and you can decide to cut yourself off from them, and wage war against them, and even insult them, threaten them with death and execute them publicly if you want. None of that means that their belief system is not a belief system, or that their religious beliefs are not religious beliefs, or that the hate speech you will wield against them is not hate speech. It just means you deem it appropriate because your belief system dictates this, just as their belief system could dictate that they will do the same with you and those you protect. The fact that people justify it in their minds, throwing random moral facts and calling them true, doesn’t make hate speech not hate speech.
And there’s where you’re wrong. I don’t give a fuck about “absolute morals”, or “right or wrong”. I care about actual people and their actual lives. About science and facts. The facts are clearly agains the conservative world view. All attachment to it is driven by Piscian reactionary mindset, fear of losing privilege and retribution. And it harms the lives of all living beings on Earth. Climate change will destroy a lot of what we humans hold dear, and the conservative position is to deny it and barrel towards doom as fast as possible.
I don’t care if that’s right or wrong. I care about the billions of lives, human or not, that will be lost. I care about the chaos and fascism that will rise as those movements grow unimpeded and actively supported by “average conservatives”.
Like seriously fuck off with that milquetoast “enligthenend centris” spiel. We are WAY past the time for neolib conciliation.
If you want to ask TheDude specifically there’s no need to open a comment thread here, you can just PM him directly.
That makes sense and I probably should have considered it more, though I also thought it would be useful if the response was public. Since I went searching for it myself, I thought other new users might do the same.
When I skimmed the announcement where he created the Agora, I missed that part completely. I thought it was just about people donating. Based on the link in the post, I thought he was making all these decisions himself while maybe considering input from others.
Doesn’t seem like there is much point in DMing him now.
Dude. You’re late to the party. This has already been posted about and discussed to death.
You don’t have the background info to understand yet. Hang back a bit, read older posts. There are very good reasons that there are several instances that are damn near universally defederated.
I both looked around and did a search. The only comment I found from @TheDude was the one linked in my post. I am just asking for a little clarification as to whether this is a one-off or typical fare.
Edit: Just re-read the last bit. I don’t want to wait around for weeks or months only to find out that I should have realized on day one that this was a bad fit.
Is it really so wrong to ask for a little clarification about one of two total Instances that have been blocked here?
Do you have a thread over on lemmygrad asking about all the instances they have blocked? Just curious if you only concern troll in one direction
Try reading my post and asking a good faith question if you would like it answered.
Reading your post - it should be a DM. You are literally only asking for theDudes opinion.
try DMing thedude directly instead of making a public discussion post thats clearly aimed to generate discussion and questions exactly like mine.
You might be right about that DM thing. I thought I was in a small enough instance to get a direct response that would be useful to future users who wanted to move over. It seems I have misjudged that.
I didn’t mind a bit of discussion and question answering, but to be frank being thrown red-herrings and called a troll was definitely not my goal.
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I vote we ban ‘can we ban “can we block x” posts’ posts.
Kidding.
Or am I.
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You can unsub from the Agora then. Discussing shit like that is kind of the point of it.
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What? We’re not currently on that community. Your reply does not make sense.
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I assumed your original comment was in reference to the posts on the Agora, as that’s where I’ve seen them. In that context my comment makes plenty of sense. I don’t really understand why you’re responding in this way.
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Your comment refers to posts asking if an instance can be blocked, and this post is asking why an instance was blocked. Those are not the same thing. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean.
There is now @goat doing a “lemmygrad findings” collection here: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for anyone who is interested in those gems.
I know goat pushes some buttons (whether just due to being contrarian but earnest or actively trolling - I’m still kind of on the fence about that beyond ‘they’re kind of a dick’), but I’ve said this would be an interesting concept before, so it’s neat to see it in practice.
Will reserve judgement until I see what’s being curated, though.
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Two thrusts to this: re: your community, haven’t followed it too closely, but from what I did see it’s mostly just shitting on tankies. That’s fine I guess, though my thought was more sifting through the garbage and sharing posts of decent quality/worth seeing despite defederation or the larger tenor of the instance.
Re: you specifically - also haven’t followed too closely (have reverted to lurking more in fewer communities - bad Cracks!), but maybe the binary I mentioned is a little too stark. From what I have seen, you’re opinionated, maybe contrarian for its own sake sometimes, but apply it evenly. I saw you getting in people’s faces over at EH too, and it looks like you don’t care which side of any given divide you piss off - gotta respect that.
And moderating FoxNews? Obvious but legitimately hilarious bait, and I have to tip my hat. Edit: Though you might not anymore?
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Going off a vague memory at this point, but didn’t you moderate/create a community somewhere called FoxNews that was news about foxes?
Recall when people were going at you this was brought up (“This fuckin’ guy, he moderates FoxNews! Of course eye roll” kinda thing), though that may have been someone else. Apologies if misattributing.
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“I want someone else to pay for hosting and maintaining an instance for me, to admin it and moderate its communities, but when they make a choice I disagree with that’s not okay.”
Well, good thing there’s a way for you to stand up your own instance that you can federate or defederate whatever instances you want.
Thank you for literally putting words in my mouth, quotation marks and all.
If you had bothered to spend one minute reading the post, that I literally spend thirty minutes typing up, you would have noticed that the first sentence was to express appreciation for the time and money @TheDude on creating and maintaining this instance. At no point did I say he was wrong or even that I disagreed with his choice. I just asked for clarification on the matter.
I assume you raise the same concerns under each and every post calling for further defederation from instances since they aren’t being posted by the person/people in charge of hosting?
federating with lemmygrad means opening your communities up to the same behaviour displayed there, such as active calls for political violence, suggesting users kill themselves, ableist slurs etc
having personal convictions against this sort of behaviour seems entirely reasonable
So then block people instead of trying to shovel your personal feed curation onto everyone
alternatively, dont go on an explicitly curated instance
That would be perfectly reasonable. It might also be perfectly reasonable if @TheDude’s grandmother was killed by communists. It might also be perfectly reasonable that he and the main admin at lemmygrad.ml have known and disliked each other for years.
My concern is that I don’t know which one of those things that it is or if it is none of them. Before I settle down here, I would like to have a better idea of what here is.
Let me pill out an analogy:
Right now, I am sitting in a comfortable lounge with pretty chill people and all along one wall are a bunch of doors with windows in them, but for some reason two of the doors are locked and have their windows covered. One has a little note near it that says, “beware pedos beyond this door” which is all I want to know. The other door has a note that says, “beware politics beyond this door” which leaves me with a couple curiosities. After asking around all I hear is that it goes against the hosts personal convictions. Is it really so wrong to go ask the host what is going on?
I am not arguing the door should be unlocked or telling anyone that they are wrong. I am just asking what are the odds that he is going to lock more doors, and if so, what kind of doors should I expect to get locked in the future? Oh and as a side note if he is interested in engaging my personal curiosity, “what made this particular political door so bad in his eyes?”
thats fair
Sounds perfectly normal. :)
