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Fediverse situation right now
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Huge drama surrounding instances that have a major far-right presence and certain instances cutting connections (defederating), while others aren't (staying federated).
I like how someone put it in another thread. From the "defederaters," The argument most seen is: "if there's a nazi at the table and you say nothing, it's a table full of nazis." The most common counter-argument is "it's actually like a stadium full of people with some nazi's in the corner jerking themselves off." From the "federators," the most common argument is "defederation defeats decentralization," and the most common counter to this is simply: "fuck off nazi!"
I find the whole situation quite extraordinary to see unfold and be a part of.
What stadiums have these people been to where being a Nazi is okay? Stadium staff curate very specific atmospheres, and being a Nazi is an automatic disqualifier
Excellent example of why giant instances are bad ideas. Nazis love forcing you into a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" type choice because it means they can continue their hateful, destructive, genocidal behaviors without consequences. They're usually not stupid, they know what they're doing is wrong, they just want to keep getting away with it. So they'll go nuclear on anyone and everyone in order to maintain their comfy corner of hate.
Any moderator (or stadium owner) who doesn't give Nazis jerking off in a corner a lifetime ban is negligent, as you said.
Aren't the instances defederating from exploding heads actually the ones maintaining their comfy corners though
Yes but instead of a comfy corner of hate, it's a comfy corner without nazis
Coming from ShitJustWorks, I never ever have seen a thread from exploding-heads. They simply do not make it into the feed. And the only reason I saw any posts from TheDonald community while it still existed was because sorting by active was broken and would randomly throw in threads with no traction whatsoever. I can get behind keeping a space hate-free. But currently, there simply is no hate being shown even on instances still federated with exploding-heads.
This is a period of explosive growth and adjustment for Lemmy, it'll take awhile for things to settle down and for us to see what people's true colors are. Hopefully anywhere that actually harbors hateful or troll content will be marginalized and the mainstream instances will be properly moderated, but it'll be a continual battle since such people always want to find new ways to spread awfulness. If we're lucky, instances that have good track records will federate with each other. If not, people can vote with their feet.
Do you actually have solid grounds to call all the users of an instance nazis? That's not something to throw around lightly
I agree, it's not something to throw around lightly. I might be misinterpreting your message, but I don't believe I called all the users of an instance nazis (in this case, I guess we'd be taking about sh.it.just.works). I realise in a comment lower in the thread, they say "defederating from exploding heads", but that's not exactly correct because that's a community, not an instance. I am not calling all sh.it.just.works users nazis, and I'm not calling all exploding heads users nazis either. It's just that that sort of community tends to attract some nazis, so I would say that exploding heads would attract and retain a higher number of nazis than other communities.
What I did say, regarding the stadium metaphor, is that instead of having a stadium with a comfy corner of hate for nazis (a community in an instance that facilitates such people and behaviour, which could seep into the rest of the instance and other instances), if you defederate, it would make the whole stadium more comfortable because there isn't a corner with nazis (which would make it more inviting for other people to visit. Who would want to visit a stadium with a corner for nazis?). It would mean that the non-nazi people of that instance would also be moved to their own stadium with the small group of nazis, but they are free to create an account on another instance if they want to move. That's the power of Lemmy; you can find an instance that aligns with your values and join that.
Okay the more I write in this stadium metaphor the more I realise it's harder to make it make sense haha, I hope this makes some sense
People have crippled the power of many words by overuse.
Nazi, racist, bigot, -phobe, and so on.
There are definitely people out there who espouse the same beliefs as the Nazi Party and use the same strategies to weasel their way into popular discourse. Even as far back and as mildly as the US election with Obama, I was struck walking through the German History Museum in Berlin by how similar Nazi propaganda posters were to the kinds of rhetoric seen on Fox News and spoken by Republican politicians. Calling everything they don't like Socialism, or Globalism, for example, when the targets are hardly aligned with those ideologies, is literally copy and paste what the Nazi Party did. Not just "everything I don't like is Nazism," but like the specific phrasing and strategies they use against specific targets like Black, Jewish, LGBT+ people, and foreigners are nearly identical. When the mainstream dismisses it as "economic anxiety" or "ignorance" or "right wing populism" we're failing an open book test, because it's all been written down for 80 years and you can tell that these neo-Nazis have read it.
