The screenshot shows the recommendations from 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. They create communities only to crosspost exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma They take over discussions against them 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 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.
Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now 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
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
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.
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. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored early warnings. (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/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 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 It would be a first step to implement these rules for 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
This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?
-Share/crosspost
-Contact admins
update: lemmy.word defederated eh
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Exploding-heads.com has been blocked by https://lemmy.world as well.
Full list of our linked and blocked instances can be found here: https://lemmy.world/instances
Good. Are you actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
Fucking christian fundamentalists fascists. They are a fucking cancer in every social media platform.
The worst thing it’s they are being funded by the conservative elite nations to speak fascist hate all over the internet.
It’s super effective! Humanity hurt itself in its confusion!
A tale as old as time
Shit, to what server should I move that doesn’t federate with nazis? Idc how they call themselves these days, you know what I mean with nazis
Also I see the name lemmygrad thrown around, what’s the story with them?
The questions aren’t specifically for OP
Also it looks like lemmy.world (your home instance) has elected to defederate from exploding heads. They’re becoming an interesting sociological study as I noticed a pattern early on of them having a lot of chud-y types, but it seems like the admin staff at lemmy.world is not interested in being an instance that tolerates that kind of behavior (which I realize now, looking at the code of conduct on mastodon.world, should have been expected eventually to become the norm). This gives me high hopes for Beehaw and lemmy.world being refederated with eachother sooner rather than later. Lemmy.world is probably still fighting an uphill battle with how rudimentary moderation tools are on this platform, but it warms my soul to see
Lemmygrad is a pro-authoritarian socialist instance
As far as instances that don’t federate with exploding heads, there’s sopuli.xyz, beehaw.org, slrpnk.net, and Lemmy.dbzer0.com
The first two are general purpose instances. Sopuli is kinda the most traditionally run instance. Its actively moderated, but its unlikely to defederate from an instance just because its big and moderating traffic from it is more than they can handle. Beehaw DOES defederate from instances that generate more traffic than they can manage. This is where my primary account is because the moderation style of “make the community a pleasant place to be regardless of the popularity of other instances’ popularity” is definitively my speed.
Slrpnk and dbzer0 are focused instances. Slrpnk is focused on ecological friendliness, sustainability, and making the physical world a more survivable space. They describe themselves as not trying to create a Utopian (impossibly idealistic) society, but rather a eutopian (acheivably idealistic) society. Dbzer0 is focused on digital anarchism. The slogan on their instance admin’s website alludes to the 90s slogan “You wouldn’t download a car” by effectively saying “yes I would, and I intend to.” I would say their mission is also eutopian in nature, but less focused on making our physical world more sustainable, but instead on the idea that the world would be more diverse and interesting if we put everything, and I mean EVERYTHING into the public domain. I’m not 100% sure I agree, but I definitively respect the ethos and the dedication to it. I guess what I’m saying is check it out, here them out, they’re not harmful or abusive. They’re filled with convictions, and I’d probably enjoy hanging out with them
Also I see the name lemmygrad thrown around, what’s the story with them?
Lemmygrad.ml is an instance for Marxist-Leninists and other Socialists who are broadly pro-AES (Actually Existing Socialism, i.e. the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, East Germany, etc.) and anti-West. Criticism of AES is fine; but the assumption is that you’re there because you think AES is better than Actually Existing Capitalism. If you’ve ever heard of podcasts like TrueAnon or The Deprogram (or even Chapo Traphouse, to some extent, though they’re more “ML-sympathetic” than “Outright Marxist-Leninists”), it’ll give you a general idea of what sort of politics they’re about.
Lemmygrad is where Leftist Redditors go when their favorite subs (/r/ChapoTrapHouse, /r/MoreTankieChapo, /r/FULLCOMMUNISM, /r/GenZedong) get banned or quarantined.
I’m not a big Lemmy-head, but I saw this post on lemmygrad so I assume that means your instance is federated with lemmygrad.
Let’s say I’m technically affiliated to the biggest ML party of the country where I come from, am I going to find marxists, or is it more of an American leftist thing?
