Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don’t like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It’s annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don’t want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.
I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.
I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol
I’ll echo this sentiment. I also lurk communities that I don’t agree with, and I want to see dissenting views. I find that heavy moderation often just leads to echo chambers where real issues can be kicked under the rug
Are we not capable of hiding things we don’t want to see on Lemmy ourselves? Why would I want to be babysat by anyone when I can make adult choices on what I want to see my own damn self? Censorship was what ruined Reddit years ago. Leave it entirely up to the users.
thank you for not being a drama queen and railroading this whole thing by leveraging the small amount of power you have to make some bullshit point about your social views.
I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don’t want other people to control what I see.
That’s it. That’s my entire position on the matter.
I am dismayed with how many people want to control what others can see.
Yeah that’s why it’s not going to last here. Like honestly I’m going to leave eventually because it’s really annoying and it kills the experience for me and it just makes me want to argue with everybody to how judgmental and asinine they are
this makes me want to spin up my own instance just for myself to follow other communities, I guess that would be the best way to do it
Beehaw defederated because of users, not communities though. They wanted to control who could comment, not what people could see.
Their intent is irrelevant to my point.
In my point of view it’s a kind of censorship. Just let the user himself decide what he wants to see.
I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re a second language speaker where “user” is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use “themselves” instead.
Akchually, since we’re being annoyingly corrective, shouldn’t it be “themself”?
OR is it able-ist to assume the commentor does not express multiple personalities?
Yeah I guess I reordered it “Just let the user decide themselves…” in my head.
As I guessed the commenter was a German speaker. This is a very common occurrence and not something malicious (check like every boardgame from Germany referring to “the player” as “he”), just lost in translation.
Never meant to be annoying or holier-than-thou, people can genuinely misunderstand that it’s some sexist remark, and so I pointed it out. Just said it so the commenter hopefully isn’t misunderstood in the future.
So, if you feel that’s some woke-ass snowflake nonsense, be my guest lol
On the internet whoever you’re conversing with is male unless explicitly stated. It really really does not matter since it’s all just randos on the internet anyway. Please note the large number of down votes you got for actually caring.
On the internet whoever you’re conversing with is male unless explicitly stated
“OH mY gOd, aRE yoU a GiRL???” In a game lobby.
Same vibes.
Just reiterating, that the original poster was German as I suspected, and pointing it out might spare them being misunderstood in the future. I have no regrets.
Lol… Alright take the upvote.
A bit facetious innit
Live and let live
Yea okay. In German you mostly use the masculine noun
Yeah that’s what I guessed! Alles gut :)
Just throwing my opinion in… Since we can block communities on our own, we don’t really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it’s not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might’ve decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I’d still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.
Completely agree with this. I can block anything I don’t want to see, and I’d rather not have someone else decide that for me
Can you blanket block comments from other instances users?
I am not a fan of Beehaw’s decision, but I can’t a setting where you can actually do this.
I think the issue here people posting things in BeeHaw’s communities that they don’t want. The only way to stop that is to block users on a case by case basis, and since people can create unlimited free accounts this is ineffective given the low numbers of mods they have. The only way to work around this was to ban the two instances that had the most bad actors and easy registration.
I have floated the idea of a whitelist of users for their communities, but have been informed this isn’t supported by Lemmy at the moment.
I very much appreciate this philosophy. It looks like this is the right instance for me :)
The problem at the moment is that the community moderation tools are pretty limited. At some point there will be coordinated attacks on some communities and the moderation tools are not yet sufficient to defend against that sort of thing.
Why lemmygrad tho?
Click the link and find out
I know lemmygrad,still don’t get it
I also think lemmygrad should not be defederated
all the tankies.
So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
Why is lemmygrad blocked, but not exploding heads?
Because lemmygrad is a tankie hellhole. They support all kinds of authoritarian nonsense.
That doesn’t answer the question.
Sorry I didn’t know what exploding heads was when I commented. That’s also an authoritarian hellhole, and should also be blocked.
because COMMUNISM
Is there a place to see what’s blocked, and why?
I think that structures that permit people and communities to do literally whatever they want is how lemmy can thrive. The people in beehaw (myself included) are on the whole perfectly chill with the defederation, and the specific reasons and conditions for that defederation. The admins have been open about the fact that they want more moderation tools for our community before refederating with those instances, it isn’t a permanent state of affairs. I like beehaw. Its chill. Maybe other people wouldn’t like that, but then maybe just don’t host your account there? There are tons of other places to be. This isn’t reddit, if you aren’t inside beehaw, its management doesn’t affect you.
