Might- be worth knowing about…
https://lemmyonline.com/comment/47545
Edit- And… (From beehaw…) https://lemmyonline.com/post/8944
I think that is a mistake. Plenty of nice folks on this instance people shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Also this discourse on that thread is really problematic. The idea of defederating a whole instance over 1 community is terrible. I would understand. If most of that instance was a troll den that is definitely not the case with this instance
deleted by creator
This issue has been resolved.
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.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.
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.
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.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.
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.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.
I’m trying to understand this as a refuge from Reddit. I joined this instance because of the renewable energy commitment. I’m not beholden to this instance, but this seems like something a federated system could handle without banning an instance. Am I confused about how this works?
but this seems like something a federated system could handle without banning an instance. Am I confused about how this works?
No- it can be easily handled multiple other ways too.
- If users don’t subscribe to the community, the community doesn’t federate elsewhere.
- Users can individually block the community and/or user responsible.
- Admins, at an instance level, can block the community and/or user.
At THIS instance level (sh.itjust.works) 4. The community can be removed/blocked. This removes it globally.
Defederation is the complete nuke-from-orbit option, which should only be reserved when you have an instance that is unwilling to work with you to resolve issues.
Aka- you have an instance, owned by spammers, producing spam bots causing negative user experience.
I joined this instance because of the renewable energy commitment.
I keep hearing this. Maybe. I should update my instance and let everyone know my server runs on pure sunlight too. lol
:(
I don’t think that users on a fledgling platform should be this gung-ho about fragmentation, but it is what it is. Lemmy is starting to feel like something I should just revisit in a year: either to postmortem another perennially niche service, or to finally “pick a side” once the chips are more settled, even though I don’t particularly want to.
If- this de-federation movement doesn’t stop- what will eventually happen-
The large instances will end up defederating so much of the fediverse, that it makes more sense for them to just enable the “private” checkbox.
The end-result, is the failure of lemmy.
Yeah man, unless we allow all manner of garbage it’ll fail. Yeah man.Totally.
THERE ARE WAYS TO BLOCK AND REMOVE CONTENT WITHOUT USING A GODDAMN SLEDGEHAMMER!!!
(as has already been noted NUMEROUS times in many threads)
YOU DON’T USE A STICK OF DYNAMITE TO REMOVE A DOOR.
FFS…
failure
It’s only a failure from certain perspectives. It happens to be my perspective too, but I can understand where others are coming from. I suppose this is one of them fancy irreconcilable differences thingies.
Personally, I suppose what mostly peeves me about these kinds of approaches is that they don’t really seem like solutions. Anyone from a no-no community is still free to employ the time-honored trolling tradition that is alt-juggling for harassment campaigns. Or, I assume that’s the case - if there’s one thing I really hope everyone at the table can still agree on, it’s that extreme privacy-invading measures for preventing alts is a step too far: there’s vulnerable voices across all parts of the opinion spectrum. Anyways, because alts exist, defederation measures always felt a bit performative from my perspective. But far be it from me to judge whatever helps people sleep at night. 🤣
I want to take the explanation that this is just a stopgap while moderation tooling develops at face value, but something tells me that isn’t the whole of the truth. In the end, I don’t think I’ll care all that much no matter how this shakes out; touching grass is really fantastic for helping maintain perspective. 👍
Will note, I have been publishing a few scripts into the admins chat on lemmy.ml, to assist with moderation, and catching some of these types of content too.
Hopefully, we get some built in tools soon too.
As an early Mastodon user, it went through something like this when overt Nazis (gab, et al) federated and often used misleading names for instances. The result was an immediate reaction in disgust from the vast majority of the fediverse and rampant defederations of hateful instances.
Hateful instance run by hateful admin? Sure defederate it. Don’t defederate instances because they’re trying to be more open and popular.
As an early Mastodon once-user - mostly just to try self-hosting 4fun - that all mostly flew over my head and I’m hoping to do the same here. Though I did mostly follow Pawoo/Baraag artists, which I believe puts me on a similar side of history to said Nazis by current standards? I can’t say I’m thrilled by the association but I do get it at least. At the end of the day, to me it just feels silly to get hung up on moderation policies set by people who have never met me, and whom I have never met.
