this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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9 users here now

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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[–] gabuwu 73 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

They are going to cause issues sooner rather than later in communities that don’t defederate from them. It’s quite literally just a given. I’m shocked some of those instances haven’t defederated from them already.

[–] Cube6392 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me

[–] gabuwu 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the whole attitude of "oh just block the community and ignore it" really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren't cut off preemptively. You aren't deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.

[–] Cube6392 16 points 1 year ago

The question I always find myself asking is, why is it that people only expect the targets of abuse to do the filtering of that abuse, and why, other than you yourself would like to enact abuse, would you want to leave people engaging in abusive behavior in position to continue being abusive? Beehaw has lamented there not being more flexible moderation tools allowing us to perform more powerful moderation actions, enabling the filtration of abuse on otherwise good servers, but until those tools exist, what good reason is there to ignore and enable abuse?

[–] Rhabuko@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷‍♂️.

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those "free speech absolutist" types. It's a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.

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[–] MrComradeTaco@lemmy.fmhy.ml 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] MrComradeTaco@lemmy.fmhy.ml 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] argv_minus_one 15 points 1 year ago

It's super effective! Humanity hurt itself in its confusion!

[–] fugepe@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

man I dont get it. These christians are talking about God and shit, yet you have muslims killing people all over the world and not a word about them.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They are very much bad too. But christians are the dominant religion in western nations, which are the core audience of social media. Islamic fundamentalist thus simply do not have a similar presence as Christianity does on social media.

[–] MrComradeTaco@lemmy.fmhy.ml 19 points 1 year ago

Both fundamentalists are crazy bastards but the ones with power and money are more dangerous.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

It's almost like they're both bad, but one is a more immediate problem. Al Qaeda may have taken down the twin towers, but they never tried to launch a coup and get Roe V Wade overturned.

[–] Lols@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

what about

original, innovative, unprecedented

also, yknow, a complete lie

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[–] Cube6392 65 points 1 year ago (7 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

[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 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 9 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.

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[–] Belgdore@lemm.ee 45 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.

[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 42 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 7 points 1 year ago

should be a no brauner

German "braun" = brown => nazi

What a beautiful typo.

[–] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 34 points 1 year ago (2 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 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 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 6 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 7 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.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's pretty much my philosophy on my instance.

I've only defederated instances for pedo (usually loli) crap - I don't want their communities in the "All" feed. I don't want users joining my instance to access such things (when they upload images, even when posting on remote communities, that gets hosted on MY server).

That and spam.

[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, illegal things are sort of an existential threat to any instance, so I will not hesitate to defederate over embracing of and failure to moderate such content at an admin/instance level. That is another one of the rules on my instance.

[–] hawkwind@lemmy.management 17 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.

[–] Rhabuko@feddit.de 13 points 1 year ago

Good to see that my admins already dealt with it.

[–] EthicalAI 13 points 1 year ago

The only instance I’d ever recommend my friends to join is beehaw.org and that’s why I love it. Otherwise it’s the wild Wild West.

[–] Percy@lemmy.one 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a lemmy.one user I will move to somewhere else after bringing this up. Any recommended places to move to?

[–] Cube6392 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net, beehaw.org, or lemmy.dbzer0.com are the current instances that have moderation styles I appreciate. Take that with a grain of salt that you and I may be different people and may like different things. Sopuli and Beehaw are general purpose. Sopuli federates with more (non-nsfw) instances. Beehaw is more actively moderated (and doesn't defederate from lemmynsfw.com, if that's something you're into). slrpnk is ecological friendliness focused, and dbzer0 is internet piracy focused.

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[–] original_ish_name@latte.isnot.coffee 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

MOM!!! People are disagreeing with me!!!! :(

Pwease defederate

[–] animist@lemmy.one 19 points 1 year ago

Lick my unwashed taint chud

[–] gabuwu 18 points 1 year ago
[–] Tetreo@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago

bless our lords at Sopuli for pre-removing these apparent EH people before I even knew they existed <3

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

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

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts

Is there much of a difference nowadays?

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[–] Atarian@vlemmy.net 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

ELI5 (because I signed up about an hour ago) - what's wrong with the Exploding Heads instance? I thought about joining up because I suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome (really)

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Theyre basically the_Donald: fediverse edition. They troll, raid, and generally cause problems across the threadiverse in the name of promoting their authoritarian world view

[–] Atarian@vlemmy.net 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh, fuck that. I'm so tired of that shit.

I'm not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.

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[–] imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not about that they are Christian fundamental fascists

[–] Atarian@vlemmy.net 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah you know what? I've had enough of fundies, I'll leave that thought there.

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (2 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 18 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

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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

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