Except for the fact that defederating is bidirectional at the moment. It would be nice if the platform’s defederation and the user’s defederation were less tied together, but as far as I can tell, the beehaw admins only defederated because there wasn’t a compromise between “do nothing” and “ban everything” available to them.
as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it’s important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we’re still federated with them and things seem fine?
Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.
It’s nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don’t defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don’t like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.
Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else’s, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so… basically, they’re human, just like the rest of us.
Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they’ll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they’ve got to say, they’re just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.
If you don’t like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them… at least I can’t see a reason.
They support North Korea for goodness sake. Being communists isn’t the problem, it’s that they support fascist dictatorships pretending to be communist.
Do you support president Washington? Did you know he was pro slavery? Far worse than having a dictatorship if you ask me.
Honestly I had to google who he was, because I fogot. I am British, not American, so he isn’t a big deal over hear. Technically he was an enemy of my country not that really matters.
I don’t particularly support him if that’s what you’re asking, as I have no reason to. He wasn’t the first person to implement a democracy, and the democracy he implemented wasn’t a true democracy to begin with. The ancient greeks did it thousands of years before him and fyi also had slaves.
Likewise, the communism Stalin implemented wasn’t true communism. Nobody gets it perfect the first time. But Washington is still praised as the founder of the USA, but Stalin is frowned upon 🤔. These are the double standards I’m talking about.
I don’t prasie Washington though. He just took what the Greeks did and made it worse.
Stalin should rightly be criticized. He took a great revolution and ruined it making people hate communism to this day.
Lenin and Trotsky weren’t that much better either before you start talking about them. Anyone remember Kronstadt?
You may not do that, but most of the US does… and everyone just hates Stalin for the things he did. Like no good could come out of that person. Maybe not good, but a good idea, sure, everyone has one from time to time.
No doubt there, he did a lot of things wrong, not to mention eliminating Lenin, but that’s beside the point. My point was, you’re obviously not stating the same about Washington or other western polititians that may have done even worse things.
And people don’t hate communism because of what Stalin did, they hate it because of a well thought of propaganda campaign made by the US. Sure, the USSR had one against capitalism as well, but it wasn’t as aggressive.
Good thing you mention Kronstadt. What you’re comparing is like the confederates having a rebellion (revolution) after the civil war, because they lost, and then wining about the unions kicking their buts. A certain social order/policy prevailed, deal with it… you wanna pick a fight with the bear again, don’t be surprised if it comes back to bite you… again.
I mean TBF Washington didn’t write the constitution and it was politically untenable at the time to illegalize slavery (note: I don’t know if he was against slavery, but generally no matter who was president it would’ve been impossible).
Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you’re probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.
If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they’ve read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren’t authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don’t exist and are “western propaganda” while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don’t think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after “years of propaganda pushed by western countries” to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.
If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they’ve read.
Of course, that is how you spread ideas, through propaganda. That is how western countries did it as well. That is how we got here, to Lemmy, lol.
They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren’t authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
I have seen people judge, but have never experienced what it would be like living under the ruling of a benevolent dictator. I’m not saying Stalin or Mao were like that, I’m saying that I live in a country that used to be socialist and had a dictator like that… trust me when I say this, we were better of with what we had previously.
So, please first experiece first had what it is to live in both types of societies before you judge. Every story has 2 sides, so does this one.
The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again.
I don’t think any of them actually deny that. They usually just compare those acts with what western countries have done. Go on and have a talk with them, none of them deny that. They know that they did terrible things, but try and debunk the western theories “russia bad, usa good”… thay all have sceletons in their closets, there is no denying that. You can’t keep an empire as large as the US or USSR afloat and not have done any bad deed to anyone, that’s just nuts. There will always be collateral damage.
George Washington was pro slavery, yet he’s still praised and printed on bills, right? So that’s normal, but this isn’t, lol.
A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don’t exist and are “western propaganda” while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
Denying it is not OK. But, I get their stand point - the US denies doing soooo many things, why should we be any different 🤷. They’re cutting slack, why not us.
I still haven’t seen anyone deny those tjings, but if I do, even though I am a socialist by beliefs, I will most definitely confront them. Their beliefs are not mine and I would rather have the truth out than hide it under the carpet. BUT, the whole truth, not just one side of it. Let’s take everyone’s dirty laundry out, not just the USSRs or USes, both of them. Because people usually think that bodies are piled up on only side of the lawn, which is a lie of course.
