The screenshot shows the recommendations from https://join-lemmy.org/.
Still being federated with exploding-heads does not mean the instance supports them. But it means that shit-heads are allowed to take part in the discussions on their communities. They do intoxicate the discussions we will have. They will attack minorities. Maybe you will not be harassed by them, more vulnerable people will be. They are allowed to moderate communities on these instances. Exploding-heads members actively guide young and unknowing people to their hateful instance.
They try to start discussions about the holocaust https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268. They create communities only to crosspost exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma They take over discussions against them https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189 “WHY are vulnerable people joining a decentralized system? Isnt this why you want a closed, not for public eyes community?”
This was a link to exploding-heads, because when someone copies a permalink of a comment from them on another instance, it will be a link to their instance.
Are we building a place where vulnerable people are welcome and safe or are we building a place where nazis are welcome and safe?
They want you to block them, they comment that everywhere. They block people who are in favor of defederating them https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 When their opponents won’t see them anymore, they can harass and recruit without being noticed.
Blocking will not solve the problem. They will spread even when you close your eyes.
Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now there is a post with a list of ‘health communities on Lemmy’ with the first entry guiding to exploding heads. https://lemmy.world/post/396561
It is still possible that some of the mentioned instances do support them. The owner of sh.itjust.works says that because of “free speech” all other instances would be allowed. It is suspicious to me that his line is drawn only for lemmygrad https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474
The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.
I’d like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that’s all about and report back?
At the same time they seem to ignore the call and vote to defederate with exploding-heads https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483.
They rejected to delete The_Donald from sh.itjust.works until they feared to get isolated from the other instances: https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored early warnings. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248). TD was more important to them than keeping the only mod of their 4th biggest community c/patientgamers (https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747, https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922)
Since The_Donald was removed, I did not find more racist content on the mentioned servers. That is part their tactics. They act harmless but recruit to their instance, attract likeminded people and chase others away. Discussions on sh.itjust.works about such topics are very toxic already, soon they might be able to do more harm.
(My research is very limited, as i could not search for all exploding-heads member content on other instances by entering their domain. I know there are nice communities on sh.itjust.works.)
What can be done? On joinmastodon.org there is a Mastodon Server Covenant with very few useful rules, one of them is “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”. https://joinmastodon.org/covenant It would be a first step to implement these rules for join-lemmy.org. At least instances that want to be recommended on there should have to agree to that rule.
More actions should be taken now. Please make suggestions. Things will only become more complicated. The next reddit wave is incoming.
For those who did not already know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?
-Share/crosspost
-Contact admins
update: lemmy.word defederated eh
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Exploding-heads.com has been blocked by lemmy.world
Full list of linked and blocked instances can be found here: https://lemmy.world/instances
I’ve thought about making a feature request for Lemmy itself to support this, but would you guys ever consider some kind of page with all the blocked instances and why they were blocked?
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Full list of linked and blocked instances can be found here: https://lemmy.world/instances
Reverse search: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=exploding-heads.com
Good. Are you actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
Ofcourse. We will come up with an official statement soon and then I will edit my top post to link it but honestly this action was a no-brainer. Unanimous decision from everyone involved.
Why do you have to sound like such a douchebag about this?
As soon as you fix your op.
Fucking christian fundamentalists fascists. They are a fucking cancer in every social media platform.
The worst thing it’s they are being funded by the conservative elite nations to speak fascist hate all over the internet.
It’s super effective! Humanity hurt itself in its confusion!
A tale as old as time
man I dont get it. These christians are talking about God and shit, yet you have muslims killing people all over the world and not a word about them.
It’s almost like they’re both bad, but one is a more immediate problem. Al Qaeda may have taken down the twin towers, but they never tried to launch a coup and get Roe V Wade overturned.
They are very much bad too. But christians are the dominant religion in western nations, which are the core audience of social media. Islamic fundamentalist thus simply do not have a similar presence as Christianity does on social media.
Both fundamentalists are crazy bastards but the ones with power and money are more dangerous.
I bitch about Islam constantly. Almost as much as I bitch about Christianity. Being in the USA, Christianity negatively effects my life far more than Islam does so it’s a higher priority to complain about.
They are going to cause issues sooner rather than later in communities that don’t defederate from them. It’s quite literally just a given. I’m shocked some of those instances haven’t defederated from them already.
