Hey all, I recently left reddit like many of you. I have a question regarding lemmy and the fediverse on the history of banning and defederation. I have noticed several posts calling for varying communities to be disconnected. were these removal requests as prevalent before the mass migration? Usually I am all for communities existsting in their own spaces, barring illegal content. I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
I also have recently left Reddit. And I am all for blocking content that contains hate speech. Allowing fascist content to take root is unacceptable.
I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
Yeah go and take a stroll through those instances and you’ll see quickly why their posts aren’t welcomed here.
“communities existsting in their own spaces”
In some sense that is what defederating does, no?
In fact, defederating can ensure communities can continue to exist in their own spaces without being harassed or being subject to bigotry
Is kbin a community, or a platform for communities to run on? I’m subbed to maybe 20 magazines now, and I can’t even tell you which one comes from which server.
I think of magazines as communities, and servers as enablers of the platform they run on. Sure there are purpose-built servers around a topic, but as a data point of 1, I haven’t joined kbin to be a part of kbin community, I joined because it seemed to be the most reliable provider for me to reach communities across fediverse.
Is kbin a community, or a platform for communities to run on?
Both, that distinction doesn’t work very well for the new fediverse model.
Seems to be popular to defederate from right-leaning instances. The Fediverse basically started as a far-left stronghold, so it isn’t surprising.
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Tankies, not just commies
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Are they trots or stalinists or maoists i keep reading all 3 used interchangeably.
Most instances also defederated from lemmygrad (commies) so its not generally politically left either.IMO, Stalinists aren’t exactly tolerant either. You’re still talking about a totalitarian and authoritarian viewpoint, even if they’re on the left on economic matters.
IMO, if your point is to make a community welcoming, then you have to get rid of intolerant voices. That–broadly speaking–means that you have to remove people advocating for any kind of absolutist, authoritarian rules. It’s easy to see at a macro level, but it’s all fuzzy at a micro level.
A lot of people in the Fediverse don’t seem to appreciate the concept that the political left is just as capable of intolerance and extremism as the political right.
Anyone that is familiar with the ways that communism has existed in Warsaw-pact countries, in China, in southeast Asia in general, etc., should be able to see that. LGBTQ+ people were, if anything, even more fucked in most communist countries. There certainly wasn’t any meaningful religious tolerance, since religion was banned in at least some communist countries (or wholly controlled by the gov’t).
I’m in favor of communism in principle, but not in practice. I’d love to live in a commune, but I don’t think I’d want to live in a communist country.
I’m in favor of communism in principle, but not in practice. I’d love to live in a commune, but I don’t think I’d want to live in a communist country.
You might be interested in anarcho-communism. I’m not one myself, but they’re the only kind of communists that I’m okay with.
It’s true that self-proclaimed communist states have been awful in this regard. You’re not wrong.
It becomes a question of semantics, ultimately. If I go on I’ll just fall into the “no true Scotsman” line of reasoning. “If by ‘whiskey’…”
Glad we’re ultimately on the side of supporting gay rights & black lives, whether or not that’s called right, left, red flag, blue state…
🤷🏻♀️
The shift of the political battle from workers-vs-owners to populists-vs-pluralists has been driven by the far right and has been an explicit goal of the right since 1922.
The populist ideology uses intolerance and bigotry as a tool. Hate on a group to get the workers to vote for the rich-get-richer economics the right wing favors.
Ideally a group they can describe as disgustingly weak in one breath and a dangerous threat the next.
So it’s de jure the case that the left a.k.a. pluralists oppose intolerance and bigotry. That’s what makes us the left.
So it’s de jure the case that the left a.k.a. pluralists oppose intolerance and bigotry. That’s what makes us the left.
Many on the left don’t actually understand pluralism, though. It has become pretty mainstream to shut down voices one disagrees with.
If by pluralism you mean competing viewpoints in political systems, then the ability to shut them down means that those voices have failed to successfully compete. That’s like saying “No one wants to work anymore!” when you don’t want to pay workers the prevailing wage, and then crying because your business fails.
The difference is what’s considered extremist on the left isn’t the party platform, whereas racism, homophobia, misogyny, and various other forms of bigotry are mainstream right-wing politics in the US.
I’m not talking about parties, I’m talking about the political spectrum. There is no “Right-Wing Party”, nor is there a “Left-Wing Party”. Conservatives and liberals can be found in both of the actual dominant American parties.
So you know nothing about American politics, or are such a fucking ostrich that you’re somehow able to headsand the entirety of the past fifteen fucking years during which time the goddamn Republican party lost their mind because a Black dude was President. That’s cool.
Fuck off.
Haha another unfriendly troll rears its ugly head. Goodbye.
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I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.I counter this part of your post by throwing in there that for me and my time on reddit, the worst parts of the broader experience were the fact that communities of neo-nazis (r/conservative, r/conspiracy), Donald Trump cultists (r/the Donald), incels (numerous subreddits including r/incels and r/theredpill), and pedophiles (r/just18 among other porn based subreddits that were quarantined and banned several years ago) were allowed their own communities on the platform for as long as they were. This gave these horrible ideas time to draw attention and build a userbase that then degraded the quality of reddit across multiple other communities.
