Defederation from Lemmygrad.ml

lwadmin@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1632 points –

Hello World,

Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.

Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.

At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.

As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one's stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.

Thank you,

The Lemmy.World Team

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I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.

There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.

Hexbear and Grad users defend genocidal regimes like Ruzzia and China. They excuse their crimes and argue in bad faith. I had so many insane discussions before I decided to block both of these instances entirely.

They are, by every single sense of the word, tankies.

Tankie is not just an oblivious term that has no meaning. It signifies a red fascist. It's like arguing that it's bad that we don't let neonazis in discussions. They do not care about discussing. All they want is to spread their disgusting ideas while hiding them behind leftism.

By defederating from these instances, we don't become less leftists. These people are not leftist.

This is not a slippery slope. It is a necessary step to ensure the growth of this website and actually worthwhile discussions.

Well spoken.

interacting with them does nothing but benefit them and the spread of their lies and propaganda. It brings nothing of value for anyone else.

It can be worth to set a counter-point. But I wouldn't do so in hopes of changing the tankie's mind. Rather to help the audience.

Elevating propaganda and lies to the level of proper discourse services no purpose but giving them false legitimacy and wider spread.

I guess we summed up two main arguments for both sides in neat one-liners.

I mostly agree, except:

These people are not leftist.

They are leftists, on top of the genocide they support they're also all for workers owning the means of production. Leftism isn't "when good," right isn't "when bad," left and right are economic distinctions symbolizing the people on one side and the aristocracy on the other. There can in fact be "bad leftists" just as there can be "bad rightoids." Bad people exist everywhere, not just at republican conventions.

These people are not leftist.

Why not?

If you support brutal totalian regimes, with your only excuse being "America bad," you only use leftist as a label, not a belief system.

But is 'leftist' actually a belief system? Left vs Right seems to me to be a political construct applicable to the individual country in question, if it can even be applied at all.

Another words, i guess I don't see the point of assigning "tankies" to left or right.

their anti SJW edgelords just with a communist bent perspective.

Why is them not being leftist? Do you just interpret left = good?

Why is them not being leftist?

Bad phrasing on my part. the only thing required to be anti SJW is to be not a liberal. Socialism is distinctive from liberalism, concervitism, (heck, even mormanism), and a lot of other ideologys.

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Can't deradicalize extremists without engaging them. Not to say where and when that should happen, or that the moral argument is even relevant. As Popper said in the wake of WWII,

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Being anti imperialism that's funded by the America war machine is not the same as being a tankie.

American tax dollars are very very involved in this conflict. This war

Which war are you talking about now? If you mean the one in Gaza right now, yeah, I would agree with the fact that America is tied to it.

Supporting Hamas, however, is not anti imperial.

I agree with you about grad/hex ultimately being or supporting red fascists, but I'm not convinced that world's admins are using this much nuance to make their decision. They probably saw some angry anti-Israel comments and just assumed it's all hate speech.

They should have done it sooner, when they had schizo takes about the Ukraine war or China

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I expect you need to look in the Lemmy.World moderation log to see to what degree lemmy.ml users were or were not problematic (I've no idea either way.)

Moderation logs are largely public, you can check it yourself.

I could but I'm not the person who cares enough to want to look into it. I'm telling the person who does that doing so is a good idea.

Good idea, if anyone can point me to it or to specific examples, I would appreciate it. Also do not care enough to start an investigation by myself.

Fwiw, I wouldn’t judge an entire instance by a handful individual posts. Users will be users. But still, some evidence would be a lot better than no evidence. Plenty of evidence would be even better.

No one owes you anything. If you don't like it, move instances. If you want the evidence, go find it. It's pretty easy, and you don't need to be handholded to get there. You're talking like you're a decision maker for a decision that's already been made and for which you have no authority.

I was harassed by them and insulted for not agreeing with them (mistakenly commented in one of their instances posts) and elsewhere and they kept saying certain people deserve to die (which I’d classify as hate speech).

When there’s so many that can bombard or overwhelm the rest of the discussion they should stick to their own echo chamber. I don’t see the same problem you do with defederating from them and am more likely to use the site more without their presence.

Edit: We also don’t know what the mods or admins are seeing and removing from them. I couldn’t even have a conversation without being overwhelmed and shouted out/insulted

I am not sure how many it's "them", but I usually just make very liberal use of the block function. I had very bad experiences from people from multiple instances (sopuli, .ee, etc.) and I have always blocked the people. It's a click of a button, and soon you can ban whole instances...

Yes… agree with this take. I’m disappointed in the Lemmy World Admins for this move..

If Lemmy World is going to just defederate from instances where the opinions of users of one instance annoy the admins, then I will withdraw my monthly donation and go elsewhere.

Also, seems like there should be more of a process involved in defederation than a knee jerk post where the admins assure us it was a decision made with lots of deliberation. Despite that, it all feels very abrupt and top down and driven more by the admins’ personal geo-political opinions about recent events than other factors.

Already canceled my patreon subscription, haven't had the time to figure out a new server yet.

Lemm.ee think before defed. Lemmy.ml is run by the lemmy devs who are communists and don't have the sane desire to silence any non-American view.

I used to be on world, but it's become quite politicised and intolerant of any view other than their admins.

Can we transfer our account like on Mastodon, or just create a new one? (I don’t currently plan to, just wondering.)

There are tools to copy your subscriptions and blocks from one account to another, but you can't "transfer" an account.

Just gotta create a new one unfortunately. It's a highly requested feature but real low on the devs priority.

