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For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don’t think this would produce any valuable discussion, they’re unlikely to change their instance’s purpose for us.
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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.
It’s cool that we have an active admin team staying on top of everything.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen users from these instances only the meta posts about them. I did ban a few communities when I signed up and probably am not really browsing the ones hate speech would show up in usually.
It would be great if lemmy had the option for an instance blacklist on a per-user level but this doesn’t exist for now.
Anyway, I just want to let you know, some of us won’t notice the difference either way, so if there are people here who are affected by it banning them is not a huge loss.
Am I the only one using Subscribed view by default? I subscribe to communities that interest me and it shows me their posts.
I see someone spamming, being a dick etc., I block them.
Everyone can just keep whatever they like and hide whatever they don’t like. You can block whole communities too.
I took a quick view at linked examples and haven’t seen anything illegal. Let’s not turn into r€ddit/twatter, where mob cancels someone for being controversial. I’m subscribed to !Piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, hope we won’t defederate from them 😀
I think federation is one of the greatest assets of the fediverse and if defederation becomes something common, then we might lose that. Good thing this is being put for a vote!
Unfortunately the moderation tools just aren’t there yet - ideally I’d love for users to set their own instance blocks and for us admin’s to leave that up to users (unless in the case of illegal/CSAM content) and if those tools ever do become available, then we’d probably refederate as an instance and allow users to decide.
As that isn’t the case currently we need to take broader steps towards moderation. If CSAM/illegal material makes its way on to this server, we’re just as much on the hook for it which jeopardises the instance.
In terms of what counts as illegal, I personally live in the UK which has stricter laws around this than some other countries, i.e. the USA, which are summarised here. Specifically, it is an offence to host: web pages with pictures, videos or descriptions that glorify violence against anyone due to their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or because they are transgender.
EH has posted “memes” which could be argued violate this law. I also need to be mindful of the content held in other countries as part of hosting the site, i.e. in Germany, and their local laws.
While I’m very unlikely to have my front door kicked in over a meme, it does in the long term risk the instance if content like this continues to be produced by EH.
Unlike many other instances, we haven’t defederated with anyone else (except threads) at all, instead allowing users to choose, but it does come to a point when I find myself asking the question about the risk vs the content, and then I feel it needs to go to the community to be involved in that decision.
Personally I don’t feel they produce anything of importance that we’ll miss by not being federated, but maybe I’m in a bubble, hence why we’re asking the community!
If we defederate now, is it possible/does it make sense to re-federate with those instances when the moderation tools have matured?
Yes, we should just be able to remove the block and federation would start again.
I don’t think we should defederate, unless there is actually illegal content. There should be tools to block said instance from appearing in users feed, but cutting all comunications is too much. Lemmy users should be able to interact with the whole lemmy (without giving their IP with an instance they dont trust) , I dont want this place to be divided into groups. Thanks for making this a vote, thats really good
I think it would be better to block individual users instead of the whole instance. We need automated ways of detected questionable content to remove.
I also would be careful allowing your own biases to dictate moderation policies. Hate speech is never good but just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t make is hate speech.
With that being said it is still inappropriate for a user to troll or criticize some one else’s choices. Trolling sub’s and posting hateful comments should not be allowed.
Edit: Can you give an example of the moderated content?
While we could block individual users, they do have 7000 accounts over there (although admittedly a very small % of active users). If we block a user they can just keep creating new accounts, which just increases moderation time and doesn’t resolve the issue, as we would still be open to unblocked users posting that sort of content.
Similarly we as an instance can’t block a single community, so our instance moderation tools are only very broad in scope.
As I’ve said in another comment, I would prefer per-user instance blocking but that isn’t a feature in Lemmy yet - that would be that the ultimate win-win in my opinion.
Our moderation policy is laid out here which came about as a result of this discussion. I’ll also add that hate speech is defined as: abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.
I’m loathe to link directly to content and drive traffic their way, but I’ll link some content below from browsing their site for a couple of minutes that breaches the above definition:
Warning: explicit content
These posts clearly breach the hate speech definition, and at least one of those posts is likely to be seen as a breach of UK laws which is against this instance’s rules.
This isnt a decision we’ve taken lightly, rather its something we’ve been discussing for days and have feedback on before we announced the vote. If the community wishes to remain federated, then that is the communities decision, but it runs the risk of a couple of things:
- breaking the law and having the server shut down (although unlikely it is still a risk)
- having other communities defederate with us if we refuse to take action against bad actors
How many communities over tgere have people from this instance sub’d to them? If you do defederate you should give some notice prior to allow migrations
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Lemmy is going to quickly just turn into a frustrating, confusing echo chamber because everyone’s hurt feelings is going to require defederation. I think defederation is being abused more and more because of overly sensitive people who would probably be better off avoiding the internet entirely.
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What exactly has been “illegal”? Serious. I haven’t seen that pointed out yet.
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This is the best part imo. I don’t think people from the affected instances should have a voice in what our instance does either. I’d hope that the vote is only open to members of this instance.
The problem these guys don’t seem to understand is they absolutely become guilty by association. If you hang out with bigots all day and defend their “right to free speech” anytime someone calls them a bigot, then you are also a bigot. Also, you know, Freedom of speech doesn’t mean requirement of others to listen.
Just quickly to say yes, only open to lemmy.zip accounts with a minimum age limit.
Nah. Sensitive types will just call the things they don’t like “hate speech” to justify pushing their opinions on others. Authoritarian semantics. Yawn.
Authoritarian semantics that is taken to a vote. Bravo, you live in a perpetual circlejerk.
If you are worried about the “sensitive users” calling something hate speech just to defederate an instance, rest assured the admin here looks at everything from all angles before making a decision on what to do. This is discussed in on the matrix channel quite a bit before the admins of lemmy.zip make their decisions on what to do.
Demigodrick and Sami listen to information provided and research it before even starting to think about to decide what to do. And like he posted, he does not want to defederate unless absolutely necessary based on his local laws since he is in the UK.
yeah i agree, they take a lot of user input before making decisions that will effect the community. also the final decision will still be made by the users (unless it becomes a legal issue). with that being said i highly recommend all lemmy.zip users to join the matrix server and voice their different viewpoints.
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Am I missing the part where this will have a large impact on EH users? Nobody is trying to take down the content on your home instance.
Your definition of “hate speech” is childish. Hate speech promotes a specific belief filled with prejudiced meanings, leading to disrespect to a certain group of people’s dignity. It is defined by objective standards and has negative impacts on society. This kind of behavior can harm our community as a whole. Strongly in favor of defederating any server that cannot differentiate between “hate speech” and “free speech”
