FYI, lots of users are polling to defederate sh.itjust.works

I just don't get it.

Block the c/TheDonald community. That's it. That's all you need to do.

When it gets no visits, no views, and only it's handful of users meme-ing each other, it'll die. One of the big reasons TheDonald took off on Reddit was because of all the attention it got.

So, don't give them attention. Don't feed the trolls.

I'm not saying to tolerate neo-nazis. But running from them isn't exactly a time proven strategy, either. They will exist, and it's up to all of us to remind them that their views are garbage.

It does feel that many people here on lemmy are experiencing 1st hand of "feeding the troll". The Donald community created is probably done by less than a handful of people and it drove hundred times more amount of users to turn against each other.

This is why I frown upon the idea of defederation and I blame the users for opening that pandora's box. People, including mods, are too busy getting at each other throats and praising the value of their bubble communities rather than having any sort of planning.

I'm surprised the admin gives it so much thought. Just delete "the Donald" and be done with it. Who is going to complain that they don't want to give fascists a platform? That's how you handle them, by not giving them a second thought, all this discussion is already giving them way too much publicity.

Defederation is not the answer. Honestly, it's such a powerful and destructive tool that I question whether it should exist period.

Users should be treated like adults who are capable of determining by themselves what content they are comfortable with seeing.

If I don't want to see an extremist political community on my feed, I block that community myself. If an instance is full of such communities, I block that instance myself.

I don't want or need some other random on the internet to make judgement calls on what content I can or cannot interact with.

Defederation is a tactical nuke, that if used incorrectly will destroy the freedom, decentralization and openness of Lemmy, and replace it with a far more centralized series of walled gardens.

I fear that people are trying to recreate the reddit model on Lemmy. Lemmy is not reddit, Lemmy is better than reddit. Reddit is top down, Lemmy is bottom up. We don't need more mod control, we need more user control.

I would love to see more features built for user moderation of content. Perhaps I could subscribe to another users blocklist, or follow their 'recommended communities'. Instances themselves could maintain suggested block lists, and users could chose to enable or disable them at their own discretion.

I'm really not sure that defederation has any place at all. Even things like spam and bot instances I think would be better handled by a blocklist (enabled by default even), that users can turn on or off as they see fit.

I'm out of here if the community stays up. I've already blocked it, but we cannot be tolerant with the intolerant.

They need to go, and other instances would be right to ban. That's the only way this model works.

Seeing people here pushing back for once against the trigger-happy defederating mindset actually gives me hope in the future of this instance.

I'm gratified that a lot of the conversations over there seem to point out that you shouldn't defederate entire instances because of a few bad actors. Realistically we can't all move to a new server every time a troll shows up, and the bigger the server the more likelihood of trolls.

I havent seen the donald or exploding heads content. if I was the admin of this instance id probably want to see blatant rule breaking examples to be able to remove them. is there blatant racism and whatnot over there or is it typical stuff meant to trigger liberals?

if there is blatant racism etc, have we reported it?

The server admin removed the community, maybe update your post.

oooff didn't know there was TheDonald on this instance. Not very happy about that.

Let's just all take a breath. This instance has its rules, and I expect them to be adhered to for content on this instance.

Let's give moderator time to get involved, and the community time to navigate precident setting actions. I think it is cool this instance is being set up to be self governing. But it's just getting set up. And people work and are otherwise not constantly available.

Allowing hate speech and telling people to decide for themselves what to follow is moderate argumentation that gives more power to fascists. Taking the middle road always gives power to those willing to take it.

I don't know but it seems that this particular community didn't exist until the dust-up regarding explodingheads and the discussions that have occurred afterward, including the Agora vote.

So, to me it seems that it was started in retaliation to that particular discussion/event.

The active user at the core continually changes their display name, making it more difficult to know that you're replying to the same person unless you're checking the account, as they only mod the one community.

That alone makes it bad faith or trolling, however you want to phrase it, and it seems both the user and the community are at odds with the overall environment that many users came to this instance for.

I think it actively hampers the conversation we were having with beehaw regarding refederation, and don't disagree with their observation in the matter.

Yes, we as users can block them. And?

Call it growing pains call it whatever you'd like but I think that ignoring the larger context behind why it's here and here now is missing the point of why "just block it as a user" isn't the ideal solution.

I didn't even know this "community" was even here, mostly because that's just one guy and a half talking to themselves.

1-2 angry contrarians is hardly a community but still,
I'm not a big fan of being associated with that.
Defederation as the one and only step is a bit nuts to me, as there are 6k+ other users here.
By that logic, anyone that ever had a reddit account also supported /r/thedonald back then, which is just not the case.
As for what to do with that troll, I couldn't care less if they get the boot, yet evading a ban on here isn't exactly hard.

Not again...

Instances could also remove, ban & purge that remote community to be done with it 👌🏻

I've been using this instance more than beehaw cause i wanted a more broad federation view, but i don't want this place to become a Nazi bar. That small sub may grow. If it isn't banned then I'll probably move again and welcome the defedration

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don't love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone's attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn't caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I'm sure it's something we'll need to address internally, but it's just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

so you're getting rid of the Nazis, right? right?

I think that is a mistake. Plenty of nice folks on this instance people shouldn't jump to conclusions. Also this discourse on that thread is really problematic. The idea of defederating a whole instance over 1 community is terrible. I would understand. If most of that instance was a troll den that is definitely not the case with this instance

As an outsider, I wrote already here my thougths. I'm against de-federating, since it's a nuclear option, but I would lie if I say that I'm okay with this situation. Add to this that this server hasn't de-federated exoloding-heads.com (a far right server that really hates trans people) but has no problem with blocking lemmygrad.ml (an awful Tankie server). But in the end that's your decision 🤷🏻

Looks like TheDude@sh.itjust.works likely has a day job. Last commented 15 hours ago... Give it some time.

