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exploding-heads are infiltrating our discussions - lemm.ee
lemm.eeThe screenshot shows the recommendations from https://join-lemmy.org/
[https://join-lemmy.org/]. Still being federated with exploding-heads does not
mean the instance supports them. But it means that shit-heads are allowed to
take part in the discussions on their communities. They do intoxicate the
discussions we will have. They will attack minorities. Maybe you will not be
harassed by them, more vulnerable people will be. They are allowed to moderate
communities on these instances. Exploding-heads members actively guide young and
unknowing people to their hateful instance. They try to start discussions about
the holocaust https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268
[https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268]. They create communities only to crosspost
exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma
[https://lemmy.world/c/pharma] They take over discussions against them
https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189
[https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189] “WHY are vulnerable people joining
a decentralized system? Isnt this why you want a closed, not for public eyes
community?” This was a link to exploding-heads, because when someone copies a
permalink of a comment from them on another instance, it will be a link to their
instance. Are we building a place where vulnerable people are welcome and safe
or are we building a place where nazis are welcome and safe? They want you to
block them, they comment that everywhere. They block people who are in favor of
defederating them https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714
[https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714] When their opponents won’t see them
anymore, they can harass and recruit without being noticed. Blocking will not
solve the problem. They will spread even when you close your eyes. M̶a̶y̶b̶e̶
t̶h̶i̶s̶ w̶a̶s̶ n̶o̶t̶ d̶o̶n̶e̶ i̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶, b̶u̶t̶ n̶o̶w̶ there
is a post with a list of ‘health communities on Lemmy’ with the first entry
guiding to exploding heads. https://lemmy.world/post/396561
[https://lemmy.world/post/396561] It is still possible that some of the
mentioned instances do support them. The owner of sh.itjust.works says that
because of “free speech” all other instances would be allowed. It is suspicious
to me that his line is drawn only for lemmygrad
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474 [https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474]
>The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship,
and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal
resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and
discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that
this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly
considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said,
sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day. >I’d
like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked
instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on
that instance to see what that’s all about and report back? At the same time
they seem to ignore the call and vote to defederate with exploding-heads
https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483 [https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483]. They
rejected to delete The_Donald from sh.itjust.works until they feared to get
isolated from the other instances: https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310
[https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310]. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored
early warnings. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248
[https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248]). TD was more important to them than
keeping the only mod of their 4th biggest community c/patientgamers
(https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747 [https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747],
https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922 [https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922]) Since
The_Donald was removed, I did not find more racist content on the mentioned
servers. That is part their tactics. They act harmless but recruit to their
instance, attract likeminded people and chase others away. Discussions on
sh.itjust.works about such topics are very toxic already, soon they might be
able to do more harm. (My research is very limited, as i could not search for
all exploding-heads member content on other instances by entering their domain.
I know there are nice communities on sh.itjust.works.) What can be done? On
joinmastodon.org [http://joinmastodon.org] there is a Mastodon Server Covenant
with very few useful rules, one of them is “Active moderation against racism,
sexism, homophobia and transphobia”. https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
[https://joinmastodon.org/covenant] It would be a first step to implement these
rules for join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org]. At least instances that want
to be recommended on there should have to agree to that rule. More actions
should be taken now. Please make suggestions. Things will only become more
complicated. The next reddit wave is incoming. For those who did not already
know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance]
https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone
[https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone]
This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have
to repeat the same mistakes? -Share/crosspost -Contact admins
See longer post (not by me) there, if all is true then they should fall under both the spam and mass lemm.ee rule breaking defederation rules, both bigotry and abusive language, though not always in combination.
Also the covenant thing Mastodon has would probably be a good idea.
I would ask lemm.ee users to please use the report function whenever you see our rules being broken in any of our communities! A large volume of rule breaking users from a single instance would certainly push me to defederate that instance, and reports would be the main signal for me to gauge that.
I don’t have the capacity to go out and vet content on other instances in general (as all admins, I am running lemm.ee as a volunteer out of my free time). I want to be upfront: I am not providing a curated service in terms of who we federate with. This is why I wrote todays post about administration and federation on lemm.ee. So please bear in mind that as a user on lemm.ee, you are expected to share some responsibility for keeping our communities clean, by always downvoting low quality content and reporting rule violations. In addition to downvoting and reporting, I personally also am a huge fan of people who have the energy to respond to bigots, explaining why they’re wrong (in civil terms) - even if there’s 0.001% chance of getting through to the particular author of a horrible comment, there is still a chance that a rebuttal in the response will be seen by someone else who will be affected in a positive direction.
