/0 Governance

As someone who has completely replaced Reddit with Lemmy cold turkey since the blackouts, LW is still absolutely massive and federating with them has made me feel much less detached from the ebb and flow of online culture even if it’s filtered through the self-selection bias of people who would actually sign up for Lemmy.

I think this entire fiasco is pissy, utterly unnecessary posturing by their admin. But my bar for whether someone is a full blooded apologist for crimes or just deeply socialized into accepting them is this litmus test: is this person genuinely in favor of me being murdered, or is this person simply German?

I am personally affected by the rapacious ideology that is Zionism. I cannot currently access my familial hometown, even though it’s north of the Litani, it’s unsafe. I am almost certainly in the Palantir repository of “fighting age” males. So I’m not just happy to ignore a distant problem. I don’t want to dox myself but I am a former emergency healthcare volunteer and had to be called in during that Wednesday two weeks ago to help with triaging all the injured. They were all civilians, many who who looked and talked like me, who spoke my exact dialect. I have personally lost four acquaintances in this war, all decent people, all civilians. Some of the beggar kids who I walk past on the street every day are also dead and I fucking cried looking at a cinder block where one of them used to sit. A building I lived next to as a student, three buildings down, in a safe fucking area in the middle of the city, got fucking erased. This is very real to me. I have witnessed a lot of human suffering on that Wednesday, about as much as during the entire hell pandemic + explosion summer.

My opinion is not more important because of my experience but I have had ample reason to examine who I’m willing to talk to and who I’m willing to avoid. Back on Reddit I would openly speak about this very sensitive subject in big threads, intentionally choosing more measured wording, and I would get a lot of positive responses from people who seemed to really not know the situation. Granted this was before the mask off phase of that place.

I think our instances, and Hexbear for that measure, are exemplary on this issue. Nobody is born deserving to be murdered. I also think wider, more conservalib users from the wider Lemmy ecosystem getting to see us unapologetically call crimes crimes, and genocide fans getting downvoted by everyone, including fellow users of their own instances, is very important. This is not an abstract political idea, this is a fucking excellent litmus test. Many of the cooler users eventually migrate to our instance, I think that’s awesome. I think being so willing to federate with mostly everyone above room temperature decency is important, let them see our politics, let them be mad that they have to confront horrible ideologies they have been born into. And if they voice support for this murderous ideology, or any other genocidal belief, in our communities, then our rules are clear. Let them feel confrontation.

That said there is one annoying Zionist user on our own instance constantly pissing in our nice community pool. This person has crossed the German line.

I don’t think we saw that with LW yet. I think nothing I’ve seen so far from their admins crosses the “Is this person evil or just fucking German?” line, specifically. The broader LW userbase is on the libby side but they are broadly well meaning and can learn and be valuable allies and friends. And the large volume of posts provides plenty of opportunity to have good conversations. I have a lot of goodwill for Hexbear, despite also not loving some of what is considered mainstream on there (although I understand it. Critical support is important. Ask ne how I fucking know. I still have a town for a reason.). But Hexbear is very insular. It’s the same 200 users most of the time. A lot of the discussion there is pretty good, and frankly CTH is probably the funniest community anywhere on Lemmy. Some of the most concise and accurate English-language writing on political currents in the Levant I’ve ever seen is on Hexbear. But I think our role as an instance is different. I like that we federate with both. I like that a lot actually. I don’t have one account for shitposts, one for memes, one for saluting the blahaj flag, and one for hanging out with the MLs. This is everything I liked about Reddit back in 2011 and better. As it stands, dbzer0 is the LW of the flotilla. Does that make sense? That might be unpleasant for some people, but I think that’s a strength. The gate is wide fucking open. Solidarity to me also means getting people on board. Genocidal ideologies hurt the people they’re sold to as well, they impoverish the world we share.

Until the LW admins do something much more stupid, I strongly vote Nay. If they do, I’m happy to respond accordingly. But I don’t think it’s hit that point, I hope it doesn’t. I think this is a good initiative but that it’s being deployed too preemptively. I hope this comment isn’t too all over the place, but I really have a lot of thoughts whenever defederation or Zionist Bar problems pop up.

I do think we should try mediating first if they block our sister instances, and only defederate if they become worse about this whole thing.

