Hello World,

Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.

Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.

At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.

As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one’s stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.

Thank you,

The Lemmy.World Team

  • takeda@szmer.info
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    1 year ago

    Lemmmygrad supposedly is for people who support communism, but when talking to them, they really are supporting totalitarian countries which have nothing to do with communism.

      • WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        They do it to so many smaller forums too. I saw an old board I used to frequent for game faqs and questions turned into one, under the guise of being mostly transgender positive.

        It’s crazy to watch one user create a wannabe cult, user shame everyone and constantly move goalposts with straw men bs. Meanwhile, they had moderators discussing in Discord chats who to drive insane next and pick on. Not to mention using a serious issue as means to divide people that frequent the site by having over 30+ accounts to pad the numbers that agree with their views in topics.

        It’s scary how far they go these days, especially considering the site was relatively respected around Y2K era, and now it’s full of republicans pretending to be trans and liberal for a psychotic gimmick.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          under the guise of being mostly transgender positive.

          The “trans rights to tankie” pipeline is just as weird as the “hippie to fascist” pipeline. I saw a lot of it on Blahaj.

    • buzziebee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah glad to see those fucks go. There’s been an awful lot of bad takes filling up content sections on certain topics, every time I checked who had posted it it was almost always a lemmygrad user.

      • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I need to start checking the instance when someone posts something stinky.

        I’d honestly noticed it a lot over the last few weeks and thought oh well, eternal September.

        There was a nice little period there where’s there wasn’t much discussion around and those actually poking their heads out were really kind of wholesome. Now I see so many people still coming across in that friendly, inclusive way and I realise it’s just a vocal minority ruining it.

        Let’s hold each other to a higher standard.

        One love.

        • DarthBueller@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          One knock-on effect for me is that encountering those folks on here made me want to triple check my tone and emotionality when I post or comment. I absolutely want this to be a better place than reddit, and I constantly find myself going back through my comments, editing to add corrections, or outright deleting them if I realize in hindsight I was being a cranky asshole. I’ve got to admit, I’ve even appreciated the notification-free moderation here - if I got into a fight with someone and our lack of civility broke the rules, I’m happy when a mod wipes out both of our offending comments. Nine times out of ten it takes out the comment that caused me to fight in the first place. And as heated as I can get, after going on an online tear, afterwards I usually feel terrible for being driven by anger. And angry posts almost never do anything except stroke my ego.

          • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yea, see you sound like a good egg.

            Thanks for posting. I’m going to start measuring how emotional I get too. The good of the community is more important than a momentary annoyance. Thanks for describing a higher standard let’s all encourage each other to aspire to it.

            One love.

            • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              My preference is a good quality dark chocolate, but I don’t turn my nose up at pretty much any chocolate. Hell, I’ll dig into one of those waxy chocolate Easter bunnies if that’s what I’ve got.

              Most recent (a couple hours ago) was a very chocolate brownie from a pan I made last night.

      • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Their responses and comments have legitimately prevented me from coming here. Maybe I’ll actually visit and comment again with them defederated, I was so sick of their bullshit and posts clogging my feed.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I honestly don’t get the big deal about defederation.

      Free speech doesn’t really seem achievable on social media because bad actors will always manipulate votes to ensure that some opinions are promoted more than others.

      For example, the opinions of lemmygrad should probably consume ~1% of the total informed opinion “pie chart” if you will. They can be adequately represented by some idiot posting their opinion in a thread once in a while - yet here we are. Their bizarre takes are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

      Surely there’s a better way to ensure that all opinions on a given matter can be considered rather than just saying we must allow our streets to be overrun with zombies lest we forget they exist.

  • Moghul@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thank fucking god. It’s exhausting being around people for whom any meme, any post, any comment, has to spin into how good communism is, how bad the libs are, how good China is, and how bad The West TM is. It is exhausting.

  • kescusay@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thank goodness.

    I’m reminded of a story I read a while back - not sure where - about how if you let a Nazi into your bar, you eventually end up running a Nazi bar. I think the same applies to online forums. You let Nazis overrun a forum, everyone else leaves, and eventually you might as well just be running Stormfront.

  • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think this is for the best, there are some seriously disturbed people posting on Lemmygrad. I saw comments cheering on and celebrating the Hamas attack and talking about how they hoped the people who were kidnapped get tortured. Whatever your politics, that is super fucked up and not “legitimate discourse”.

