Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you’re not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I’ve linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn’t the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
I vote defederate. This isn’t a question of putting up with a little fascist rhetoric on an otherwise acceptable instance. Exploding heads is exclusively fascist rhetoric, bad faith users, and spam bots.
We have nothing to gain from listening to them.
For me this is an easy aye. We already defederate from Lemmygrad for tankyism. I don’t see an issue with that, as that often comes with denying genocide and generally being apologetic of leaders of the past who have legislated against and killed minorities.
I don’t see how a right-wing instance obsessed with Donald “very fine people on both sides” trump is any better. It simply stands to reason that if Lemmygrad is to remain defederated (and I don’t see why not) then so should EH.
Defederate them. There’s no room for Nazis and fascists anywhere, ever.
it seems ridiculous to defederate from lemmygrad but not these tools
any ‘personal convictions’ that rule out tankies but not fascists are a serious red flag
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That’s litterally what he tried to do here. This is the admin trying to seem “decent” and saying that he is being “harassed” by people who want to defederate just because he is “right wing”. Saying that exploding-heads.com only has 2 communities where “actual free speech” is allowed. But the problem is a lot deeper than that.
There’s a few steps between right wingers, racists and nazis but he is giving a platform to the absolute worst and I call him out on that. And I will continue to do so.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/571413
And if you haven’t read it, OP posted the Lemmy World admin response to the defederation with some more examples of what they are like.
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Nah that was just me replying to deleted messages by him. He might be a racist, intolerant shithead but at least he’s not showing his dick randomly.
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The problem with the Nazi Bar analogy in relation to de-federation is that we’re not running their bar. They’re running their own bar and we’re just another bar on the same planet. Nothing we can do will cause their bar to shut down, nothing we can do will cause users to not be able to enter their bar.
The de-federation argument is more akin to asking to build a wall outside so that we can’t see the nazi bar from here. They’ll still be there, the wall doesn’t change anything. Any users with accounts here can also create accounts there.
You’re not required to go to the Nazi bar this idea that we can de-federate our way to a solution doesn’t make any sense. Is the endgame to have everyone build a wall around the Nazis so that they can’t pollute the rest of us with their unclean ideas? To place them in some sort of ideological ghetto because we deem them unfit to interact with society?
Trapping people in echo chambers and denying them the opportunity to hear any dissenting opinions is how you create more extremism, not less.
Bad analogy, it’s not one planet, this is like Super Mario Galaxy. We have a planet with little bars (communities), they have a planet with their shitty racist bars. It’s not building a wall, it’s cutting them out of our orbit.
I think it’s more akin to deciding to tear down the flyers for their bar events posted in our bar bathroom.
Also you’re kind of undermining your own argument by saying we’re trapping people in echo chambers while simultaneously claiming nothing we do will prevent users from going to their bar.
“hey lets ban those nazis from the nazi bar from coming into our non-nazi bar” easy
Defederation doesn’t keep them from making innocent-looking accounts elsewhere or here. It just makes each other’s content a little less accessible, and it’s mainly there for keeping the server from replicating it.
We can’t do anything to enforce moderation of content on another server. If they come here to do it we can boot em.
If the people from the nazi instance wants to join other instances, there’s nothing preventing them from that. This isn’t oppression, this is just content moderation, people acting like it’s some sort of crime against the idea of free speech are blowing it way out of proportion.
To place them in some sort of ideological ghetto because we deem them unfit to interact with society?
Also, using ghettos as a metaphor when talking about nazis just seems intentionally distasteful. Being pro-nazi and anti-nazi aren’t equivalent positions, one is defending discrimination and genocide and the other is saying that discrimination and genocide are bad things.
We’re under no obligation to federate with anyone that we don’t want to. They’re not just a Nazi bar, which I now believe is a good enough reason to build our wall, as you say, but they’re also a Nazi bar with Nazi robots.
Thank you kind stranger for the reasonability.
People use nazi only because it’s an easy label to hate and doesn’t require any further thought.
Say that bartender said “communist” instead of nazi or some other ideology they don’t agree with.
Also the bartender assumed the guy was a nazi. I used to work security in a very progressive US town and you would be surprised how many people go “some one just said there’s is a nazi in my store get them out of here” I would walk over to find it’s actually an antifa shirt with a swatica that is crossed out. the customer never took the time to actually read the guy’s shirt and decided they were going to sleep better tonight because they told on them.
Being an idiot with a knee jerk reaction to someone that is different from you isn’t an antidote to live by. Some people quick to judge would even call it nazi like behavior.
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I don’t use nazi lightly.
Seems your whole argument mixed Republican and Nazi ideology into one when they are separate things.
Yes someone one that thinks minority, and Jews should be scrubbed of this earth is a bad person but there are other aspects you are throwing into the mix. For example
They foamed at the mouth when asked to do the bare minimum and wear a mask to help protect their more vulnerable countrymen during a pandemic
This seems to leave the definition of a Nazi and fall more under people that took issue with mask. I wouldn’t imagine a Nazi to say “countymen”. If a Nazi lived in an all white town would they wear a mask because they valued the lives of a white person more? Again it’s seems like there’s a bit of a classification problem to me.
Are all people that don’t were mask Nazis?
Are all Republicans Nazis?
Is any right wing belief just a dog whistle for white supremacy?