You’re gonna have a preponderance of users from the imperial core (hard to avoid that on the internet), but a significant number of users are from the imperial periphery.
I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don’t permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won’t interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don’t like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.
I will take action against:
- Local users harassing someone
- Local users breaking local rules
- Local users repeatedly breaking remote rules
- Local communities that break local instance rules
- Remote users harassing local users
- Remote users repeatedly breaking local rules
- Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to break local rules
- Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to harass my users
The first rule on my instance is a catch-all “Be welcoming”, that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just “racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
As an admin I don’t have the time or desire to police:
- Local users interacting on remote communities, so long as they are following remote rules
- Remote communities
- Remote users interacting with remote users/communities
I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the “All” feed, at the very least for anyone who isn’t logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.
There’s no feasible way to stop people of a specific ideology from using an open source piece of software. You say blocking isn’t the answer but I’m not sure what more you can expect. Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector, what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?
The most realistic solution I can think of is letting instances or users subscribe to curated blacklists. Something akin to Adblock or email server spam blacklists.
Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector
As interesting a problem as this might be (my final year undergrad project was similar in nature), the nuance of written word can be significant and difficult to detect. Making a good product and then ensuring multiple communities would adopt it is not realistic in 2023.
What is realistic, however, is a zero tolerance policy against such individuals. What we should be doing is ostracizing them. You take away their platform, you take away their power. They can only do so much damage if they’re all gathered up in a single community with no ties or influence to the rest of the world.
what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?
Defederation, that’s one of the key concepts of the fediverse
Blocking an entire instance is still blocking.
It keeps them from participating by demoting them to the kids table, but you’re still in a glass house to some extent.
I think this is the right answer, but the structure is going to require some amount of frequent drama just like this every time. You can keep an open federation policy until proven malicious, or you can verify partners, but I don’t see the way around discussions.
They are going to cause issues sooner rather than later in communities that don’t defederate from them. It’s quite literally just a given. I’m shocked some of those instances haven’t defederated from them already.
A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me
I think the whole attitude of “oh just block the community and ignore it” really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren’t cut off preemptively. You aren’t deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.
The question I always find myself asking is, why is it that people only expect the targets of abuse to do the filtering of that abuse, and why, other than you yourself would like to enact abuse, would you want to leave people engaging in abusive behavior in position to continue being abusive? Beehaw has lamented there not being more flexible moderation tools allowing us to perform more powerful moderation actions, enabling the filtration of abuse on otherwise good servers, but until those tools exist, what good reason is there to ignore and enable abuse?
It’s this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷♂️.
Americans who understand the first amendment will tell you that freedom of association is inseparable from freedom of expression. The government (plus its agents) is the only entity constrained by the First Amendment. Everyone else benefits from it, including certain instance owners who don’t want to associate with certain others.
Yep. And (obviously) America is going to one day be forced to come to that same understanding that Germany was painfully forced to. I’m just hopeful it doesn’t take a genocide or some sort of dictatorship for a similar reckoning to occur. Germany might not be perfect, but there are many things American society could learn from that exist within modern day German culture especially in regards to cultural reconciliation with historical wrongs. It’s hard to really describe how happy it makes me feel that as a Jewish person I can say I would feel very safe and welcome living in and visiting most places in Germany, but it also makes me sad to an immense degree that I can truthfully say I’d probably feel safer most places there than in the most places in the states right now… :(
If censorship is the answer, why have years of censorship failed to eradicate undesirable ideologies?
The same way that depends is the answer, yet Donald Trump is still incontinent.
I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those “free speech absolutist” types. It’s a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.
That’s why I moved there from lemmy.world. I’d rather not have somebody else tell me what to think or see.
You cannot have a space which is welcoming to nazis which is also welcoming to minorities.
Nobody is telling you what to “think or see” when an instance gets deferderated. You’re welcome to think whatever you like, and to go seek it out. You’re just not welcome to bring it into some spaces.
Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now 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
I’m building that list and no, it wasn’t intentional. It being first is completely accidental. As you can see, “general health” communities are at the top, and well the one from xheads is the most general purpose (another one is on Midwest US and the other is Mander so more scientific).