When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist.
Expressing absolute power in a state can sometimes be a good thing. Depends on a lot of things, but in certain countries/federations, it just works. I could state examples here, my own country being one of them, but it’ll just be too long of a post.
And you percieve them as toxic, I don’t. Why? IDK, I just don’t 🤷. Maybe it’s because my own beliefs allign in 90% of theirs.
Defederating is the issue here, not the content of that instance. You don’t like something, fine, block it. Lemmy has that option. I block communies I don’t like all the time, I have about 20 blocked ao far, why is that so hard, I really have bo idea.
I don’t think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after “years of propaganda pushed by western countries” to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.
I couldn’t care less if anyone stays federated with a faschist instance or not. It doesn’t make 1 single bit of difference. I don’t like it? I block it. It really is THAT simple 🤦.
In fact, I would even like to be federated with a faschist instance. Why? Meeh, might unblock it from time to time, just to troll them and get on their nerves.
I see. I like the kbin philosophy of just federating with everyone. lemmygrad stuff doesn’t pop up that often here and from a quick look it didn’t really look like an issue. But yeah I guess you’re right that it’s just fear? or people just wanting to curate/block certain things…
It’s like my need to see less cat posts. I searched for every cat community there is on Lemmy and just blocked all of them. Problem solved 👍. Some people are just snowflakes and don’t even wanna do that out of fear they might see some tankie posts or something, so the admins just did their dirty work for them 😒.
I might open up a kbin account as well, this whole defederation thing sucks. I already have like 5 accounts cuz this instance is defederated from that instance and so on 😒.
yeah so far on kbin I think we’re federated with everyone and I think that’s kinda the default going forward. So unless other instances block us, we’re probably fine.
Cool, thanks for the info 👍.
Any app for kbin?
I don’t know why you’re insisting people who don’t like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.
And not all liberals are pro war advocates… but some are.
Just because they like him, doesn’t mean they admire everything he did. The idea behind the USSR, yes, not the war crimes he commited. And there are war crimes on both sides of the fence, not just on Stalin’s side, yet they go unrecognized in history. If we villanize, let’s villanize both sides, not just one.
Sure! Fuck all war criminals, including the ones you seem to like defending. Listen, maybe people defederated lemmygrad because they “hate communists”, or maybe they fully understand their position, and find it objectionable on its own merits. I would, unambiguously, never say I liked a war criminal. If I found out somebody was a war criminal, I would stop liking them. I don’t want to be around people who like war criminals, either. To me, that either means they don’t know about the war crimes, or they’re kinda okay with the war crimes, and either option is bad.
The US took every rocket scientist from Nazi Germany after WWII and didn’t let any one of them get tried in Nimmberg for their war crimes, threatening with sanctions if anyone tried to portray them as criminals 😒.
I don’t like war crimes and criminals as well, but there are crimes on both sides, not just one. Just because one of them is pretty good at hiding, minimizing and justifying theirs, doesn’t mean they’re lesser crimes or that they didn’t happen.
Then you should probably stop liking half the US leadership, historically of course, cuz most of them have done things that can be catagorized as war crimes. They’re just really good at hiding or minimizing them.
If you don’t like them, that’s fine, block the communities. Defederating from them is not the answer IMO. And I will probably move to kbin because of this defederation BS.
Again. I DO hate all war criminals. I DON’T think US leadership is good. I am familiar with the numerous crimes of the American empire and find them objectionable on their own merits. I thought my comment above made it clear, but simping for any war criminal is icky, and if “both sides” have committed war crimes, then I want to be on NEITHER side. If genocide is part of your political strategy, you suck, and your politics sucks.
I don’t wanna be on neither side as well. I don’t agree with whatever attrocities one side or another did.
But let’s face it, the US does something, gets news coverage like “meeeh, it’s what they do, what can you do 🤷”, a communist country does the same and it’s “evil tankies! 😠”.
The inequality of how things are viewed is what bothers me. They all did unspeakable things, no doubt there and I don’t deny that they did. But just because someone is far left or far right, doesn’t necessarily make them evil. Not to mention that you can actually learn some really useful things and get some valuable info regarding certain subjects, as well as interpretations regarding certain events. I would rather have the option to view whatever I like with only 1 account, not have to have 3, 4, 5 because this instance or that instance decided to defderate from whatever.
That’s why I say that blocking works. You don’t like something? Block it. Defederation is stupid to say the least.