Are corporations run by neoconservatives all just Nazis who tow a progressive narrative to hide there actions but they should be banned as well?
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Wait Republicans are not Nazis?
That would be new to me…
It’s a spectrum, and I honestly put that label Increasingly onto Republicans, but I’m living in europe, everything seems to be a little bit less extreme here (but the trend is unfortunately not that good either). I think to keep a place civil one has to moderate unfortunately, since hate is so much apparent nowadays (likely promoted by the “legacy” social networks). A place of true free speech with civil discussion and without hate is unfortunately just unrealistic utopia…
For me personally, I don’t care about the label. Is it nazist? Is it not? Don’t care.
What matters is that attacks against discriminated minorities on that instance, including celebration of violence, are completely normalized and I don’t want to associate with or give a platform to those that propagate this.
One of the people in their main community said the rules allowed you to “be racist, but not obvious about it”. I also will vote for defederation to keep that digusting hate speech out of my feed.
That’s a big yikes. I’m usually one of those “but what about the randos that unknowingly signed up that will end up in an echo chamber of hate” but if that’s on their main community then there’s not much of a chance or randos joining without knowing their MO.
I also think with federation it’s different than with something like a small local subreddit. On the sub for my (small, racist, generally regressive) country, I reveled in seeing smug assholes get voted down to hell for saying something that suggested that not only were they justified in saying something bigoted, but that they were above some “trend” of “pretending” that “things were not how they really were”.
I think that kind of reinforcement also helped form an identity for that community, that we were all together in fighting bad ideas.
I don’t know how that applies to federated communities, I’m even commenting from another community so I don’t know how welcome my feedback would be here. But that’s my $.02
I don’t know how that applies to federated communities, I’m even commenting from another community so I don’t know how welcome my feedback would be here
Insights and thoughts from people on other instances is explicitly welcomed. Members of this instance will be doing the final vote, but the discussion is very much open to all.
I was also initially against defederation. I believe that to combat bigotry and hate, we need to show that those things aren’t tolerated, and also why the those things are wrong. And I still believe this, however I don’t believe it’s the right response to EH anymore.
They are coming on to other instances and making posts like this, this, this, and this. Each one an innocuous post, but each one containing a link back to their instance.
It appears they are recruiting for their instance in the time tested way of slow exposure to radicalization.
Time to stop their spread and defederate them. And when their users come over because they like our communities, then we can combat their bigotry and hate, and ban those who won’t change.
I think we should defederate from any alt-right or facist instance, do not give them a plataform.
At first I was against defederating from them, since even though I do not agree with their viewpoints, I was of the opinion that we should not be so hasty to defederate with anyone. I thought that it was against the spirit of the Fediverse.
However, I have since changed my mind. There are three types of federation in Lemmy: allow list, block list, and open. We aren’t under any obligation federate anyone that feels like spinning up an instance.
The people on that instance, including its mods and admins, are a hate group. They break the sh.itjust.works rules of being respectful and having no bigotry. The exploding-heads content has no business even reaching the sh.itjust.works server, in my opinion.
It would also be a very bad look for us for sh.itjust.works users to create an account here and begin posting on instances which break our rules.
There is also the argument that, since we federate with a Nazi instance, we are also a Nazi instance. We had the “The Donald” and “Conspiracy Theories” communities which also supported that argument. Whether you agree with it or not, this is why we have been defederated from Beehaw, one of the larger Lemmy instances.
In addition to all of the ideological arguments above, they have opened themselves up to a botswarm invasion, and I think that is itself a reason to defederate them. It’s a simple security concern!
Finally, I am in disbelief we are even voting on this a second time. I would have expected the moderator team to honor the previous vote to defederate from them. Any further discussion and vote should have been to re-federate with them.
Defederate nazis!
I vote defedederation. This is a clear instance of “nip it in the bud”. Additionally, drafting a clear code of what the terms of defedederation will entail in the future will help both users and mods. We’re still new in this whole fediverse learning experience, so it’s understandable that there will be challenges like this, but I personally will feel most comfortable in instances which are willing to take strong stances against bigotry and hate speech.
Note that since Lemmy is new, if I invite someone to this server and they say extremely racist content, they’re never going to give this platform another try.
I see nothing to be gained from remaining federated. Exploding heads doesn’t offer a “diversity of opinion” or engage in good-faith debate any more than lemmygrad, and remaining federated will do nothing but fill our feeds with their low-effort hate trolling and sully our instance’s reputation.
You can watch my opinion evolve https://sh.itjust.works/comment/468378
It is no longer “like two people or something lol”.
The difference between posts and comments is large as others pointed out (way more posts) and to me this indicates they are looking more for “you need MY content in your feed (because I said so)” more than “let’s discuss this content”. I prefer the latter.
I am now in favor of defederating exploding heads.
If you want that content in your feed, there are plenty of ways to get it. I don’t.
For what it’s worth. I was looking at the server statistics on https://the-federation.info/platform/73 (linked from join-lemmy) and I noticed something. Almost all of the largest lemmy servers have far more comments than posts. The only two notable exceptions are lemmynsfw and exploding heads. They both have far more posts than comments. I’m not sure what it means, but it might be useful to someone in this discussion.
For example.
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sh.itjust.works has 5966 posts to 32670 comments
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exploding heads has 18406 posts to 5503 comments
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