Didn’t want to further derail the exploding heads vote thread, so:
What are the criteria that should be applied when determining whether to defederate from an instance? And should there be a specific process to be followed, and what level of communication if any with the instance admins?
For context it may be useful to look at the history of the Fediblock tag in Mastodon, to see what sorts of stuff folks are dealing with historically in terms of both obvious and unremarkable bad actors (e.g., spam) and conflict over acceptability of types of speech and moderation standards.
(Not saying that folks need to embrace similar standards or practices, but it’s useful to know what’s been going on all this time, especially for folks who are new to the fediverse.)
For example:
- Presence of posts that violate this instance’s “no bigotry” rule (Does it matter how prolific this type of content is on the target instance?)
- Instance rules that conflict with this instance’s rules directly - if this instance blocks hate speech and the other instance explicitly allows it, for example.
- Admin non-response or unsatisfactory response to reported posts which violate community rules
- Not sure if there’s a way in lemmy to track incoming/outgoing reports, but it would be useful for the community to have some idea here. NOT saying to expose the content of all reports, just an idea of volume.
- High volume of bad faith reports from the target instance on users here (e.g., if someone talks about racism here and a hostile instance reports it for “white genocide” or some other bs). This may seem obscure, but it’s a real issue on Mastodon.
- Edited to add: Hosting communities whose stated purpose is to share content bigoted content
- Coordinating trolling, harassment, etc.
For reference, local rules:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
No Ads / Spamming.
No pornography.
it looks like some people are realy itching to get instances defederated from sh.itjust.works. It’s all they talk about.
People you don't like exist.
They probably don't like you either.
Life goes on and the world at large doesn't care.
Please stop making up problems, we will run into real ones soon enough. Instead, how about we stop worrying about “Nazis” or “Commys” or whatever over at other instances and try to enjoy watching this instance grow for a change.
edit: some formatting.
Defederation is a normal part of life in the fediverse, and this instance already defederates from the start. Healthy fediverse instances have clear standards for what instances they do and don’t federate with.
Normally those are defined by admin; in this case admin has now stated a desire for the community to make rules decisions. So, reasonable and normal to discuss. And reasonable and normal for folks to have disagreements about.
This instance is already paying the price for lax moderation in having been defederated by beehaw, which regardless of how much you or I personally care about the content on beehaw does notably impact the user experience for many folks. And the more this site “stops worrying about nazis” the more that will happen. (And the more users will get fed fed up and migrate to instances with clearer moderation practices.)
Not referring to you or anyone in particular, but it feels like a lot of the folks in this conversation had never heard of defederation before a couple weeks ago and are acting like it and the fediverse generally are a brand new idea. Defederation for Lemmy in many ways has higher stakes than it does for Mastodon due to being structured around communities and not just individual user – but that’s all the more reason to have clear standards for it.
I suspect there is no objectively right way to single out instances for exclusion to maintain a healthy community. There are clearly cases where it is necessary. An instance set up plainly as a place to automated spam needs to go. But we will see many edge cases as well, and these edge cases can end up being community defining for better or worse.
I might suggest, in addition to the existence of a well defined set of rules, putting de-federation from another instance, if there are objections, to a vote in the Agora, with a respectable supermajority (maybe 2/3) being needed to realize the de-federation. Violation of the rules justifies putting the instance on trial for being a crappy federation partner. But if no consensus can be found to that effect then, well, that’s how it goes.
High volume of bad faith reports from the target instance on users here (e.g., if someone talks about racism here and a hostile instance reports it for “white genocide” or some other bs). This may seem obscure, but it’s a real issue on Mastodon.
There is no way we should defederate an instance because of this. Particularly, as we know reports will grow as the number of users does over time anyway.
Breaking the users’ experience because your tooling is insufficient is a bad look.
Throwing up your hands and saying “oh well, you’re gonna have to personally deal with all the trolls because we don’t want to hurt their feelings to keep our rules in place” isn’t better.
When the tools are created, they can refederate and use the tools as needed.
Bad faith reports don’t imply actual trolls for users to personally deal with.
Performing moderation actions on good faith reports from users is desirable.
Disconnecting your own users from content they find useful because of the volume of reports that they can’t see or prevent, just because you can’t be bothered to do the moderation work is undesirable.
Who decides that the majority are bad faith reports?
Users that want access to that content can, as mentioned a hundred times every time defederating comes up, go migrate or make a second account.
The fact is that there are not a lot of tools for mods right now so it’s either: A) keep federated and let each individual user block trolls, Or B) defederating until such mod tools are available, which is something that is apparently being worked on. Considering many posters shit on beehaw for defederating when their community is predominantly of a group that receives intense trolling and has a notably higher suicide rate than baseline, and that online harassment is a contributing factor to that level, I don’t understand why there is such a pushback until such a time as said tools are available in order to protect the larger community.
But I guess some people who do not have to bear that weight don’t appreciate it, and a full throated defenders of free speech and “just asking questions” despite how that has worked out historically as enabling trolls at all levels.
In addition, these instances are growing fast and it will be difficult for mods to keep up with their duties even with a full suite of tools. Defederating is just a way to cool things off while assessing the damage vs potential and putting the most vulnerable first over users who don’t personally care that they see said content.
Breaking the users’ experience because your tooling is insufficient is a bad look.
The Beehaw method
I think your examples fit pretty well!
I don’t think defederating should be used as a ‘mega downvote’ button.
I definitely think de federation should be on the table if an instance has a significant portion of their users breaking our site rules, or trolling/spamming our communities. We don’t want to have our communities overrun with people who want to promote a negative atmosphere because the admins of another instance are unwilling/unable to moderate their users effectively, as it will just put undue burden on our admins and community moderators.
I’d say before de federating we should definitely try to engage with the offending instance’s admins to see if they’re acting in good faith, and if they have a plan for mitigating the issues.
Personally I don’t think we should federate with instances that make themselves safe-havens for people who post bigoted/conspiratorial content and dog-whistling, as having that kind of content on our /all feed will drive away users from groups the content is targeting, making the community worse overall.
I’d say before de federating we should definitely try to engage with the offending instance’s admins to see if they’re acting in good faith, and if they have a plan for mitigating the issues.
The way I look at it is that there are some things that are absolutely unacceptable. Violence, CSAM, Doxing, harassment campaigns, illegal activities, etc. These are a red line for de-federation.
Then we have our instance rules. They circumscribes the behavior that we allow and don’t allow in communities on this instance. Let’s say this is the green line.
There is a huge amount of grey area between the red line and the green line. I think that this grey area is best handled by individual users’ ability to block and avoid communities and users that they don’t care to see.
Federating with an instance isn’t an approval of their users or communities, it is simply a line of communication. Cutting that line should be avoided if at all possible. Otherwise we don’t have a social media network, we have a few islands of instances and we’re back to being no better off than the current social media where you need to create 50 different accounts to access each island of content.
We don’t want to have our communities overrun with people who want to promote a negative atmosphere because the admins of another instance are unwilling/unable to moderate their users effectively, as it will just put undue burden on our admins and community moderators.
You’re absolutely right. If an instance’s users are coordinating to harass or brigade our communities, then the admin staff should work with the other instance owner to resolve the problem. De-federation would be a last resort if it isn’t possible to reach a resolution. That scenario fits into the ‘harassment campaigns’ category.