The difference is almost nobody supports the presidents or officials that intiated said war crimes like president Bush. Tons of people hate Nixon too. Wheras these guys support Stalin despite his war crimes. If they supported USSR ideals without Stalin maybe that would be acceptable, but they don’t.
This is like if I tried to defend Hitler because of how he improved the economy, or his anti-smoking campaign.
Yes, but both presidents are still legit presidents in the history books. No history book ever mentions these things, you find them out through published papers or articles on the subject.
They support the ideas behind what Stalin did, as in how he ran the state. In general, I do agree with some of it as well. None of them agree with the extermination of 20M USSR citizens during his reign. Ask them, you’ll always get the same answer. I have, and I got the exact same answer I gave you now.
Plus, they mostly praise Lennin and Marx, the ideologies, not the people that implemented them. Not to mention that societies like that have been implemented anywhere for the 1st time ever in history, a completely different way of looking on things, mistakes are bound to happen. Not to the exempt what Stalin did (he did most of the attrocities on purpose, no doubt there, he just wanted more centralized power).
And what is wrong with how Hitler revitalized the economy? Please explain how that is bad 🤨. The idea is 100% good. If he was a dictator and did horrible things, that doesn’t mean all of the things he did were bad, most of them, yes, but why not take what is good from the things he did and just learn from that. Praise him, no, but praise that idea that is his, most definitely yes. After all, ask any doctor when were most advances in medical knowledge about the human body done, it was right after WWII, right after the allies snatched Mengele’s thousands of drawings, pictures, analysis, etc. Were the things Dr. Mengele did good? Of course not. Did they help greatly to progress medicine in the next 10 years or so? Most definitely yes. Should he be praised? No. Should he be mentioned as the one directly responsible for that progress. Yes.
I’m saying that I live in a country that used to be socialist and had a dictator like that… trust me when I say this, we were better of with what we had previously.
That was your experience. Not everyone else’s. My country had a dictatorship not too long ago, and believe me when I say this: We didn’t flood the streets with our cries of peace for no reason.
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Yeah it’s obvious they’re straight up tankies over there. I just don’t see a difference in opinion/views as grounds for defederation, though I guess some might feel that way.
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I think there’s a difference between “unmoderated” and “free speech”. It’s one thing to allow all views and discourse. it’s another to just allow people to shit on the platform and degrade things due to unneeded hostility.
Like we don’t need 4chan-tier stuff, but why is anyone who’s slightly more conservative than “ultra progressive” instantly silenced?
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yup makes sense. each instance can decide what they wanna do. it’s interesting to see it all play out. I’m pretty happy with how kbin has approached things so far :)
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Qick question: Do you worship god?
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Yep, I worship Joe Pesci.
Thx admin chief 👍👍
I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It’s a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they’d never remove anything hateful towards trans people.
On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There’s no way to bar them from making a new server.
It’s important to choose your home wisely.
I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.
Bear in mind that defederation
isn’t bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don’t care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins.This isn’t true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn’t see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn’t even realize it.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my understanding that defederation is in fact bidirectional. lemmy.world can’t see new posts from beehaw after the announcement.
Comment based on this post
What do you mean suspicion recently confirmed? Tell me I want to know
Beehaw recently defederated from lemmy.world, one of the largest instances. Their position is that they want to maintain a hand-curated safe space for their users, whereas lemmy.world is open to all.
I think it’s different with Lemmy since people make posts in communities and it’s in the community moderator’s power to remove problematic comments.
If an entire instance supports or encourages such behaviour though, then you’re right and such instances should be defederated.
And once again what stops the user from blocking them theirselves? People have the ability to block individuals and whole subdomains, why not do it theirselves?
What percentage of people have to be posting hate on a specific topic before a certain server decides to defederate them? I’m in no way advocating hate speech but what happens if you have a large server with just two instances causing trouble? The owner believes in free speech and doesn’t want to block anything but there are dozens of other instances on that server that are behaving normally, with thousands of people using it daily? Do you block that server to your entire user base because of two instances? Do you make all of the other users on that instant suffer because of that? Or do you leave it up to your own users to make their own decisions?
Regardless of how this goes in the end I think the instance operators should have clear and open policies before people decide what servers they want to join to begin with.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances
I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That’s the beauty of the model and that’s why kbin and lemmy with thrive.
Thanks for that. I tried to subscribe to some German communities on Feddit just to find out that they blocked our instance on their end. Fuck them I guess, I’m staying here.