A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me
I think the whole attitude of “oh just block the community and ignore it” really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren’t cut off preemptively. You aren’t deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.
The question I always find myself asking is, why is it that people only expect the targets of abuse to do the filtering of that abuse, and why, other than you yourself would like to enact abuse, would you want to leave people engaging in abusive behavior in position to continue being abusive? Beehaw has lamented there not being more flexible moderation tools allowing us to perform more powerful moderation actions, enabling the filtration of abuse on otherwise good servers, but until those tools exist, what good reason is there to ignore and enable abuse?
It’s this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷♂️.
Americans who understand the first amendment will tell you that freedom of association is inseparable from freedom of expression. The government (plus its agents) is the only entity constrained by the First Amendment. Everyone else benefits from it, including certain instance owners who don’t want to associate with certain others.
I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those “free speech absolutist” types. It’s a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.
That’s why I moved there from lemmy.world. I’d rather not have somebody else tell me what to think or see.
You cannot have a space which is welcoming to nazis which is also welcoming to minorities.
Nobody is telling you what to “think or see” when an instance gets deferderated. You’re welcome to think whatever you like, and to go seek it out. You’re just not welcome to bring it into some spaces.
Yep. And (obviously) America is going to one day be forced to come to that same understanding that Germany was painfully forced to. I’m just hopeful it doesn’t take a genocide or some sort of dictatorship for a similar reckoning to occur. Germany might not be perfect, but there are many things American society could learn from that exist within modern day German culture especially in regards to cultural reconciliation with historical wrongs. It’s hard to really describe how happy it makes me feel that as a Jewish person I can say I would feel very safe and welcome living in and visiting most places in Germany, but it also makes me sad to an immense degree that I can truthfully say I’d probably feel safer most places there than in the most places in the states right now… :(
If censorship is the answer, why have years of censorship failed to eradicate undesirable ideologies?
The same way that depends is the answer, yet Donald Trump is still incontinent.
Even if these servers federate with exploding heads, the individual servers would still moderate content coming from exploding heads users on their servers, no? I agree that there are clearly a lot of shitty users there, but I have not seen a strong argument from you on how federating with them is a problem. Their content here is actively moderated.I could very well be wrong, in which case I will eat my words, but it seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.Just took a quick browse of their instance, eww…
So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?
actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts
Is there much of a difference nowadays?
Mostly the clothing. And neckbeards.
That comment sounds a little bigoted.
Not to me. It sounds quite sane.
A little of column A, a little of Columbine
Sharp!
Interesting
Tiny, edgy instance. I haven’t found any nazis yet.
They’re playing the traditional Alt-Right playbook, and they’re playing a bunch of instance admins like fiddles. I’ve noticed a consistent pattern of abusive trolls being from that instance. My secondary account is on sh.itjust.works, and I’m looking for another instance to be my secondary instance that I use to look at lemmy.world content I can’t see from this, my primary account. Thus far, there aren’t any instances I can find that have a federation / defederation list that matches my ideal list, so for now, I have my happy account and my “it stresses me out” account.
It seems like there are two camps here in the threadiverse. People who are excited to find an instance admin who moderates the way they like, and people who think an instance admin is only responsible for uptimes and that this entire experiment should be fully unmoderated
Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it’s the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that’d be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you’re not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.
If you are interested in doing so I’d be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.
Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don’t defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.
Being outside of the US, I wasn’t aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it’s easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.
If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don’t see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.
I’m sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven’t already.
Last I tired to set one up the docker image just vomits. The install instructions are for ubuntu, but everything in my server farm is all debian and they don’t have the same versions of packages so it doesn’t work.
I could spin up an Ubuntu instance and try the manual install instructions again, but having a one off system doesn’t make me happy.
I’m strongly considering hosting a KBin instance
I may not be able to help too specifically with that then as I don’t have any experience with it, but I would still encourage you to do so. One of the helpful folks in !selfhosted@lemmy.world would probably know more about Kbin specifically.
It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head. I’ll either be able to do a great job of it with my devops background, or a terrible job of it with my devops fulltime job
Ah, hello fellow DevOp. If I were to apply some of the stuff I do for clients, I’d end up with an AWS bill bigger than my car payment… It’s really neat to see just how far your dollar can go running on a non “Big 3” cloud provider, or even in my homelab. And then weighing that efficiency and limited feature set with availability… fun times
Join us at lemmy.dbzer0.com. We’re federated with most instances including Beehaw. And no Tankies or Fascists are here. lemmygrad and explodingheads are both defederated.
