banning and defederating communities
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 44 points – 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.
Let's not sugar-coat this: do not tolerate fascists and bigots in your spaces. Period.
I agree 100%
If you want to tolerate Nazis, bigots, fascists, etc under the guise of "free speech" then this is not the instance for you. And I hope we maintain that moving forward. Y'all can have your own hellhole somewhere else
This.
A clear-cut and uncontroversial rule that will see little to no opposition, yes.
And in many cases it's also clear-cut and uncontroversial whether someone is a fascist or a bigot.
But in other cases, you're going to run into trouble. A particular case in point; I don't like the Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy. I have, in the past, been immediately called a sexist when I've mentioned that fact. But I personally don't care one whit about the gender of the trilogy's protagonist, I just think they're bad movies. Maybe there are other people who actually do care and that's the reason they don't like those movies. Maybe there are people who don't believe me when I say I personally don't care about the gender of the trilogy's protagonist. So, is https://reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ a bigoted community? If there was a Fediverse equivalent, should it be blocked? Different people will argue different ways.
I can think of lots of other scenarios, I won't make a big rambling list because I'm sure I'll step on a landmine eventually. I'm just arguing that seemingly simple straightforward "rules" that are easy to agree with can still end up mired in complexity when people try to implement them in the real world.
I don't feel like there is as much gray area here as you're making it out to be. There is a big difference between
"The new star wars movies are bad cause they are WOKE!1!1!1!1!1 Women are bad!"
vs
"The new star wars movies were an incohesive mess due to changes between writers and directors for all 3 films"
But also it's not like we will be defederating whenever people get in a slap fight, people are still going to have shitty opinions on any instance and get downvoted for that. This is for a pattern of behavior being tolerated and prolific.
The whole reason /r/saltierthancrait exists is because the folks at /r/starwars largely refused to make that distinction. It could be that "misogynist" was simply a convenient weapon to bludgeon the people who disagreed with their taste in movies and they didn't genuinely believe that everyone who disliked those movies were misogynist, but the weapon was deployed nonetheless and resulted in a schism.
These words are just too convenient sometimes.
Yeah I have no doubt someone called him a sexist for not liking the new SW, but from what I've seen across communities online 99% of people are easily able to distinguish between someone critiquing films over being a misogynist. And there was def rampant misogyny in some places when they got released.
That's a bad faith argument they used against you for having a good opinion that they disagree with. In my personal head cannon I ignore the prequels and sequels because they cheapen the original plot. Rogue One I'll take though.
I'm a fan of the Machete Order, which salvages two of the three prequels. The prequels weren't good, but the story was reasonably sound at least and inserting them between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi actually does some nice improvements to the overall pacing IMO.
That’s a valid concern, but in “fuzzy” cases like that, I think we can trust the mods. They’ve shown good judgment so far.
Very well said.
"No nazis or bigots" is a nice slogan, but if people turn off our brains and turn off our humanity and just start mindlessly chanting slogans that justify the punishing of our enemies, then there's no difference between us and the typical German in 1938.
It doesn't take a lot to end up in a bad place if we think we're purely good and in the right and our enemy is purely evil.
lmao fuck off. Tolerating nazis leads to more nazis. The only way to get rid of them is to stomp them out.
Are you familiar with the Salem witch trials, the werewolf trials in France in the 1500s and 1600s and the Satanic Panic of the late 80s and early 90s? Those people thought they were morally justified in anything they did against the accused because they were fighting against literal Satan.
World War 2 ended 75 years ago. Virtually everyone who was a Nazi is dead of old age.
So who are you stomping?
lol you are delusional if you think Nazi ideology is dead.
There are plenty of white supremacist fascists out there. People often call them nazis because we don't give a shit about splitting hairs regarding if they are a member of the actual Nazi party or if they're just closely related scum.
also funny that you only bring up horseshit things as your dodge with witches, werewolves and Satan, you know all not real, but Nazis and bigots are real so it seem a weird comparison
We're not talking about punishing anyone, we just don't want to hear or see their bigotry. They can have their space and we can choose not to interact with them.
That's a fair point.
Ya we should have thought harder about who the bad guys REALLY were in WW2
FFS
There is a really, really big difference between "we want to kill you" and "we do not want to be killed by you".
Don't tolerate fascists. However comfortable that centrist illusion is, you are signing your own death warrant and that of millions of others (most of whom will suffer the consequences of your actions long before they get around to the people who feel safe enough to argue that fascists must be tolerated).
The concern you raised cannot be overstated. Accusing someone of bigotry or hate because their opinions of a subject are different has become a common invalidation and attack strategy. Another example is the Little Mermaid movie. By most accounts it's just not a very good movie. But you'll likely be called a racist by certain groups if you state that you don't like it. I haven't seen it. I don't have an opinion on it. But I witnessed the resulting arguments unfold across the internet. It is okay to dislike works created by or starring POC. It is not okay to dislike them because they were created by or star POC. Some people seem to find it impossible to differentiate between the two.
Perhaps different life experiences. In many cases nothing is really clear-cut when it comes to people and their opinions. People who believe "they figured it out" inadvertently become totalitarians.
The bulk of my comment was all about the "but in other cases..." stuff.
PERIOD
💯
we should defederate from kbin for hosting fascists and bigots
Satire doesn't work as well on fedi when everybody has to check what instance they're on AND what instance you're posting from to figure out if you're serious
“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.
Both, that distinction doesn't work very well for the new fediverse model.
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.
Yeah go and take a stroll through those instances and you'll see quickly why their posts aren't welcomed here.
Seems to be popular to defederate from right-leaning instances. The Fediverse basically started as a far-left stronghold, so it isn't surprising.
Most instances also defederated from lemmygrad (commies) so its not generally politically left either.
Also there is the problem of liability, if a instance hosts stuff that is legal where their server stands, but isn't where yours is, you basically need to do it. (Burggit.moe for example, also LemmyNSFW)
Porn in general is also defederated by many because its problematic to moderate.
And then there are instances that just brigade a lot or make bots on mass that spam. They usually get blocked as well.
Last but not least, if your instance defederated nothing it will be defederated because its seen as unmoderated (wich could potentially result in illegal activities)
Tankies, not just commies
Mostly the same for me tbh, the Intersection is about 90% nowadays, especially on the internet.
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.
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.
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.
.
Faschism and Stalinism is just different in who they want to dispose of mostly. The Intersection of their policies is gigantic.
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:
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.
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.
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 a post about the issues these users bring, 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?
FYI, that list is generated by kiwifarms software. You should not be linking to it directly
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?
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/instances
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.