I am logged in to sh.itjust.works and I cannot see thedonald or the_donald. You guys sure it's still there?

I’m trying to understand this as a refuge from Reddit. I joined this instance because of the renewable energy commitment. I’m not beholden to this instance, but this seems like something a federated system could handle without banning an instance. Am I confused about how this works?

Was going to post this at thedonald but found I'm already banned. Oh well, it was low effort anyway. If anyone who isn't banned wants to execute this better please be my guest.

:(

I don't think that users on a fledgling platform should be this gung-ho about fragmentation, but it is what it is. Lemmy is starting to feel like something I should just revisit in a year: either to postmortem another perennially niche service, or to finally "pick a side" once the chips are more settled, even though I don't particularly want to.

This issue has been resolved.

The trouble with having a federated server containing a lot of users/communities promoting bigotry is that it dirties the name of Lemmy. The dirtying dissuades people from joining. It ultimately helps ONLY the group causing the dirtying and harms the majority.

The most important thing people have on Fediverse is freedom of choice and, I hope, of expression. There are countless isolated communities outside of it, corporate or not, which one can use as a safe space when necessary. I really hope this decentralized archipelago will not turn into a) centralized echo chamber, or b) even more decentralized set of very small echo chambers. We need to be able to experience everything that there is, and react to it if/however we like. And for that, we need substantial amount of communities to be federated to everyone else. I hate when some delusional freak praises Mao or Stalin, who literally washed the land with the blood of the innocent and built a new order on their bones. Or when someone writes a trolling(?) post which implies open racism. But I better be able to read those posts than not.

While I blocked the community, I don't want my little community blocked because the whole instance is defederated. Should that happen I will leave - an advantage of federation.

Edit: I also blocked the 2 posters. There were only 2.

Defederation is a double-edged sword. In the end, those who defederate will lock themselves into a smaller space and lose out on content produced by users outside of their instance. With how hard it currently is to discover content, a big instance defederating from lots of other instances with little good reason can easily backfire. At least that's how I see it from what I currently understand about Lemmy.

I think people are trying to defederate to filter content, which is not something that defederating is good for right now, cause every big instance has a lot of diverse communities. Also, there's been concerns about bots and safety which makes sense, but that doesn't mean that we're under risk of staying defederated permanently or for any significant amount of time. Moderation tools, content filtering and discovery needs to become much better before that resolved for everyone in a satisfying way.

As for /c/thedonald and communities like it specifically, it's ridiculous to take what seems to me as satire as 100% serious straight up bigotry, but I do understand that we've seen communities with origins in satire turn to serious on the internet before. I think an instance-wide flag for communities that signals that the content is satire when you open them or see a post from them. Allow communities to be created with it from the start but only modifiable by admins afterwards, so you can't take it away or add it after a community is made. It might just work to mitigate this problem and help punish rule breaking quicker and easier.

I didn't know about it until I checked Beehaw. It's easy enough to block the community so I can't see it, but I would rather it not be here. TheDonald and The Agora feel like polar opposite ideals.

Dang... I just signed up and picked that instance since it's powered by renewables and the agora exists. I'll give it a minute to see how things go, but looks like I should switch to another instance.

More drama now targeting sowing discord between the large communities. The Donald sucks but if we remove them then we have to make rules to what communities we will now allow or not. Can't just make special rules for one person.

I've seen them and blocked them immediately. It's a couple of sad losers posting news (or "news") articles. I'm one of the more vocal supporters of defederating that one instance since they've openly become a bigoted shithole and their mods are in favor of keeping it that way, but this? If T_D showed up on a different instance I'd be generally in favor of that instance banning that community and nipping the problem in the bud (Trumpers have been fine with sitting at a table with Nazis for a while) but I wouldn't be supporting defederaton over a couple of assholes on an otherwise decent instance. Assuming they're not bots, they'll probably get themselves banned soon enough for being awful if we've got enough mods here that can keep a close eye on them, and maybe just using the current rules the moment they start to be openly bigoted is the right play here.

I know the mod tools on Lemmy aren't terribly robust, but are other instances able to block individual communities without defederaton? I would like to believe T_D is a temporary problem here and I think it'd be interesting to see if the current set of rules take out the trash in a timely manner, or if they just fester while building a critical mass before infecting the whole instance.

Inevitable, the fee instances and the non-free instances tend to sort themselves out and clump together

I could be wrong here (so forgive me), but wasn't one of the reasons that people flocked to this instance and others was because they didn't want some 'overseer' to make judgments on their behalf? Did they not come here for the freedom to choose what was important and meaningful to them and disregard that which wasn't?

I realize that there are growing pains going on here - that these instances which have been fairly unknown and relatively steady in their user base have now exploded in popularity and have caused many an issue upon communities and admins that were not prepared for such an explosive influx of users.

If we all really want to come together as a community, I believe it is important to understand all of the dynamics that are currently evolving and allow some time for all of this tumult (and influx of users) to settle down before demanding certain actions to be taken.

Crazy that instances wanna defederate from a whole other instance because there's a community for another political party. Let people who challenge your ideas exist, jesus

Everyone i don't like is a Nazi/tankie/label. The internet is so predictable and boring around this.

Doesn't help when tech has sided with one US political party and we have to pretend that people need to fight amongst each other on identity bullshit issues instead of the political and corporate class doing whatever they want with their power imbalance

But hey, blue Vs red, this Vs that. Cry victim and bully...

We need users to curate their own content instead of demanding circlejerks of identical ideology and inconsistent rules.