Hello all,
This is a heads up that this weekend we will be asking the community to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and Rammy.site, following an increase in their content making its way into our instance and moderation queue.
This content borders on illegal in my/the servers locality (if it was to be clearly iilegal we would have defederated with them immediately to protect the instance) and is usually hate-filled and targeted towards minorities.
So far we’ve had very little to do with them, but have come across some posts wishing (although not directly stating) harm on trans people and other minorities.
My personal take is the content being generated in those communities is not the content that this community needs to see or be a part of. Given the increasing visibility of this content coming over to us, I feel now is the time for the community to vote.
However, as I have said from the start, these decisions are not mine to take alone, and are for the community to come together to agree on. I never take defederation lightly, and have not defederated with any other instance (except threads) yet. Therefore this is a decision for the community to weigh in on.
In order to protect users here the vote will be held anonymously (we’ll release details on Friday), and we encourage discussion to be held on our Matrix space so as to prevent users here being targeted for any views.
The vote will be held at some point on Friday and run for 48 hours over the weekend to give everyone time to vote.
For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don’t think this would produce any valuable discussion, they’re unlikely to change their instance’s purpose for us.
I appreciate the admin team putting defederation to a vote.
Wanted some context myself, so I did click on rammy.site and scrolled a little. There is a stickied post recommending moving away and to a new instance since others are defederation and the admin has abandoned it.
Scrolling further, the most common post is one user posting a list of what they say are known child groomers and complaining admin was taking it down (this is a daily post it appears). Others include comparing drag queens to paedophiles and saying leftist parents are fleeing Florida due to anti child mutilation laws.
As for exploding heads, I saw some similar, but issue wasn’t obvious. That said, I did find this https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 that added screenshots.
From what I gather, rammy.site is mainly dead and exploding heads has (from what I saw on another post so take it with a grain of salt) 104 users.
I’m thinking yes to defederation as it seems like very few users and links would be lost, but I totally get the other argument. Just wanting to help provide some context for those without time to look for it.