I didn’t know or even care where the communities come from. In the post I clearly state I don’t vouch for any of them, and people can let me know if they think some don’t belong.
I called for help or advice on multiple occasions, guess how many people offered any? Zero.
Honestly until this post I didn’t even know there’s any controversy with that instance. I never visited it, it’s just been under my radar. I know some instances don’t like other instances and it just becomes noise to me, honestly.
I don’t know what would you have me do here? Remove the link? What other links should I remove because some instances have some oddball users? Should I remove Lemmygrad links too?
I’m not claiming to be the Red Cross or anything, but I was hoping to have a neutral list that’s as complete as possible.
This may seem like a problem specific to this list of mine, but see how easy to suddenly be indirectly accused of supporting nazis or something. Let’s not be so hasty alright?
Btw, I was just about to try to figure out how or if to include lgbtq+ matters in the health community, and wanted to go ask some actual lgbtq+ people because I want their input rather than just guess myself. Now I’m wondering if I’d also be accused of being a provocateur or something else for trying to be open to everyone.
Removed by mod
I know. My point was that everyone has some political disagreement with someone else, and I can’t care about those feuds or I’d have no list.
Removed by mod
The only instance I’d ever recommend my friends to join is beehaw.org and that’s why I love it. Otherwise it’s the wild Wild West.
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They’re playing the traditional Alt-Right playbook, and they’re playing a bunch of instance admins like fiddles. I’ve noticed a consistent pattern of abusive trolls being from that instance. My secondary account is on sh.itjust.works, and I’m looking for another instance to be my secondary instance that I use to look at lemmy.world content I can’t see from this, my primary account. Thus far, there aren’t any instances I can find that have a federation / defederation list that matches my ideal list, so for now, I have my happy account and my “it stresses me out” account.
It seems like there are two camps here in the threadiverse. People who are excited to find an instance admin who moderates the way they like, and people who think an instance admin is only responsible for uptimes and that this entire experiment should be fully unmoderated
Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it’s the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that’d be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you’re not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.
If you are interested in doing so I’d be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.
Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don’t defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.
Being outside of the US, I wasn’t aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it’s easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.
If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don’t see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.
I’m sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven’t already.
Oh no! Anyway. Welcome to the internet. Not everyone is going to be nice.
No, but why should they be tolerated?
As a lemmy.one user I will move to somewhere else after bringing this up. Any recommended places to move to?
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So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?
actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts
Is there much of a difference nowadays?
That comment sounds a little bigoted.
Not to me. It sounds quite sane.
A little of column A, a little of Columbine
It is fascinating to watch a lot of people who got purged from social media for being too leftist and flocked to a defederated forum created by free speech enjoyers go on to immediately start complaining about the lack of censorship and damning the concept of free speech having learned nothing in the process.
The most popular suggestion here seems to be isolating yourselves from any part of the Fediverse which doesn’t accept your demands. Now, if we could just get the Nazis to be stupid enough to follow in your footsteps and curtail their own methods of ideological propagation, this place might actually start to be kind of chill.
Instead they keep fucking talking to people and trying to convince them of stuff, which has proven vastly more efficient in achieving their goals. I am severely disappointed in all of you for making Nazis look intelligent by comparison.
I welcome your down votes, as disapproval from you is a mark that my brain is not grossly malfunctioning.
Oh please, could you be any more transparent in your attempts to gaslight the community? It is clear that you affiliate with bigoted and alt-right mindsets.
You are so cliche that your argument boils down to “Thinx about ya freedum of speks” as the reason behind your ignorant point of view.
Furthermore you are so one dimensional that you then play on the “you are all leftists” cliche. And then double down on the strawman argument of “downvoting me proves me right”.
0/10 Pathetic.
100%. Work together on stability, resilience and privacy while ignoring trolls? Hell no! Let’s focus on creating silos and sniffing our own farts first!
Telling the racists to get out is sniffing our own farts? Yeeeee, ok…
enjoy your echo chamber
edit: i just went and looked over there, you guys are lying, they aren’t nazis.
their admin says clearly that “racism, bigotry, sexism is allowed" there.
