Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you’re not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I’ve linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn’t the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
Defederate them. Tolerance has limits and we have the right and, in my opinion, obligation to not tolerate the intolerant. In the words of the crustpunk bartender, “you have to nip it in the bud immediately.”
Here’s the story taken from a series of tweets.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
That’s litterally what he tried to do here. This is the admin trying to seem “decent” and saying that he is being “harassed” by people who want to defederate just because he is “right wing”. Saying that exploding-heads.com only has 2 communities where “actual free speech” is allowed. But the problem is a lot deeper than that.
There’s a few steps between right wingers, racists and nazis but he is giving a platform to the absolute worst and I call him out on that. And I will continue to do so.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/571413
And if you haven’t read it, OP posted the Lemmy World admin response to the defederation with some more examples of what they are like.
Nah that was just me replying to deleted messages by him. He might be a racist, intolerant shithead but at least he’s not showing his dick randomly.
The problem with the Nazi Bar analogy in relation to de-federation is that we’re not running their bar. They’re running their own bar and we’re just another bar on the same planet. Nothing we can do will cause their bar to shut down, nothing we can do will cause users to not be able to enter their bar.
The de-federation argument is more akin to asking to build a wall outside so that we can’t see the nazi bar from here. They’ll still be there, the wall doesn’t change anything. Any users with accounts here can also create accounts there.
You’re not required to go to the Nazi bar this idea that we can de-federate our way to a solution doesn’t make any sense. Is the endgame to have everyone build a wall around the Nazis so that they can’t pollute the rest of us with their unclean ideas? To place them in some sort of ideological ghetto because we deem them unfit to interact with society?
Trapping people in echo chambers and denying them the opportunity to hear any dissenting opinions is how you create more extremism, not less.
I think it’s more akin to deciding to tear down the flyers for their bar events posted in our bar bathroom.
Also you’re kind of undermining your own argument by saying we’re trapping people in echo chambers while simultaneously claiming nothing we do will prevent users from going to their bar.
“hey lets ban those nazis from the nazi bar from coming into our non-nazi bar” easy
Defederation doesn’t keep them from making innocent-looking accounts elsewhere or here. It just makes each other’s content a little less accessible, and it’s mainly there for keeping the server from replicating it.
If the people from the nazi instance wants to join other instances, there’s nothing preventing them from that. This isn’t oppression, this is just content moderation, people acting like it’s some sort of crime against the idea of free speech are blowing it way out of proportion.
To place them in some sort of ideological ghetto because we deem them unfit to interact with society?
Also, using ghettos as a metaphor when talking about nazis just seems intentionally distasteful. Being pro-nazi and anti-nazi aren’t equivalent positions, one is defending discrimination and genocide and the other is saying that discrimination and genocide are bad things.
People use nazi only because it’s an easy label to hate and doesn’t require any further thought.
Say that bartender said “communist” instead of nazi or some other ideology they don’t agree with.
Also the bartender assumed the guy was a nazi. I used to work security in a very progressive US town and you would be surprised how many people go “some one just said there’s is a nazi in my store get them out of here” I would walk over to find it’s actually an antifa shirt with a swatica that is crossed out. the customer never took the time to actually read the guy’s shirt and decided they were going to sleep better tonight because they told on them.
Being an idiot with a knee jerk reaction to someone that is different from you isn’t an antidote to live by. Some people quick to judge would even call it nazi like behavior.
I don’t use Nazi lightly. I only use it because self proclaimed Nazis support the extremist right ideologies. They’re full of hate, and they’re anti-education, and want to make it so that the queer community goes back in the closet. This isn’t about some knee jerk reaction to people I disagree with. If the people on the right actually practiced the principles they so loudly preach like liberty and freedom for all, then yes, I’d be open to having legitimate discussions and debate with them. But they don’t. They foamed at the mouth when asked to do the bare minimum and wear a mask to help protect their more vulnerable countrymen during a pandemic. But apparently that was too much. In their minds, that was fascism. However, they can wave their Nazi flags at protests while wearing masks. But but but I thought they couldn’t breathe with them on. 😭 They only pretend to stand for freedom and family values and caring about children. They target gays, minorities, trans people, and obstruct any efforts to provide services that would actually help children and families. One example is all the Republican state legislatures wanting to end free and reduced school lunches. I’m sick and tired of decent people kowtowing to these extremists and I’m done.
I don’t use nazi lightly.
Seems your whole argument mixed Republican and Nazi ideology into one when they are separate things.
Yes someone one that thinks minority, and Jews should be scrubbed of this earth is a bad person but there are other aspects you are throwing into the mix. For example
They foamed at the mouth when asked to do the bare minimum and wear a mask to help protect their more vulnerable countrymen during a pandemic
This seems to leave the definition of a Nazi and fall more under people that took issue with mask. I wouldn’t imagine a Nazi to say “countymen”. If a Nazi lived in an all white town would they wear a mask because they valued the lives of a white person more? Again it’s seems like there’s a bit of a classification problem to me.
Are all people that don’t were mask Nazis?
Are all Republicans Nazis?
Is any right wing belief just a dog whistle for white supremacy?
Are corporations run by neoconservatives all just Nazis who tow a progressive narrative to hide there actions but they should be banned as well?
For me personally, I don’t care about the label. Is it nazist? Is it not? Don’t care.
What matters is that attacks against discriminated minorities on that instance, including celebration of violence, are completely normalized and I don’t want to associate with or give a platform to those that propagate this.
I continue to vote for defederation.
Having looked at the instance in question myself and participated in the various conversations regarding defederation for them, I can see no valuable reason to keep federation at this point.
As late as yesterday I came across (and blocked) in my feed an account with a name from exploding-heads of ihate(trans_slur) that made its anti-trans purpose on their server clear. I would be glad to privately provide the screenshot of the account in question on request as I do not want to boost visibility or post hateful content myself.
There will always be ideas I personally do not agree with, that’s fine. But it seems that this conversation around this one single instance has caused much trolling, many bad faith arguments, and has been at general odds at what I perceive the server is trying to accomplish.
The new information regarding botswarming is something I was not aware of until this post. I was monitoring the general posts regarding that type of content and supporting removal of bot instances, and that does add another layer to why defederation should be considered for this instance.
I’m fairly sure I saw the user you’re talking about and I actually blocked them pretty quickly too. Diversity of opinion is one thing, but bad-faith trolling is another. Pretty clear what their intentions are.
Most likely.
I would like to think an account like that would violate our server rules and face a ban.
But the content is being pushed in my feeds, they are making posts (from what I can see) to our community (including a recent one about options for not defederating, iirc), and we have obvious examples in this thread of bad faith behavior.
I’ve clocked at least one new sh.itjust.works account with only only activity in this post, which makes it suspect to me.
This thread is going much like the others the longer it goes on.
For me this is an easy aye. We already defederate from Lemmygrad for tankyism. I don’t see an issue with that, as that often comes with denying genocide and generally being apologetic of leaders of the past who have legislated against and killed minorities.
I don’t see how a right-wing instance obsessed with Donald “very fine people on both sides” trump is any better. It simply stands to reason that if Lemmygrad is to remain defederated (and I don’t see why not) then so should EH.
I vote defederate. This isn’t a question of putting up with a little fascist rhetoric on an otherwise acceptable instance. Exploding heads is exclusively fascist rhetoric, bad faith users, and spam bots.
We have nothing to gain from listening to them.