Stop running away from Nazi. Most of them are just trolls with a Nazi facemask to scare a reaction out of you. Don't cede power to them by acting as if their are dangerous. They are clowns, clown them.
They tried to overthrow the federal government last election and are responsible for countless hate crimes and fomenting prejudice and violence against marginalized people, including supporting new fascist laws in the past few years. They are dangerous, their ideology is dangerous, and their speech is used as a weapon to harm people. I'm not running away, I'm saying any "stadium" owner can and should be expected to ban such assholes from the premises. As the saying goes, if a bar owner lets Nazis congregate in the corner of their bar, it's a Nazi bar. "Not all Germans" physically committed a genocide, but all of them tolerated or endorsed Nazism to the point of allowing it to happen. When good people see evil rising, they get involved and disrupt it, they don't stay quiet and let it grow.
I don't think they're real. Pet theory, they're actually bigtech henchmen here to fuck shit up so competitors get poisoned and die.
The answer is a more sophisticated user led moderation system that can wipe them off Lemmy like bugs on the windshield. Use wipers, not nuclear bombs.
I don't think they're real. Pet theory, they're actually bigtech henchmen here to fuck shit up so competitors get poisoned and die.
The answer is a more sophisticated user led moderation system that can wipe them off Lemmy like bugs on the windshield. Use wipers, not nuclear bombs.
Nah this is not how moderation works on the fediverse. If you defederate from Nazi instances, Nazis have an incentive to go to those instances instead of yours - namely because they can't interact with Nazi content. They can still harass your users of course, but they can't build a platform and get banned quickly. So on the Fediverse you end up with a lot of Nazis on only a few servers, and everyone just bans those servers. Same goes for pedos, TERFs, etc.
This makes it a LOT easier as an instance admin to moderate content and keep users safe. As a Masto admin, I only get about 10 reports a week because I block about 200-300 servers. It also incentivizes me and my other fellow admins to block that kind of content, because if we don't, Nazis will come to our servers and we risk being defederated from.
The system is broken then, if it depends on a tiny amount of super powerful users who can and do block entire servers for one comment. Then this system is already broken, unsustainable and a waste of my time. This is obvious to me, this system is missing a functioning moderation system.
Relying on individual human thought janitors to try and hand-pick back content, because of how human nature is, is vowed to failure from the start.
First the kind of people who are going to be attracted by this kind of power, are never people I would like to allow manipulating what sort of things I see. And second, human lazyness will lead to harsh and excessive decision from those moderators
In fact, a system designed like this, will have to always comprise with making the moderator's impossible task as easy and as convenient as possible. This will always make the user's voice into a worthless shitstain in their curated garden.
And I say that as someone who has been victim of such as stupid and broken system.
I was a user of reddit's /r/quebec, the biggest Quebec discussion forum. The one online place where Quebec society comes to talk to itself.
And to illustrate my point, there was one of those extremely annoying amber alert and the name of the kid was really funny. And the text of the amber alert made it clear it was one of those child custody dispute, not a kidnapping.
So I just made a joke that naming their kid whatever-it-was itself constituted child abuse.
Ah, ah real funny.
And you know what happenned. I have been been permanently banned for life from ever interacting with the biggest online community of where I live.
I find that extremely unfair and it's obvious why it happened. Those people who delete people, they will never ever be able to handle the scale of sorting that enormous mass of content. So they just delete on sight anything they don't like, not just the comment but the people themselves.
Any oppressive system like that, which monopolize the center of discourse is a dictatorship. I don't care about nazi, the real nazi are the mods. All forums systems so far have been like this. Compromised by their weak, useless moderation systems.
I will take 100 nazi before I take one moderator.
