(not sure if this is the right community, sorry)
Hi, someone posted this on another server. I’d like to request we defederate with rammy.site and exploding-heads.com as well. I scrolled through some of their posts and comments and it’s full of ridiculous anti-left propaganda, for example a post where some liberal Florida family fleeing the state when some child protection laws got passed, implying liberals abuse children and won’t live in a state that doesn’t allow them to. Just take a look for yourself.
" Admins of Lemmy.ml please consider defederating from rammy.site it has been taken over by right wing malicious actors from exploding-heads.com and the admin is nowhere to be found.
It is imperative that you take action as soon as possible the users on rammy are using the site to spread their messages to a further audience, we must nip this in the bud. If you don’t believe me check the instance for yourself, you’ll see it dominated with bigoted right wing posts and spam communities."
Edit: So many commenters think this is about political opinions or disagreement. It’s not. If I said “Mixing bleach and ammonia is good for you” I bet some of you would call that a political disagreement.
I’m confused… We’re talking about trying to make two fediverses here… That’s kinda weird. I hear your “don’t mix bleach with ammonia”… But if I see someone say that on Lemmy… Am I going to do it? How does it actually hurt me? I understand it’s hateful and offensive, but this is a free and open internet, and that is one big reason I choose Lemmy/Mastodon over twitter/reddit. It’s like the library… Have you ever seen something at the library you don’t like. An opposing viewpoint? Do we defund the library and close it because there’s a “gay comic book” in it? That happened in my area, very stupid. I come here for all my ideas, and expect to be offended by some. It’s the internet. Plan to be offended… By 9am. When you wake up at 8:55a. And it takes you 4 minutes to pick up your phone.
But then again I could be a crazy conservative or liberal or something… Don’t trust me.
Now where where the memes again.
Lemmy was designed for both federation and defederation. It doesn’t make sense to blindly federate with every instance in existence, if for no other reason than some of them will be full of spambots and/or illegal content.
Illegal and spambots are one thing… I just don’t want thought police on sdf. If your reason for defederation is “I don’t like them, we should make them go away.” Then maybe we are no better then the people who say those things about us.
I think that users should be able to block instances, but being able to block communities may be good enough, at least at this stage in Lemmy’s development.
Another issue with extremists is they like to orchestrate coordinated harassment campaigns against people they don’t like. If that kind of thing starts to happen (which seems likely), that would be a good reason for defederation.
Everybody has the right to freedom of association. Nobody’s making a website “go away”. You’d still be free to go there and read their stuff on your own. I do think defederation should be a last resort, though.
I’m not saying there’s no place for defederation. I’m just saying the reasons given seem… Idea driven. Then again my experience with Lemmy has been pretty good so far. The post I saw was a “I don’t like these people and that group over there is thinking about blocking them, let’s join in”. People keep telling me it’s not about taste… Maybe I need to go look for myself. I’m just thinking about a conversation I had on mastodon where someone showed me a (hilarious) screenshot of Facebook telling them that they used hate speech… And it was just talking about a car. I guess… If they “stay in there lane” and leave our instances communitys groups alone, what is the harm in allowing two servers to speak. If on the other hand, they make threats, or mucking up the system (like is the concern with meta on mastodon) then perhaps defederating is the issue. MY PERSONAL CONCERN: Lemmy takes off, mom/grandma makes an account, and starts following content only mom or grandma would like. And boom… I’m horribly confused at the dinner table about those murder parties she’s planning to go to… And I’m going “what the hell? what are you talking about.” Let’s be honest, I want the firehose… I need to keep an eye on those crazies… All of them. Plus… I like to be offended. Keeps me humble to know people don’t like me.
There are two different problems
The exploding-heads website is the one that is “… Idea driven” (nicely said by you). Just as someone else mentioned, somebody might find my ideas distasteful and want to defederate with my instance just because my opinion doesn’t agree with theirs, I wouldn’t want to be treated that way, and that consideration should probably go both ways no matter whether I like their opinion or sense of humor/irony (or not). As a user, I have felt no impact about this “problem” but Federation or not is more of an administrator question and I am not an administrator.
The rammy.site website Is a website that has lost its administrator somewhere, so nobody is minding the store. That is concerning because it becomes an attractive nuisance to the network itself. Should there be concerning posts or other forms of malicious traffic, there is no one to raise those concerns to. As users, this doesn’t bother us very much, but this may be something for the administrators that federate with it to consider.
And as an administrator (or user), it makes sense to address the root of the problem. Many of the malicious actors on rammy appear to have ties to EH. Maintaining federation with the former is problematic. Maintaining with the latter is implicit approval of behavior harmful to the network.
This is my daily reminder that there are many people on the internet who don’t understand history. And also seemingly a lack of understanding of the word federation.
All this can be solved easily if you just go somewhere else.
Additional thought… If the people in the defederate camp just go and post things they don’t like… Maybe they defederate with us… Then we don’t stoop, and you get your wish? (I assume it goes both ways) 😜
History doesn’t show it going that way. The bad actors often take an approach similar to EEE, seeking out potential vulnerable populations of misfits to exploit. Rammy has been effectively taken over by EH users due to absent admins and maintaining federation just helps the bad actors continue to find victims.
Let’s take a look at some (US) historical examples:
How about current events? Commercial and non-commercial entities alike are pulling away from the microblogging platform formerly-known as Twitter due to unchecked vitriol, hate, and disinformation.
Well… I visited there site… That’s… Ummm… Well… Maybe there servers can cool down by going to hell? That’s… That’s not good man. I may even have seen some sort of terrorist activity on the home page. I’m not saying I would be happy about saying this… But maybe we should defederate. Eats Humble Pie
Thank you for taking the time to look at the evidence and reevaluate. I really don’t like it myself and it’s exhausting but, due to the existence of bad actors, we have to be vigilant in order to protect our free and open venues from being subverted or complicit with their behavior.
Someone on the internet was wrong. Today it was me.