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.
I see nothing to be gained from remaining federated. Exploding heads doesn’t offer a “diversity of opinion” or engage in good-faith debate any more than lemmygrad, and remaining federated will do nothing but fill our feeds with their low-effort hate trolling and sully our instance’s reputation.
A community becomes much less diverse when it banishes entire groups of people just because some of their members hold views you disagree with. The community becomes an echo chamber of yes-men.
I’m not taking a stance on politics here, I just disagree with this tendency to defederate groups on the drop of a hat.
Have you looked at the content over there? It’s not about opinions. It’s mostly just low quality hate, trolling and nonsense conspiracies.
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.
Exactly. It’s not just a few communities on there… it’s all of it. There is nothing good that would come from federating.
Note that since Lemmy is new, if I invite someone to this server and they say extremely racist content, they’re never going to give this platform another try.
I think you mean “see” not “say”. Changes your entire comment.
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Eh, this one simple comment immediately brought in a troll posting racist images that resulted in deletion and a ban. It didn’t stay up for long thanks to swift action, but it lets you know the kind of people that are waiting to take advantage of any opening to be unpleasant people.
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Wasn’t from our server, came from outside. But it was within minutes of the post. It got downvoted and reported and was handled fast. A sort by new should show you where it used to be.
I’m not sure. Reddit alternatives kind of have a reputation as for a long time only those banned from reddit would consider them.
This has since changed though but anyone who remembers voat might be more cautious.
I’m late to the discussion, but, I’d be a fan of temporary defederation until Lemmy supports users blocking entire instances. I’m not overly big on the idea of defederation in general, I feel like it hurts the fediverse overall. But I don’t want to see those asshats either. I keep blocking the communities as they pop up. But it’s not really my place to tell everyone else what kind of content they can and can’t enjoy.
And I imagine that even on an instance that leans that way, there are probably still “normal” communities too. If the world’s biggest and best “cute cat pictures” community somehow manages to spring up on an instance that also has a Nazi community, what then? If my only interaction with that instance and it’s users are through cute cat pictures, and I don’t ever know that the guy who posted the cat pic also happens to like swastikas and sucking camel dicks, why should I even care?
In the real world, unfortunately, the guys who like swastikas and sucking camel dicks also seem to really like telling everyone about it. So keeping them federated still gives them an ability to try to infect others. Because they definitely won’t stay in their little box.
So anyways. It’s hard. My preference is to leave it federated for those that want to see it, as long as there’s an easy way to block it for those that don’t. Since that doesn’t exist just yet, I’d be for defederation for exactly as long as it takes for Lemmy to implement instance blocking at a user level. Then open it back up and everyone can make their own choice as they see fit.
You can watch my opinion evolve https://sh.itjust.works/comment/468378
It is no longer “like two people or something lol”.
The difference between posts and comments is large as others pointed out (way more posts) and to me this indicates they are looking more for “you need MY content in your feed (because I said so)” more than “let’s discuss this content”. I prefer the latter.
I am now in favor of defederating exploding heads.
If you want that content in your feed, there are plenty of ways to get it. I don’t.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
We’re under no obligation to federate with anyone that we don’t want to. They’re not just a Nazi bar, which I now believe is a good enough reason to build our wall, as you say, but they’re also a Nazi bar with Nazi robots.
“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.
We can’t do anything to enforce moderation of content on another server. If they come here to do it we can boot em.
Bad analogy, it’s not one planet, this is like Super Mario Galaxy. We have a planet with little bars (communities), they have a planet with their shitty racist bars. It’s not building a wall, it’s cutting them out of our orbit.
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.
Thank you kind stranger for the reasonability.
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?
My example with the mask was to highlight the inconsistency that folks on the right exhibit. They claimed that wearing masks was a violation of their freedoms, but also seem to be in favor of policies that limit people’s freedoms. They claimed that the masks made it so they couldn’t breathe. But then there were plenty of insurrectionists on Jan. 6 wearing masks. They believe some unsubstantiated misinformation on Facebook about how the vaccines will implant trackers into them, but disbelieve the scientists who tell them they’re safe. They pick and choose their arguments and what they’ll believe without critical thought.