  • Grayox@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Lost all respect for lemmygrad when they deleted a comment i made about voting for the lesser of 2 evils being the correct course of action to advance the interests of the Prolitariat in the United States. They care more about larping as revolutionaries than enacting change that actually helps the Working Class.

  • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Good Job! You make my experience of Lemmy continuously better! You cleaned that CSAM up with the speed of light (I’ve never even noticed it), you managed the Piracy Community Troubles very well and now you made an well thought through decision about Lemmygrad. Well done Mods! And thank you all very much!

  • gcheliotis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.

    There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.

    • lwadmin@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      Most of their communities were blocked since months, that’s why you didn’t see much of them.

      • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I’m just surprised overall because most other major instances defederated from them weeks or months ago, along with Hexbear and/or Exploding Heads. .ca has been defederated with those probably for at least two months now.

        • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The administration of this Instance has a moderate lean towards not defederating in general, they have to be pushed in general. I would describe LW as a free speech leaning Instance, within the Lemmy environment.

          Naturally the topic is very divisive overall and tends to draw heated arguments no matter what position is taken. Free speech absolutists find it downright draconian. I imagine being on Beehaw for longer than five minutes might reduce them to ash, I’m not sure.

          • jarfil@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            LW has some communities which are quite non-freespeech, with rules like “we can remove and ban anything against the rules or not” (see !world), and some which use their rules arbitrarily as excuses for removing content that doesn’t match their ideology (see !politicalmemes).

          • LWJanniesRCucks@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The administration of this Instance has a moderate lean towards not defederating in general, they have to be pushed in general. I would describe LW as a free speech leaning Instance, within the Lemmy environment.

            lol not even close, lw is one of the most defederation trigger-happy instances out there, with only dbzer0, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and a few others having more. You just don’t see lw announcing them. Even lemmy.ml has less defederations than lw.

            All you need to do to get banned from lw is to piss of an admin enough over the mildest shit to be a ban-on-sight.

    • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The phrasing of “an increase in hate speech and calls to violence” suggests that there is a tolerable level of those.

      • lwadmin@lemmy.worldOPM
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        1 year ago

        A tolerable level we can handle by moderation. And when even the admins join in it becomes clear there is a big incompatibility and cultural difference.

        But you probably meant something else, right?

      • gazby@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not it doesn’t, it suggests there’s a finite amount of volunteer moderator time. Don’t be a troll.

      • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’m pro voilence against people who block grocery store entrances because they figured that was the best place to chat with someone they ran into… so yes.

      • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, there is: using your critical thinking skills, what number comes before 1?

        long pause

        That’s right! Zero! Good job! And what do we call it when 0 becomes 1?

        long pause

        And increase, yes! applause

        Tune in next week with Dora the Internet Explorer! Bye for now!

      • Navy@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        I took it to mean “it has increased to the point we can’t deal with it all”

      • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well there are going to be assholes everywhere but I guess if that instance’s admins/mods aren’t doing their jobs of moderating their users then it makes sense to defederate so the burden doesn’t fall on all other instance’s mods.

        The world isn’t black and white like your comment is suggesting.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          if that instance’s admins/mods aren’t doing their jobs of moderating their users then it makes sense to defederate

          I’m pretty sure the problem with Lemmygrad wasn’t that the admins there “[weren’t] doing their jobs”, but rather that they were doing their jobs and their jobs were to promote and encourage the hateful rhetoric instead of stopping it.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m wondering if you’re trolling or just ignorant. I’ll do you the respect of assuming ignorance.

        There will always be hate speech in any forum. Period. This cannot be stopped short of closing the forum down entirely. If, however, the hate speech is low volume, it can be dealt with individually with post deletion, user bans, community deletions, etc. Standard “tactical” moderation techniques.

        But…

        Shitholes like lemmygrad.ml release a veritable flood of hate speech, as do their right-wing “Freeze Peach!” equivalents. Individual, tactical moderation does not scale to that level without a whole lot more money than a hobbyist-run instance can bring to bear. Thus if hate speech and calls for violence reach the point where tactical moderation can no longer keep up, you start with the strategic moderation. In older-style forums that might be an IP ban. In the Fediverse it’s defederation.

        See how that works?

        Now please, prove to me you’re not trolling and simply didn’t understand how things work.

  • TheLurker@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Lemmygrad is a cesspool of pseudo intellectual unemployed neckbeards complaining about how oppressed they are under the yoke of capitalism, from their mother’s basement in Wisconsin.

    Good riddance to it.