Sorry decent people of Germany. Not all Germans etc etc

Users on lemmy.world are mostly sound but they are a very undemocratic instance where an admin has oversized power and can act on a whim without consulting its users.

Hm to think of it they are quite an analogue for USA

I made a very similar post to this on the LW Announcement post, but this has since been slightly edited and fleshed out. But... for those unaware...

A user by the name of Luminous was an admin on Anarchist.nexus. They banned MrKaplan from a community for 'posting zionist apologia.' Luminous also had 'Murder all Zionists' as their display name. MrKaplan took this as a personal death threat. Instead of speaking with any other admin from Anarchist.nexus and reporting the behavior, MrKaplan instantly defederated from Anarchist.nexus. In the next couple of days, Kaplan messaged other users/admins of Lemmy about the defederation and suggested defederation to others as well.

After being posted in the Piefed general chat, PugJesus pushed back against the defederation.

The conversation moves elsewhere.

So, I messaged Kaplan. Conversation goes on and one thing is made clear, that Kaplan did not reach out to any of the Admins of Dbzer0 or Anarchist.nexus until after defederation had occured.

LWAdmins made an announcement post discussing the defederation but the post was not featured unlike all other recent posts made by the LWAdmin account, which felt underhanded. To make matters worse, Serinus (a moderator with admin level abilities), proceeded to step into the conversation and start removing offending posts for reasons listing anything from "We've heard your opinion" to "Misinformation" when screenshots proved otherwise. I say he has Admin level access because @Goferking0@ttrpg.network was banned from the Instance by an Automod I (and Jordan Lund) previously had access to. It sort of sidesteps the Modlog by not logging who actually did the removal, which I'm not a huge fan of, but this was also admitted by Serinus in a comment where he said he was the one who banned them. This being the same Serinus who said this of defederating with Anarchist.nexus:

Kaplan later doubled down in the LemmyWorld Discord Server, after the conversation I had with them in which they admitted having exactly zero evidence for this stance other than it "feeling odd", by stating:

Ruud, the head admin of Lemmy.world, has had no feedback on this position. The only natural conclusion one can come to is that the LW Admin team (of which Serinus now seems to be a part of as he speaks for the admins in the admin community and has admin tools) are not just fully willing to act based off of knee-jerk reactions, but aren't capable of communicating with other admins on issues that they may have with their instance. Or that they only will confer with you if your instance has enough users for them to consider a valid one.

Now, they have refederated with Anarchist.nexus since this situation but they haven't backed down from the threat of defederation. This is much like every other major problematic issue that has been brought up in the past with Lemmy.world. Their admin team drags their feet for an absurd amount of time, despite rolling in reports about moderator abuse or whatever else, and then expects people to act with pre-cog abilities without them informing you of their problems with your instance. Also seem to be willing to police how good your reasoning is on how you feel about the situation to judge whether or not it's appropriate to defederate.

To paraphrase what Kaplan said in one of those screenshots, it is not my intention to control who can or can’t be on admin teams on another instance but I do expect other instances to understand that an individual admin’s actions reflect their instance as a whole. Something Ruud seems to not care about and something that Kaplan belives does not apply to themself. Overall, the primary response by the LW Admin team has been to frame AN and Dbzer0 as either a small instance that “only has 165 users” or "only 71 monthly users" or a “vocal minority with an agenda”. For 20,000 users.

How long before its your instance on the chopping block for not telling them exactly what they want to hear? How many of your users will be silenced by Lemmy.world for a perceived sleight against them?

What Luminous did was idiotic and troll-esque. But what Kaplan is doing is considerably worse.

I don't think I have to state where I stand on this.

I think you guys should just defederate, because even if you loose access to some popular or good comms Axis.world is just going to keep getting worse

They now are being pretty defensive of zionists, they rarely if ever moderate transphobia, they are eventually going to go more hands off on other issues until they start defending the wrong side over civility and eventually they will attract more like minded bigots who will join so their takes dont get moderated

Its the beginnings of a nazi bar basically

As someone who is brand new to the whole Fediverse and Lemmy and all of that, I am rapidly trying to piece together what's happened/happening here. If a kind soul would help me with some context that would be phenomenal. I know .world is like, THE biggest instance that hosts very large communities, but I am not sure what exactly is happening with the instance as a whole, or what we are wanting to happen to it.

Did unjust defederation actually happen?