Of course I don’t think people who refuse to wear masks are Nazis. That’s silly. I just think they’re selfish. And of course I don’t think all Republicans are Nazis. And like I said before, I wouldn’t want to be in place where there couldn’t be honest debate about different politics. But I’m not convinced they have any actual legitimate principles anymore. Nazi ideology, book bans, and violent rhetoric against lgbtq are not topics I’m willing to have an honest discussion about because there’s nothing to discuss. Those things don’t belong in a society. Now if they want to discuss the merits of legitimate conservative policies, those kinds of debates should absolutely be allowed. But I haven’t seen much lately showing that they even has those principles anymore sadly.
Wait Republicans are not Nazis?
That would be new to me…
It’s a spectrum, and I honestly put that label Increasingly onto Republicans, but I’m living in europe, everything seems to be a little bit less extreme here (but the trend is unfortunately not that good either). I think to keep a place civil one has to moderate unfortunately, since hate is so much apparent nowadays (likely promoted by the “legacy” social networks). A place of true free speech with civil discussion and without hate is unfortunately just unrealistic utopia…
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.
At first I was against defederating from them, since even though I do not agree with their viewpoints, I was of the opinion that we should not be so hasty to defederate with anyone. I thought that it was against the spirit of the Fediverse.
However, I have since changed my mind. There are three types of federation in Lemmy: allow list, block list, and open. We aren’t under any obligation federate anyone that feels like spinning up an instance.
The people on that instance, including its mods and admins, are a hate group. They break the sh.itjust.works rules of being respectful and having no bigotry. The exploding-heads content has no business even reaching the sh.itjust.works server, in my opinion.
It would also be a very bad look for us for sh.itjust.works users to create an account here and begin posting on instances which break our rules.
There is also the argument that, since we federate with a Nazi instance, we are also a Nazi instance. We had the “The Donald” and “Conspiracy Theories” communities which also supported that argument. Whether you agree with it or not, this is why we have been defederated from Beehaw, one of the larger Lemmy instances.
In addition to all of the ideological arguments above, they have opened themselves up to a botswarm invasion, and I think that is itself a reason to defederate them. It’s a simple security concern!
Finally, I am in disbelief we are even voting on this a second time. I would have expected the moderator team to honor the previous vote to defederate from them. Any further discussion and vote should have been to re-federate with them.
I think we should defederate from any alt-right or facist instance, do not give them a plataform.
How exactly are we giving them a platform by staying federated? They have their server, we have ours. Their posts only show up on this server’s timeline if someone subscribes to their communities, and even then, their 100 active users still have to create enough traffic to not be pushed down by the over 2000 active users on this instance, not to mention all the other instances we are federated with, that have each way more traffic than exploding-heads does.
Seriously, even while the sorting was busted in 0.17.4, I have never seen a post from exploding-heads. And as long as they don’t even come close to dictating what people on this instance see when they are looking at ‘all’, I don’t see the need for defederation.
It shows up when you browse the “all” feed. That’s the main point of federation. It greatly increases discoverability and it’s the main way newcomers (who do not yet have a lot of subscriptions) will interact with the Fediverse.
Sadly, my client doesn’t even let me block communities for myself. So right now I can’t avoid seeing alt-right shit under “all”. (I haven’t yet tried via my instance’s web site; hoping I can make a blocklist there.)
