1y ago

Why is programming.dev federated with exploding heads?

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The instance is currently federated with every instance (including places like lemmygrad and explodingheads) as the current stance is defederation should be a last resort with users being able to choose what they want to see instead
Exploding heads has some very questionable content though so its status is currently being discussed by the admins
- I wish there were a way to block entire instances per user.
  
  It is an option in Sync for Lemmy at least.
  
  Also Connect.
  
  This is actively being discussed too
  
  This would make my life so much easier
  
  Yeah it should be a per user decision..
  
  Server runners should be able to make their own decisions too.
  
  this is not mutually exclusive
  
  In some respect, it is. For example, users don't get to decide that they want to see defederated content without creating a new account somewhere else.
  Sorry if that was obvious and pedantic to say.
- Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you're participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It's no different for disinformation campaigns.
  It's not like they're just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they're taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it's very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.
  I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn't mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.
  
  My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.
  It's why I kind of wish that "engineer" was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
  
  How would a formal licensing system work for software engineering? How would they keep up with the rapid evolution in this industry?
  I believe in better education in this field, but the standard "engineer" programs from other fields don't translate to software. Having the government codify today's standards would stunt the industry as a whole and kill innovation. Imagine if they had done that in the 90s and said all programming must be waterfall, monolithic, relational dbs, and using c/Fortran/Cobol.
  Maybe I just don't understand how other countries handle it though. I know my country would absolutely screw it up
  
  Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.
  How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?
  How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I'm thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots' natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the autopilot and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.
  When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? Just for physical safety? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?
  None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.
  Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves "engineers", we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that's why software engineer should mean something.
  
  Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they're respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up in things like the all feed if their instance is problematic
  Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we get everything sorted out before we push anything and been a bit slower due to vacations
  
  That's much more reasonable than I expected =D I'd argue they can make an account on another instance if they want to participate
  
  Yeah thats why defederation isn't as bad of a decision currently while things get coded. It ruins a bit of the fediverse mechanics though of only needing one account to interact with different sites which is why having them able to interact in the instance communities while their outside posts are hidden is ideal
  The main sorts used in the instance are local new, local active, and subs which is what we are mainly optimizing for. Default sort when people make an account is local active which is a bit different from most other sites that default to all so it hasn't been as big of a problem for us as other instances but since we're growing more and more been working on some different guidelines for things like bots, federated instances, etc slowly on the side
- I understand the reasoning but I think it's not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent. Exploding heads is just violent propaganda. I hope you defederate.
  What about hexbear? Is programming.dev federated with them? Or are they intentionally defederated with everyone?
  
  hexbear split off and has been running their own fork for awhile separate from the rest of lemmy (so they couldnt federate with lemmy instances). They are coming back now though so lemmy instances will start to be able to interact with them soon
  
  Thanks for the info.
- I am not a fan of reaching for defederation often; I actually came here from beehaw because I felt like they just pulled that trigger too fast and too frequently.
  However, I do think that we should defederate from exploding-heads and hexbear. I don’t go looking for chances to be offended, but I do notice that when I see something truly distasteful on All it is almost exclusively from one of those two lately, and at this point removing them from All would make my lemmy experience just a bit more friendly.
  It’s not even worth reporting content about them because when you do it seems like a common theme is that they just tag you so they can harass you. I tested this myself recently by reporting obvious misinformation/propaganda and the next time I logged in there were indeed items waiting in my inbox calling me a coward, etc.
  Edit: fun fact, even if you block a user, and you block the community they are posting from, any time they mention you in a post you still get a message in your inbox, which seems like a pretty ridiculous oversight and a tool for harassment.

52 comments