SSO is a big thing to add so it may be a while.

You should rescind your donation anyway, the moderators have made it clear that they want the place to become a nazi bar.

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I discussed a lot with people at lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Because I really thought that these are people from a developing nation, which are fed russian and chinese propoganda all day and giving a second perspective benefits the discussion.

Ive never gotten death threats before. Now I got dozens. And not in private messages, but straight up as comment.

I am not sure that I would share your attitude in “benefiting” a developing nation with your perspectives, but yeah, death threats not cool in any case. As I said in my original comment, there may be more to this than meets the eye. Maybe these guys are being jerks and intolerant of other viewpoints more often than not, can’t tell. As far as I’m concerned it is ok for people to argue passionately, angrily even, so long as they do not seek to undermine discussion or, worse, hurt others just because they disagree with them.

Thats not what I said. I said that my perspective would benefit the discussion, comming from a western country. Compared to the perspective that was voiced in the discussion before, which was pretty one-sided. You know, to get a whole picture.

tl;dr of this ramble: ignore the paradox of tolerance!!!

give me a break. If you disagree with this, set up your own instance or find another, you're acting like you are now cut off from this instance and thus this entire instance will become an echo chamber because it doesn't tolerate intolerable content. If you actually cared, you'd look at the modlog, but instead you post an emotional reactionary response.

Very cool

I disagree with this defederation but it's how online political communities work unfortunately. Whatever views the most people generally agree with will become the most visible, that means milquetoast and agreeable "good" points of view will always dominate, ie centrist liberal stances. The communities also become over-paranoid of outside infiltrators, the idea that the space is in some way authentic and pure and needs to be protected.

Over time as things happen in the world and the acceptable view is established, more views become cleaved away until it just becomes an agreeable and boring comment section of people rewarding each other for also having the correct opinions on everything.

Finally a voice of actual moderate reason. Thanks for the well said contribution.

I could not agree more. Not only are comments removed, and users banned way too easily, is the nuclear option, defederation, used perhaps a bit lightly too.

In my personal experience I much more enjoy the comment sections of the more open instances. Feels much more like the thing I enjoyed most about reddit.

Thank you for saying this. I'd never visited until the ban and probably won't again it's just not my scene. I spent about an hour browsing and saw lots of critique of Israel but never saw hate speech.

I'm disappointed lemmy.world admins consider justifiable criticism hate speech. Maybe I'm missing something but if there was true hate speech it was certainly a small minority and not the majority.

We are very much seeing the powers that be flexing a ton of influence right now.

Now I firmly and staunchly do not believe in any kind of dumb new world order or any crazy beliefs about Jewish people, but we are definitely witnessing a lot of very powerful people influencing this story towards a very pro Israel stance.

This is an objective statement.

While I don't think your statement is false in general, it doesn't really apply to lemmy.world defederating. This isn't about support for Palestine, or even support for Hamas necessarily, but about calls to violence.

this story towards a very pro Israel stance.

You mean because people are pointing out that a leading political party in Gaza is organizing the slaughter of civilians?

And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.

Edit: If lemmygrad truly are tankies, then the collapsed doesn't apply and I'm misinformed. I'm just concerned we did a sentencing hearing. if they truly are being cult like, "soaked in the enemie's propaganda" and intolerant, okay we have a different situation. we should still limit our anger before we whip ourselves into a mob.

::: spoiler (written during anger) Its true and im rather disgusted by it. Its depressing to see the largest face in the fediverse self isolate make bitter enemies with a different shade of hateful. One bad Hexbear user made me want to defederate, the second one made me think otherwise. I used to want to defederate from hexbear, now I really don't. Ive seen toxic people from every instance, including our own.

lemmygrad's perspective

Fuck you reddit 2.0, took you long enough. Thanks though, we’ll stop seeing your crap posters pollute our comment section from now on.

90% of people we ban come from world. Very funny that they said they saw a rise of hate speech from our instance though considering the worlders we ban are fucking genocidal maniacs and fascists. You can check the modlog (it’s unfortunately federated), we are one of the tamest instances when it comes to banning people and deleting comments/posts.

For any worlder that was based and liked interacting with lemmygrad (you will notice we did not ban good faith participants), I recommend you make an account on a third-party instance that federates with us, like ml or ee until they also defederate from us because we have principles 🙃

The post is as idiotically angry at world as world are at them.

I will likely change my primary instance from now on to one federated with both world and lemmygrad because your and their people can hopefully exist in harmony there. the anger on both sides is frankly unsettling I want to be neutral on this matter.

Take better care of yourself, Hikikomori lemmygrad and Hikikomori lemmy.world. (stop being a prick, @HelloHotel)

The fact that this whole thing may be secretly abou the war bugs me too.

:::

I mean, im pretty sure more than 90% of people who join started at .world so it makes sense.

The above quote tells me all I need to know it was a good choice. This wasn't a mature, unbiased response that understood there are different values and opinions in the world, or that wanted to address issues between the two - no instance owes any other anything unless they want to try get along and these clearly don't.

no instance owes any other anything unless they want to try get along and these clearly don’t.

that's absolutely fair but tragic. They have the right, absolutely. I updated my comment to hopefuly have more clarity

I agree it is fair but tragic. All opinions and sides demand fair, respectful and critical evaluations, regardless of the current status quo and its a shame these discussions can't be had.

A centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard.

Perfect description of Reddit.

Like me. World is too left and whiny for my taste anyway so I left, and lemmygrad is a shitpool.

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