If kbin or lemmyworld immediately start banning or defederating these instances or communities/magazines, then to me that is how this larger community works and it is inherently not former redditors migrating here to shape the Fediverse in the image of reddit.
I eventually couldnt even browse r/all without seeing bigoted and generally fascist remarks getting thousands of upvotes with hardly any people that debated their takes not getting two to three digits of downvotes.
It has been common in other parts of the Fediverse - Mastodon for example.
Yes. Defederation of bad actors has always been common and it’s expected.
Personally, I prefer individual users being empowered to easily block instances over instances blocking stuff “for” the users in most cases. Issues:
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Users from other instances can still require mod actions. Moderation time is limited. Defederating from more problematic instances can be necessary if they cause more trouble than can be easily dealt with.
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It is important for instance owners to achieve a coherent “front page” which includes the wider fediverse. I’m unsure if it is possible to ban individual instances from the frontpage while still allowing users to specifically visit them as they want.
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Some instances are legally ambiguous or even contain content fully illegal in some countries.
I did for some research. Basically, all the top-defederated instances on this list are so for good reasons, often even legal reasons: https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blocked=100
Note that if you click on an instance, it will show you the various admin reasons for why people defederated.
The one I saw someone asking to be removed (exploding heads) seemed to be more normal discussion with a big extra dose of edgy humor magazines and swear words. This includes various slurs and straight up racism. This very much falls into the category of “I don’t want those here, but I’d prefer if users can still visit them” for me.
However, Lemmy.world admins have compiled some issues these users being, including harassing DMs to users. See for yourself: https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/107898/Lemmy-world-Admin-Response-to-Defederation-from-Exploding-Heads#comments
Specifically, admins and community moderators of that instance were the problem. This seems like it would quickly fall into the “unfeasible to moderate on a case-by-case basis” category. Therefore, the nuclear option of defederation may be necessary.
Thanks for sharing that site. Very interesting. As someone who enjoyed lurking on r/conservative and r/conspiracy (just to see what’s going on in their echo chambers) I am imagining I might need to join a different server if I want to rubberneck those types of instances.
You could always just view their instance without logging in, no?
I did for some research. Basically, all the top-defederated instances on this list
FYI, that list is generated by kiwifarms software. You should not be linking to it directly
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The reason I am on lemmy.world is that so far, they have basically blocked nothing and that is the experience I’m looking for. I want to be the one who decides what I see.
That said, others prefer a more curated experience and thus choose other instances. That’s the beauty of the fediverse, you can have both.
didn’t lemmy.world just defederate from exploding heads tho?
The reason I am on lemmy.world is that so far, they have basically blocked nothing
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I agree that racists/nazis etc should be condemned through out the entire platform. this is an instance where I hope the vast majority of the community would agree that defederation is a fair solution. With the easy question out of the way how far has the community gone in the past regarding the removal of content and users on less offensive but still taboo topics?
Eeh let me go against the grain here a bit: Personally I’d rather have my account on somewhere that doesn’t police my access. IMO one of the major boons to the Internet that it being decentralized and not particularly easy to police by any one authority. I’ve lived a big part of my life in an authoritarian country, and censorship gradually builds up. I have no interest in granting this kind of power even governments rarely get to exercise, to some random people.
I firmly believe that the best kind of content moderation is to use the small “X” button right next to the browser tab. I would understand and completely support not wanting to see certain content, communities or users yourself, but unless illegal [1] I don’t see any reason why you should be able to prevent others.
[1] even then, question of in what jurisdiction comes to kind
Anyway, I know that nowadays vouching for information freedom doesn’t win much favours. Cool thing about ActivityPub is that barring future potential scaling issues, I can run my own instance and enjoy the Internet as it once was.
edit: I have to say that there’s a level of irony in asking for bans and central controls on content on a platform that in its very nature decentralized and supposed to be empowering.
I have to say that there’s a level of irony in asking for bans and central controls on content on a platform that in its very nature decentralized and supposed to be empowering.
There isn’t any irony. That’s the whole point of the decentralization - it empowers everybody to be part of the communities they wish to be in, and not participate in those they disagree with. We have the power to leave any instance where we disagree with the admins and move to a new one.
While I don’t doubt people’s intentions are well, I feel perfectly capable of deciding myself what should be defederated or not. Currently using kbin.social. Any resources for people interested in learning more about this and potentially wanting to host their own instance (which I assume you’d need to, to be able to control this?). Or maybe there are already instances out there that don’t defederate and leave it up to the individual?
Or maybe there are already instances out there that don’t defederate and leave it up to the individual?
It only takes one to defederate. Any large instances that stay neutral will eventually be defederated with by other instances, as per the beehaw example recently. So your best option would indeed be to host your own small instance.
