It has blatant homophobia, transphobia, racism, vaccine anti-science misinformation, etc. What is mander stand on this?
I prefer to deal with content in a case-by-case basis, and de-federation from an instance would be the very last-resort strategy. I want users to have the freedom to choose what they interact with. Today it’s exploding-heads, soon it will be Meta, then some might want to defederate from lemmygrad, and after that something else.
My position is to resist de-federation. To defederate I would need to have seen that the users asking for defederation have made an effort not to engage with the content by blocking communities and reporting offending users/content who post to our communities, and the scale of the problem must be so significant that I can no longer deal with it manually. As of today, I have received zero reports of exploding-heads.
I have looked at the communities, and I can see that we have fetched content from the following communities:
!digitslfreedom@exploding-heads.com
!thedonald@exploding-heads.com
!unitedkingdom@exploding-heads.com
It is only five communities, and my suggestion is to block them if you find their content offensive. I hope that users will soon be able to block instances themselves.
If this is a deal-breaker, defederating with problematic instances is a very common position in the fediverse, and it will be easy to find an instance that blocks them.
It may not be wise to wait and watch with this one. Part of the reason people are leaving Reddit like myself is we do not want to deal with this anymore. These do not argue in good faith. They will eventually brigade us with the next controversy. I suggest asking your users and listening on this one. This is not a safe place unless defended, that sometimes means being proactive. Consider this my report as well.
It may not be wise to wait and watch with this one.
Oh, it is probably not wise if it is my idea.
I am sorry that we are not aligned in this - especially considering that you are literally the most active user here at the moment!
Part of the reason people are leaving Reddit like myself is we do not want to deal with this anymore.
Maybe it is in part our difference in experiences that give us different opinions. I am aware that people are mean online, but I have never been the target of an attack, nor have I experienced the meanness of the internet like others have. So I am definitely not be the best to administrate a vulnerable community.
I left Reddit and other social media a while ago but for different reasons. I left because I do not think that centralized parties should have the authority of dictating how we communicate with each other, to establish what is true and what what isn’t, they shouldn’t be able to take advantage of our reliance on technology to apply social punishment, and I do not like that they hold our private information. I tell you this because it may provide some insight into why our vision and priorities are not aligned - not because I want to argue this.
But all of these are important. The way I see it: I want to try out an experiment in which I am able to have a reasonably safe space without needing to cut off connections. And yes, maybe this is a naive view that assumes too good of the people, but I want to try.
They will eventually brigade us with the next controversy. I suggest asking your users and listening on this one.
But why is there no hope of stopping this? I feel like these issues can happen even within the instance, without need for federation, and that they can be dealt with in a few minutes. This is a very small instance, I’ve never dealt with something like this. I don’t know that we ever will… To me these sound like hypothetical problems that may not be so hard to solve when it comes to it, and so I am not very deterred by those possibilities. I genuinely think that… we can handle this.
This is not a safe place unless defended, that sometimes means being proactive.
It is a balance, but it is clear to me now that for many people that balance lies strongly along the ‘ensuring a safe-space’ axis, and that people are willing to have an authority to sanitize the space if that means minimizing the risk. I am sorry if my choice of waiting until the waves hits the shore makes you feel unsafe here… While I am willing to change, it would take time. Towards the end of another comment[1] I extended an invitation to any user who would like to set up an science-based instance with more stringent federation moderation. I know you are good with technology, and I can already see that you would be a better community admin than I can, so if you would like to take on that offer I would be more than happy!
Once extremists fixate on a target they do not stop. I’ve watched it be done to others. I’ve had to ban people across multiple subreddits because they go to scream anywhere they can and then into my inbox on multiple accounts. It’s not good faith behavior. Simply blocking after the fact does not stop it. They find other ways once they have a mission. It’s easier and healthier to stop it before it’s an issue. It’s not so easy as it sounds. It’ll persist for as long as they are fixated which is not sane or rational. If it’s let in, it changes the culture of the instance inherently.
You should be the bartender here: https://www.boredpanda.com/bar-bartender-nazi-punk-iamragesparkle/
The people that have been exposed to the meanness of the internet are trying to warn you about something. Please consider it.
This is not a balance, not in a scientific community.
There is an immense gap between the scientific discussion of these kinds of issues and ideas, and the kinds of bad-faith polemic argumentation that takes place in spaces like exploding-heads.
We should not welcome those spreading mis/dis/malinformation as part of our community. We should not welcome their forms of argumentation as legitimate. We should not welcome their “questions” and “claims” as part of the debate, all in the same ways that these ideas and forms of argumentation are not welcome in the scientific literature.
You started this instance not as a “free speech bastion” but as “An instance dedicated to nature and science.” A dedication to nature and science requires the forms of moderation you resist. A dedication to nature and science does not mean unmoderated, unregulated discussion.
What you do now drives the culture and the norms of this community. Every second you wait further entrenches this kind of speech as acceptable by the leadership of this community.
I’ll hold my “engineers really need to stop making social spaces by themselves” rant for another day.
Technical question: while the instance is federated, its users can post here, right? Do you have any moderating tools that allow you to monitor incoming comments from users from a “fishy” instance as they come in?
My fear is that they have not accumulated enough of a mass of users yet, and enough of an interest in a “small” platform like Lemmy yet, but that the crowd will come once Lemmy becomes an established platform, which will make real infiltration efforts worthwhile.
And then we’ll have to deal with the usual tactics: brigades organized offsite (on discord, telegram…) to drop on anything trans/immigration/etc. related like a plague of locusts. Teams of users posturing as the “sane one” and “crazy one” allowing the “sane” actor to push far-right points that “make sense” next to pure extremism. Threats sent as PMs to individual users. Doxxing, online stalking. And, behind that, their host doing nothing to prevent- or facilitating - the behavior.
I’m fine with you not taking action for now, but would you be ready to drop the hammer if they become problematic and user-level blocking of instances is not yet a thing?
Edit: I commented on the wrong account, but I also have one on Mander.
Yeah, I’m with you on this. I will probably go back to lurking* if this is how it is because I do not want a target on my head as a proactive poster. I would have instance blocked them ages ago, but Lemmy in its current state leaves us unable to defend ourselves in this way. By the time that hammer is dropped if it does, the targets will already have been made. Hell, I grew up in a place where a lot of these people come from and I left there too for a reason. We cannot build and be proactive if our base is undefended.
*If I start seeing it.
You’re such an active user that at the beginning I thought it was your instance, and your presence here makes this place very active and interesting. I agree it’d be quite easy to associate you with mander as one and the same.
For what it’s worth, Lemmy.world defederated with them a few days ago. I feel like it was a good move.
kbin.social and lemmy.world defederated from exploding-heads a few days ago. I went there once and the whole site looks like /r/the_donald before it was banned. Full of propaganda and lies, misinformation. anti-vax nonsense, election disinformation. Good riddance.
Nah. Let free speech reign.
I’m not from your instance, but I share the following information regarding how other instances feel regarding EH.
https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=exploding-heads.com
when your instance defederated list becomes a reasonable map of the fediverse you know you fucked up