Yes, posts from exploding-heads can show up, but they only do if they “win out” against all the other posts. So if you sort by new or new comments, they might show up if they updated just recently, which is unlikely given how little traffic those posts get. For other sorting methods, there is little to no chance the ever making it onto the front page, because, again, they get so little traffic. Their numbers are simply too small to ever consistently,outside of bugs, make it onto the front page of this instance. Their limited user count also means that they, compared to all the other user visits this instance is getting, a few and far between. On the other hand, big instances like this one can dominate discussion on their instance. And as long as they don’t create an echo chamber on their side, I’m against us voluntarily depriving ourselves from the possibility of giving them pushback. And lastly, if we defederate, they can still create accounts here. I’d much rather have them visit this instance with their exploding-heads accounts, as that makes it far easier in spotting them.
it seems ridiculous to defederate from lemmygrad but not these tools
any ‘personal convictions’ that rule out tankies but not fascists are a serious red flag
Lemmy grad was more established when this instance was spun up. Since that time a community controlled system has been implemented here. That’s all.
For what it’s worth. I was looking at the server statistics on https://the-federation.info/platform/73 (linked from join-lemmy) and I noticed something. Almost all of the largest lemmy servers have far more comments than posts. The only two notable exceptions are lemmynsfw and exploding heads. They both have far more posts than comments. I’m not sure what it means, but it might be useful to someone in this discussion.
For example.
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sh.itjust.works has 5966 posts to 32670 comments
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exploding heads has 18406 posts to 5503 comments
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One of the people in their main community said the rules allowed you to “be racist, but not obvious about it”. I also will vote for defederation to keep that digusting hate speech out of my feed.
That’s a big yikes. I’m usually one of those “but what about the randos that unknowingly signed up that will end up in an echo chamber of hate” but if that’s on their main community then there’s not much of a chance or randos joining without knowing their MO.
I also think with federation it’s different than with something like a small local subreddit. On the sub for my (small, racist, generally regressive) country, I reveled in seeing smug assholes get voted down to hell for saying something that suggested that not only were they justified in saying something bigoted, but that they were above some “trend” of “pretending” that “things were not how they really were”.
I think that kind of reinforcement also helped form an identity for that community, that we were all together in fighting bad ideas.
I don’t know how that applies to federated communities, I’m even commenting from another community so I don’t know how welcome my feedback would be here. But that’s my $.02
I don’t know how that applies to federated communities, I’m even commenting from another community so I don’t know how welcome my feedback would be here
Insights and thoughts from people on other instances is explicitly welcomed. Members of this instance will be doing the final vote, but the discussion is very much open to all.
I was also initially against defederation. I believe that to combat bigotry and hate, we need to show that those things aren’t tolerated, and also why the those things are wrong. And I still believe this, however I don’t believe it’s the right response to EH anymore.
They are coming on to other instances and making posts like this, this, this, and this. Each one an innocuous post, but each one containing a link back to their instance.
It appears they are recruiting for their instance in the time tested way of slow exposure to radicalization.
Time to stop their spread and defederate them. And when their users come over because they like our communities, then we can combat their bigotry and hate, and ban those who won’t change.
That’s just how crossposting works in Lemmy, but yeah, that might have been intentional.
You might be right but if you look at the third link, the one about Germany and the Holocaust, you’ll see it was done differently than the others.
I think, and maybe someone can correct me, that they created a new post and cross-posted the new post, and then linked the original post on EH in the body of the post. But I’m not familiar with how Lemmy does cross-posting, so I accept I could be wrong.
Defederate nazis!
What Nazis? Stop devaluing real Nazism as a term for right wingers.
They’re chanting ‘blood and soil’ at alt-right marches. That’s a do not pass go or collect $200 straight up nazi thing.
When did Make America Great Again Republicans chant blood and soil at an alt right march?
Charlottesville. The rally that was organized on t_d.
The one that trump said had a lot of very nice people. *
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This post was stickied to the subreddit. Things got scrubbed after that girl was murdered. *
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Charlottesville, 2017. As you might recall, they also committed an act of terrorism and killed a woman
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Increasingly, no, they don’t.
The only difference between today’s MAGA movement and the OG Nazis is the branding.
Based on what?
Based on what CNN and their professor told them
Defederate them. There’s no room for Nazis and fascists anywhere, ever.