To be clear, I am not somebody that believes that all ideas should get a platform without exception. Quite the opposite, I am super happy to shut down hateful content. It’s just a matter of putting my energy where I think it is most useful. For example, I would rather spend a week worth of free time working on better moderation tools or better self-service tools for users to curate their own feed, than spend the same time going through external instances in order to figure out how many racists they have and how well are they moderating them. That is why I have made the decision (for now) to focus most of my moderation efforts on things that happen within lemm.ee, and not externally.
I also want to say that I do not want to act hastily based on little information. I’m sure this will frustrate some of our users (and I’m very sorry about that), but I have not had time to research the Exploding Heads situation, and I don’t want to effectively create a new rift in the federated network, without first being absolutely sure that such an action is really necessary to protect lemm.ee users.
By the way, regarding this the_donald situation on sh.itjust.works, the OP of the linked post said this:
This seems like a great outcome to me - the_donald was removed and there is no more racist content. I would not think this is a good example of a reason to defederate another instance. I understand that part of the complaint is that the admin of sh.itjust.works took too long to respond to the situation, and as a user I can see why this would be frustrating, but as an admin, I can tell you that I can also see why he wanted to see evidence before acting. In the end, I really like that he removed the community as soon as he saw evidence of it being awful.
Just to leave you with my main point, I do not want to federate with instances which aim to hurt our communities or users, but I need concrete and specific evidence of this before I take drastic action. So please report rule violations, and if I see that banning violators does not work, then defederation will certainly be the next move.
Acting based on evidence is always good and proper. As to relying on reports for that I’m sceptical, though, or better put things aren’t quite there yet: A toxic community might be raiding some instance somewhere, that instance’s users are reporting like crazy, and you see none of it, consequently they could focus on one instance after the other, then change domains, rinse and repeat. Or at least that’s how I think it works (excuse my ignorance), there’s no global space where admins could see all reports. Would you even see a report from a lemm.ee user made in a community of another instance?
It might be a good idea to have more options in the report dialog, not just because of this, regarding whom to actually report the post to, as well as a drop-down for reasons – a post on beehaw that I report might violate beehaw “be nice” rules, but it might or might not also violate lemm.ee rules so I may or may not want to report it here, too.
It might also make sense to be able to report not just to mods/admins but specific communities who can then collate evidence and present it to admins (essentially /r/shitXXXsay but better), collating will be important because the harassment can be in the overall interaction pattern of a community, not just individual posts.
All in all though, to get my head out of the clouds and back into the here and now: Please don’t be too principled as long as the tools and community to back up those principles aren’t in place. That is, err on the side of the banhammer if you see a preponderance of evidence because if you don’t those people are going to strategise around your principles, rules of evidence etc. to do their thing. We’re already seeing that with the “block users who want us gone so they can’t report us” type of tactic.
Actually that looks like quite a misfeature: Someone blocking me shouldn’t preclude me from seeing their content. Another thing reddit got wrong.
I very much agree with this, @sunaurus@lemm.ee - your stance above is, I think, exactly as a stated policy should be, but please do remember that plans and reality must meet somewhere along the way. If you overthink things or cleave too religiously to the rules you’ve set yourself, you risk taking too long to act, and it’s exactly this delay between problem and reaction that bad actors exploit.
Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, basically. Lemm.ee is a great instance, and we’d all, I think, love to see it stay that way 🙂
If I reported hate speech advocates on this instance (I am writing from kbin) will my report go to you or to ernest ?
Almost certainly to ernest. Anything you see or interact with while the kbin.social URL remains in your browser bar is coming from kbin.social. It may be content that originated elsewhere, but you’re always engaging with a local copy. So, that report button is on k-soc, and it reports to the k-soc admin.
I don’t even know if kbin has a way of knowing who the remote admins even are.
Ah, I was wondering where the reports go. Mastodon has an option to forward the report to the remote server admins too, maybe kbin/Lemmy will get something like that eventually.
That would be a nice feature, yeah
as long as defederation of any instance is announced, folks can just leave to a completely federated one
Sounds reasonable, as always.
I just wanted to say, the high degree of federation was a big reason for me to join lemm.ee. I generally like to decide for myself what content I want to see or engage with (which does not mean I endorse it), and am grateful this instance allows me that.
However, like OP, I also cross-posted the post to other communities since there are limits to tolerance. Some folks just love to push the limits, using “free speech” to push agendas which I cannot condone.
For the time being, I’m happy the issue received attention and hope defederation will be used carefully as a measure of last resort.