And realistically, the main thing that tapered my interest in Mastodon is I have no idea how to become addicted to Twitter/Twitter-likes. 🤣 I should try again sometime, Misskey seems nice.
Looks like [email protected] likely has a day job. Last commented 15 hours ago… Give it some time.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Things in a DEMOCRACY takes time.
This instance, has a way, where they collectively vote on issues such as this.
But- you might say, THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT INPUT!
Just remember- that is EXACTLY WHY WE ALL LEFT REDDIT!!!
I figured it was either that, or, he is in a different timezone and likely sleeping.
Do people actually not have day jobs and just browse reddit 24/7? Like what’s the expected alternative?
He does.
Well I would expect God to know that
There’s a matrix chat. 😊 Perks of being omnipresent.
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.
The sad part- I believe it was only a single account which sparked this conflict causing everyone to be at each other’s throats.
They’re constantly changing their display name too. Whether it’s to be more elusive or to make their numbers look greater.
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.
I was able to block them pretty easily. They’re still just on one acct.
This time. But- when they come back in bigger numbers- its going to be a problem.
Especially, since you can get banned from one place, and turn around and sign up to another.
This truly is the internet
oooff didn’t know there was TheDonald on this instance. Not very happy about that.
So as a user block the community and be done with it.
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.
It’s not even red hats plural. It’s just a guy.
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.
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.
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.
So you stop and then it goes unchecked.
But de-federating ENSURES it goes unchecked…
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.
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).
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.
deleted by creator
I don’t know if you mean that as sarcasm. But we’re talking about The Donald. That’s one bag, or even one aspect of it. Not everything on the spectrum.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Honestly- I think its just somebody trolling.
The username sounds like a troll, and the news posts they were sending were… comically bad.
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.
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.
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.
Hard disagree. If people are following the rules, they should be allowed to exist.
“Hey guys, this one is totally fine with having us Nazis, let’s all go over there!”
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
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.
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
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
what if it doesnt grow at all and continues to be a downvote farm?
What a risk.
I’ve seen them and blocked them immediately. It’s a couple of sad losers posting news (or “news”) articles. I’m one of the more vocal supporters of defederating that one instance since they’ve openly become a bigoted shithole and their mods are in favor of keeping it that way, but this? If T_D showed up on a different instance I’d be generally in favor of that instance banning that community and nipping the problem in the bud (Trumpers have been fine with sitting at a table with Nazis for a while) but I wouldn’t be supporting defederaton over a couple of assholes on an otherwise decent instance. Assuming they’re not bots, they’ll probably get themselves banned soon enough for being awful if we’ve got enough mods here that can keep a close eye on them, and maybe just using the current rules the moment they start to be openly bigoted is the right play here.
I know the mod tools on Lemmy aren’t terribly robust, but are other instances able to block individual communities without defederaton? I would like to believe T_D is a temporary problem here and I think it’d be interesting to see if the current set of rules take out the trash in a timely manner, or if they just fester while building a critical mass before infecting the whole instance.
I know the mod tools on Lemmy aren’t terribly robust, but are other instances able to block individual communities without defederaton?
Actually- that is honestly a good question
While- I can block a community, I do believe that may only affect my account. The purge/remove options exist as well, but, I do believe those are also temporary.
That being said-
At the database level, community_block is defined for a particular person.
Looking at the removed option,
From an admin’s perspective, it flags the community as removed.
But, from a user’s perspective- the community no longer exists.
That being said- I do believe the
removeoption might be suitable for this purpose.
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.
The way it should work imo is that users report them, and if they’re a moderator, that goes to the admin of the instance, who then makes a call whether to ban the user and/or community.
Don’t defederate because someone made a stupid community, report and work through the moderation system.
That’s really interesting about the changing display name thing, and given when the community showed up, yeah that seems to be bad faith or trolling. Yeah I think I’m in favor of banning them for that.
I think I’ve seen at least six different user names depending on the thread, including Agora threads.
It’s absolutely all done in bad faith.
This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don’t love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone’s attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn’t caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.
I’m sure it’s something we’ll need to address internally, but it’s just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.
