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.
Hey @Sal@mander.xyz long time no see. Hope you are doing good. I just want you to be aware there is a active campaign to get every instance to defederate with exploding heads. Probably by Lemmy grad folks. Some of the offending content is likely posted by them. And they are using dozens of alts to attempt this. I think they are mad lemmygrad.com redirects there. Anyways, I don’t admin there but know the admins and would be happy to help you clean up any trolling or bad faith post coming from there. Even if you decide to cave to this mob (it’s really only a few with lots of alts) no big deal. Just want you to know the context because I came across your post.
Thank you! I appreciate the warning. Long time no see indeed! I hope you and your family are doing well too!
I can purge a few users, but if exploding-heads is used as a platform to launch a coordinated brigade against Mander, I will block it as soon as I see an indication of this to mitigate the attack. I fear that now that have spoken about this publicly, a massive target has been drawn, and the probability of this happening soon has sharply increased.
At that point the brigadiers would have been successful, which is not something that I like, because I don’t think we should hand out so easily the power to cut off connections to those who come here with the purpose of manipulating the network and creating even more polarization than we already have.
That said, removing the block at that point would require either the deployment of better moderation tools, the ability to soft-block instances and deployment of instance-blocks at the user level. I will always be open to dialogue and open to finding alternative solutions to prevent de-federation.
You seem to know this person so maybe you won’t be surprised by their posting history, but for anyone else, I recommend checking it out to get an idea of what to expect from that instance and some context to these discussions.
The fact that you even hesitate to defederate from them is reason enough for me to abandon this ship before it turns into an intellectual dark web hub.
https://slrpnk.net may be a reasonable alternative for some of us who are closer to the intersection of nature, science, sustainability, and decentralisation of power and wealth.
Yes, I “know” him. Masterofballs was the administrator of a right-wing instace (wolfballs) - it was the predecessor of exploding-heads.com. He was very active in the Lemmy community, and contributed to the development to an extent. Eventually he was banned from lemmy.ml, possibly due to user pressure, and later on closed his instance to focus on other projects. I disagree with Masterofballs in pretty much all political issues, as I am much more aligned with ‘left-leaning’ policies and he is more aligned with ‘right-leaning’. I am also not a ‘free-speech’ absolutist like he is, nowhere near that! But we do share in common our interest for decentralized social networks.
https://slrpnk.net may be a reasonable alternative for some of us who are closer to the intersection of nature, science, sustainability, and decentralisation of power and wealth.
Thank you for that suggestion! I have checked, and they do block exploding-heads. I think https://slrpnk.net is a great alternative to those looking for an alternative tech-related community that has a slightly more strict federation policy, but is still very open.
As I have said in other comments before, if someone wants to create a science-based instance that has a more strict policy, I am more than happy to help.
