Gone Quill

Since this post was linked from another thread, @Difficult_Bit_1339, you’ve unfairly characterized @socialjusticewizard as a beehaw.org user coming here “trying to stir up shit” as you’ve phrased it. Their sh.itjust.works account predates their beehaw.org account by two weeks. This post, the one we’re commenting on right now, is NOT clearly labeled as being the rules for vote posts. It’s just named “changes.” You should consider putting the rules for vote posts in the sidebar and in the vote posts themselves.

If you want to label me as a beehaw.org user coming here “trying to stir up shit,” too, so be it. At least my first account was from beehaw.org, and I came here looking to see sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world posts. At this point, I’m entirely done with this instance based on the overall handling of this situation and will be using my @[email protected] account for the purposes this account was originally meant to serve. Here is some advice I have, as a sort of exit interview.

1. Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity
2. Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation
3. Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you’re using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it’s fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

Removed by mod

Aye

Charlottesville, 2017. As you might recall, they also committed an act of terrorism and killed a woman

Actions speak louder than words, and that admin has done nothing to follow up on the things he says he will do

They have their house. We have ours. All we’re discussing today is “Should we stop letting them into our house when they come over?”

I keep seeing this discussion framed as a “slippery slope in regards to defederation” but what about the “slippery slope of letting unchecked unacceptable behavior continue?” Why is that not a slippery slope concern?

It’s selection bias. I wrote a big, long comment just now before seeing this. sh.itjust.works has already bled users, even if the MAU has continued to grow. It’s just that the makeup of those monthly active users is shifting, and will continue to do so the longer nothing is done one way or the other

I logged into this account after several days of inactivity to participate in this discussion and not just appear as someone from another instance. I left this instance because this decision-making process about what to do about an instance whose users consistently harass users on other instances was too arduous and was beginning to give me concerns that this problem would fester and get out of control. Not only that, but I picked the instance I moved to after a discussion with a few users about 4 other instances (lemmy.world was added to that list later in that conversation) that had moved a little bit faster on this issue. This was three days ago.

There are people who I’ve talked to that are still keeping an eye on things and intend to leave or stay depending on the outcome of how this discussion goes. The things that absolutely must be communicated are what the defederation policy will be, and what kind of time frame can be expected for executing a defederation based on this policy.

The point I’m trying to make is that “All of us have seen the content by now, and we’re still here” is a form of selection bias, and is precisely the concern. Not everyone who has seen the content is still here. The users who have stayed are more okay with seeing this kind of content than the entire set of users who started on the instance. Whatever decision you come to will influence the long-term community that matures here on sh.itjust.works. Whether you think you’re leaving it purely in the hands of all of us or not, the timing of when you’re holding the discussion and having the vote, and all of this changes the outcomes of the discussion and the vote. If you keep putting this decision off forever, the more favorable the community will become for and towards what the exploding-heads community represents to the greater fediverse.

And it bothers me every single day that someone who entered office with a 44% approval rating and a 42% disapproval rating won 49.9% of the vote. He was over 50% disapproval within 1 month of his term, and under 40% approval by his second month. This was someone that even his political allies called a racist and dangerous demagogue before continuing on to endorse him.

That is not a feature available in either Lemmy or KBin yet. The primary directive, if you ask me, of online community building is you must not allow your users to come to mental harm. It would be nice to keep exploding-heads from becoming a nazi echo chamber by having realistic content appearing in their feed, but we shouldn’t let that stop us from preventing their continued abuse of our rules

I’ve reported multiple users multiple times from exploding-heads for such behavior (against trans people). The admin of exploding heads has been documented as saying that’s fine (though I’d have to go find that thread again). That instance is not moderated to a standard of decency, and its active users have developed a reputation for raiding

Agreed. all of the bot replication content I’ve seen on Lemmy getting automatically copied from Reddit has been hard to engage with because the titles aren’t informative and the comments are awash with bot replication comments with no engagement from Lemmy users. I understand the urge to pump up the content here but I think the replication bots actually reduce the ability to engage and enjoy Lemmy.

The question I would ask is, what do people value a out the fediverse and the threadiverse? Personally, I like being able to engage with excited and interested users. The replication bots are noise standing in the way of this

Then why use a platform with federation / defederation as a core feature? Why not Nostr or SSB? Why activitypub?

Aye, and here’s why. Exploding heads are not coming into our space and having discussions in good faith. They are acting as a troll farm and being abusive toward our members, and generally not following the rules of the road laid out for our instance. “Beehaw defederated us and I didn’t like it” isn’t a valid argument as this is a different situation. Beehaw defederated from here because they couldn’t deal with the scale of moderating all the traffic coming from here which including abusive troll accounts. Exploding Heads is going by the alt right playbook and is almost exclusively being abusive, even if it’s a small number of people.

And it is noticable. I see some people arguing that individuals who don’t like that instance should just block it themselves, but that’s not an available function of the threadiverse yet. You’re saying that our server at large should endure abuse coming from that server because someday the functionality may be implemented for individuals to handle it themselves. I don’t think this is a good moderation strategy and will only allow abusive actors to find foothold.

No. People like tits.

Nah, UNIX certification requires paying money and almost all of the BSD spins said “That’s dumb, we barely have money as it is”

In real life, you can filter by not hanging out with people who speak abusively about and to you. You can walk away. And yeah, sometimes those abusive people follow you. So a lot of them seek online support communities as a retreat from the abuse. Saying “they should just toughen up” misses on what their daily life is like, and that no one wants to be subject to constant unending abuse

I’ve been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don’t remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don’t understand what the Fediverse is for and about. There’s a lot of anger and hate that the Fediverse is supposed to be free and open and all the instances all federate with each other, and it’s just like… No. That’s not the point. Why would we even architect ActivityPub to have whitelist and blacklist functionalities if we didn’t want server admins to be able to use them? The point of the fediverse is that you own your relationship to your server’s moderators, and you pick your server’s moderators based on their moderation style.

Think of it this way. On reddit, the administrators have full power over all communities. Don’t like it? You are welcome to have no avenues to participate in any of the discussions. On the fediverse every server has a team that has full power of that small section of the internet. Don’t like how they federate? Pick a different instance that better matches how you would like to interact with the fediverse. If you’re angry that Beehaw is doing this, it just means Beehaw isn’t a good fediverse home for you. You can just… Not go to beehaw for your fediverse needs. Do you like it here, but still want to see posts from Beehaw? Maybe an instance that federates with both is right for you. Because if you like what’s on beehaw, to some extent, you are enjoying the community that is there because they like how things are run there. There is an extent to which you have common ground with those moderators. An instance that federates both there and here is saying “We like what both of these moderation teams are about.”

Here’s another way to think of it. Let’s think about the internet as being the world. The Fediverse is one country in the world. Each project is like a city. You pick which city you want to live in based on what’s going on in your life and how you want to go about things. Here in the Lemmy city (which is very near the KBin city. Think New York and Newark), every instance represents a house with a garden. When you move into the Lemmy, when you pick your instance you move into a house where your profile lives, and then you go hang out in the communities in the back garden. Who your administrators choose to let into the garden is just them creating the atmosphere they want for their garden party. And almost every Lemmy garden has defederated from someone. Almost every server has set up rules about what it takes to walk through the back gate to come kick it in the back garden. The largest instance with a fully open door policy is lemm.ee, not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. They’re the 3rd largest instance overall.

All beehaw.org is saying is that our house is very crowded and their bouncer can’t keep up with all the people trying to get into their garden party. And it’s what makes the fediverse beautiful. That’s the point of the fediverse.