This has not happened in my experience, the standard for blocking entire instances is always much higher. Sure you have a few minor exceptions like Beehaw, but Beehaw is just a single instance. In practice it's usually multiple comments, over a sustained period of time. Blocking an instance is not trivial.
Then leave or start your own server.
Lemmy has one at the community-level and at the admin level. Instance banning is a moderation tool and it is incredibly useful to use as I laid out before.
This has not been my experience from having been in this space for months and moderating a large server. I do what keeps my users safe, not what is convenient for me. Sometimes those overlap, sometimes they don't. I block instances because it prevents my users from receiving harassment from Nazis, instead of me cleaning it up after the fact.
Also you can just start your own server. Lemmy is cheap.
Then leave. This has not been my experience moderating a large server. I listen to my users. And the vast, vast majority of my users want Nazis banned. So I ban them. If you are in the very small minority that wants to interact with Nazis, then you can leave and go join one of the many Nazi servers out there. They would love to have you.
Not really.
Ok.
Ok. Then start your own server. The great thing about the Fediverse is you are more than free to do that.
...
Then leave and go join a Nazi server. You sound like you would fit in great over there.
Then start a competitor that fixes it, or start a server that doesn't use these systems.
Then go join a Nazi server or start your own. Nobody's forcing you to stay here.
It's unfortunate but there are a ton of shitbag people out there whose method of using the Internet is to be as shitty as they can be. Whether it's fascism, abuse, sexism, racism, harassment, or just being the kind of person nobody wants to be around, these are real-life humans who've always been around and volunteer moderators/admins have always had to deal with. It's as old as Usenet and if you've ever done in-person community management you know that it's just a feature of our society in general. (People are just a little more wary of being yelled at and punched in person though.)
Downvotes and user moderation is more than enough. Giving unlimited power of content manipulation to a secret cabal of powerusers is not a solution, it's a dictatorship worse than whatever the bad users could muster.
Any such system, can burn for all I care. I am so, so fed up with the control freaks. who think they're better than everyone.
Make every user a moderator, and make their moderation public and proportionnate with their status as one of the users.
Then other user content discovery algorithm will just not pick the comment with 30 downvotes and 10 user blocks. Moderators are completely superfluous and in fact destroy the system as they plainly are doing to lemmy right now.
I don't care to have do my part downvoting a nazi once in a while. Much better that than to be the powerless victim of power tripping moderators.
It isn't "running away", its preferring to go to bars where the bouncer will reliably throw nazis out. If these bouncers didn't toss a nazi, I'd find a bar where they would.
Don't be surprised when you or one of your friend gets thrown out as well
You mean like what happens when you join any of these far-right platforms and post something with any sort of common sense or reasoning? These people don't give a shit about free speech. They want to spread their hate and influence and "muh free speech" is the crutch they use to convince people like you to defend them.
Guess what? Even after they're banned they still have freedom of speech! Nobody broke into their house and cut out their tongues. Free speech does not equal a free platform.
Main issue is that in a large enough group of people, there are bound to be a few Nazis that slip in and start causing shit.
Going nuclear (defederating) on the whole group before they are aware or can react to this revelation is completely unreasonable. Even more so when the instance owners, moderators and the community are aware and actively down-voting and removing comments and communities.
And the beauty of the fediverse is if you are a Nazi sympathizer, you can pick an instance that federates with assholes!
Plus, I'd rather have those useless fuckers out in the open - it's easier to hit them that way. Hit them with legal charges is what I meant, of course.
Ahh, the fine line between "must cut all contact with the bad people" and "oh, are we an insular cult now?"
Literally anyone who isn't a bigot/Nazi is welcome. I'm so sorry if that's an 'insular cult' to you, but to most people that's just decent company.
As the old and wise George Carlin used to say..."fuck the ducking fuckers". Use the word! It literally can be every word in a full sentence.
It's not a fine line. More like an 8-lane highway
We have both extremes actually, both ultra left and right. Both got defederated by some major instances.