I have a secondary at lemm.ee, but i don’t think i want to keep it after this. I’m definitely looking into dbzer0. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hey, for the record, bigotry is not allowed on lemm.ee, and I have no problems with defederatating any instance which encourages its users to break that rule in any of our communities (or to harm our users in other ways).
Is there an easy way to carry over my subscriptions to a new account?
I made a script just for that https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
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There’s more to leftism than just those who support authoritarian states.
The scary part about this is that i think you’re deadly serious.
You do know the .ml domain for lemmy.ml was chosen to represent Marxism-Leninism, right, comrade?
perhaps they chose it because .ml domains are free, however Nutomic and Dessalines are absolutely what many would describe as “Tankies”
I think it’s a little column A, and a little column B.
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Yes - but none of the devs or admins of lemmy.ml are Mali
They are communists though.
Here for example is Dessalines’ communist reading list.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/dessalines_marxism_study_plan.html
I don’t mean to imply that this is bad or not, but simply to point it out as a fact.
I mean, .ml domains are free: http://www.point.ml/en/index.html?lang=en that’s the reason it was used.
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Comments like this is why instances need downvotes displayed
you lot are distanced away because you cant behave lol
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Making the basic rules like Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia should be a no brauner. Pls add this rule
should be a no brauner
German “braun” = brown => nazi
What a beautiful typo.
IMO the best defense is education. Make these people and their bigotry known. I had not heard of them before this post, but now I can be on alert for them, and avoid interacting with them and report them in the future.
ELI5 (because I signed up about an hour ago) - what’s wrong with the Exploding Heads instance? I thought about joining up because I suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome (really)
Theyre basically the_Donald: fediverse edition. They troll, raid, and generally cause problems across the threadiverse in the name of promoting their authoritarian world view
Oh, fuck that. I’m so tired of that shit.
I’m not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.
Sounds like you’re pretty anti-one side, even if you don’t want to admit it
Thinks… Well, one side generally annoy me more than the other side.
I can generally be around right wingers longer than left wingers and traditionally the right have been more tolerant of libertarians like myself, so I guess maybe.
It’s not about that they are Christian fundamental fascists
Yeah you know what? I’ve had enough of fundies, I’ll leave that thought there.
Join an instance that does not allow local communities. Then you can subscribe remotely to whatever you want and block whatever you don’t.
Good to see that my admins already dealt with it.
bless our lords at Sopuli for pre-removing these apparent EH people before I even knew they existed <3
There’s no feasible way to stop people of a specific ideology from using an open source piece of software. You say blocking isn’t the answer but I’m not sure what more you can expect. Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector, what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?
The most realistic solution I can think of is letting instances or users subscribe to curated blacklists. Something akin to Adblock or email server spam blacklists.
what action can it enforce beyond banning or blocking?
Defederation, that’s one of the key concepts of the fediverse
It keeps them from participating by demoting them to the kids table, but you’re still in a glass house to some extent.
I think this is the right answer, but the structure is going to require some amount of frequent drama just like this every time. You can keep an open federation policy until proven malicious, or you can verify partners, but I don’t see the way around discussions.
Blocking an entire instance is still blocking.
A thing you can do apart from blocking is talking about it and raising awareness.Thight balancing though with doing “outrage marketing” for or making a self fulfilling prophecy.
If you are engaged, you could document malicous behaviour from them, so they can’t work in the shadows and their real intends are widely known. Truth is: few people like Nazis
Even if you invent some kind of automated Nazi detector
As interesting a problem as this might be (my final year undergrad project was similar in nature), the nuance of written word can be significant and difficult to detect. Making a good product and then ensuring multiple communities would adopt it is not realistic in 2023.
What is realistic, however, is a zero tolerance policy against such individuals. What we should be doing is ostracizing them. You take away their platform, you take away their power. They can only do so much damage if they’re all gathered up in a single community with no ties or influence to the rest of the world.
Who enforces your zero tolerance policy on a decentralized platform? What action do they take to enforce it that isn’t blocking the offenders?
To be clear I’m saying that blocking is the only realistic solution so efforts should be focused on ways to make that easier and more effective. The only issue I have is the suggestion that blocking is somehow insufficient. ’