I mean, I am not happy about the community being on this instance given the 2nd rule in the list about “no bigotry”, and it’s kinda hard to praise Trump unequivocally and not be violating that rule…
It’s hard to praise Reddit and Lemmy users for that either since they will be absolutely bigoted towards anyone they perceive not falling in line about narratives like trump, Ukraine, war in general, covid, environment, abortion, speech, gender, and more stuff I’m probably forgetting.
The scale of identity privilege allows for quite a lot of hate and bullying as long as it’s in the right direction (but it’s always very US centric, which is hilariously pathetic).
First, I’m fully against defederating any instance that isn’t showing an instance wide bad actor status.
But let’s be real, this isn’t about a political belief.
It’s about the banner of “the donald” having been used for disruptive purposes multiple times. The c/ needs to be removed because it’s a “fuck you” meant to stir shit.
However, any instance that wants it, I’ll be glad to create an account, create the same community, but dedicate it to a different Donald. If there’s already a c/ in existence with the name, it’s harder for the idea behind the subreddit to creep in. We take the name back
How isn’t it political? TD was a rare manifest of a different idea having prominence and being subsequently attacked because “how dare it exist” at which point it went full “attack back” ans it became a ridiculous battle until the admins of Reddit decided they would go back to controlling narratives because the ad money wasn’t that good.
Same as trump being banned for twitter. It IS political. There’s one political party in the US that is treated as “literally evil” and we are supposed to get on board and fight amongst each other instead of pointing how corrupt and entrenches the parties are and.how auperficial de battle. Is.
But hey, if we pretend the whole world things in US terms and that anyone who doesn’t subscribe to identity politics and bullying with self perceived moral superiority then of course TD and similar “wrongthink” has to be banned.
The dude has a pretty damning public record of being intolerant towards women and minorities, it’s not like it’s hard to find this stuff. Let’s not pretend like a few bad actors being in the mix suddenly make this guy a patron saint. And even if you want to ignore him directly, it’s hard to ignore the type of crowd that he gathers. Birds of a shit-feather flock together.
Dude. Every other politician out there in the last 3 years had a good record of being intolerant to people who claimed “my body my choice” but you won’t care because “it was wrongthink”.
It’s not hard to find repubs and dema saying heinous shit and pushing war or hate against opponents but we have to pretend Trump is somw terrific thing. The patron saint is a bullshit. Strawman.
The type of crowd that gathers around wantijgn to ban dissent is actually worse and more damaging. You can only end up as a one narrative circlejerk if you go down that path. Specially when defederation seemiike a frequent thing.
Instead of leaving it to the useer, it’s as if you want to change it to "follow the list of this mainstream person/newspape’.
Instead of leaving it to the useer, it’s as if you want to change it to "follow the list of this mainstream person/newspape’.
The instance admins are free to express themselves just as much as any other group of people. If you don’t like the outcome of their decision then you’re also free to go and create an instance or move instances.
If a majority of their users decide they don’t like the actions the administration of that instance are taking they can always move instances to one that more closely aligns with their viewpoints. If they choose to stay then clearly they agree and are very likely part of the group you clearly don’t want to be associating with.
Nobody is entitled to the service that instance admins offer, and users are free to move as they see fit. Reddit made a unilateral decision we didn’t like and now we’re all here, why is a Lemmy instance any different?
If you don’t like the Reddit change you’re free yo go… if you don’t like this you’re free to go.
Yeah. I get it. It’s just so limiting. It’s not sold as “the forum where God like admins get to say exactly how things go an malleate at their willing”. Even forums had people do their own stuff without breaking or mass banning every 5 minutes.
Your last point on “this is no different to reddit” is amazing. Yes. It’s different. Right now it’s worse. Less people who contributeless and destroy the shape and userbase of the network everytime they don’t fully get their way.
It’s really looking worse. In subs, mods with power trips could be easily replaced. Here you need an account per instance and the subs get fractured.
I thought it was just beehaw but holy hell the entitled attitude to not have to listen to any type of dissent ever. Don’t worry, you won’t be exposed to too many users. You’ll get your wish.
Yes! I was thinking very similar to this. It’s a big overreaction. It’s a community of one person or very few. If you aren’t on this instance then just don’t subscribe or block it. If you are involved in this instance then figure out how to deal with it along with the mods. It seems very quick to jump to defederation of an entire instance for one person.
Sure they might shield their users from one community but they are also blocking them from access to all the quality content from here.
