From your home instance, go to search and enter the community like this:

!dndnext@ttrpg.network

Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community. Defederating such an instance is a basic best practice in the Fediverse.

More importantly for those who wring their hands about not limiting the whole community – failure to defederate from bad actor instances will be factored in when good productive instances with content folks here want to see decide whether to defederate us. (Remember that this place is already defederated by one prominent instance, which is a material detriment to users here.)

It is reasonable and normal to disagree about where the line is drawn in terms of what instances deserve defederation. It’s often ambiguous what’s a normal instance with sloppy moderation and a few bad apples^[1] versus what’s a place that is run by and for bad actors.

There’s a wide range of standards that can be applied. It seems like the general vibe can be broken down into three groups:

• Only defederate spammers and child porn
• Only defederate spammers child porn and tankies
• Defederate spammers child porn, tankies, and rampantly fascist troll farms

I don’t think anyone has really advocated for anything aggressive than that on here (could be wrong)

Vote: imaqtpie

Additional commentary: goat in particular seems based on activity to be trolling/sealioning/derailing discussions

Defederation is a normal part of life in the fediverse, and this instance already defederates from the start. Healthy fediverse instances have clear standards for what instances they do and don’t federate with.

Normally those are defined by admin; in this case admin has now stated a desire for the community to make rules decisions. So, reasonable and normal to discuss. And reasonable and normal for folks to have disagreements about.

This instance is already paying the price for lax moderation in having been defederated by beehaw, which regardless of how much you or I personally care about the content on beehaw does notably impact the user experience for many folks. And the more this site “stops worrying about nazis” the more that will happen. (And the more users will get fed fed up and migrate to instances with clearer moderation practices.)

Not referring to you or anyone in particular, but it feels like a lot of the folks in this conversation had never heard of defederation before a couple weeks ago and are acting like it and the fediverse generally are a brand new idea. Defederation for Lemmy in many ways has higher stakes than it does for Mastodon due to being structured around communities and not just individual user – but that’s all the more reason to have clear standards for it.

Because rather than make a decision one way or the other, the instance admin announced an undefined consensus-based decision making process, as a result of which we now have both this thread and this one

The call is coming from inside the house on this one

Yeah, I dunno at this point in terms of what the intentions are. But in terms of how this all looks to the outside on the nazi-bar-ification scale, it’s not great. Give an inch and they’ll take a mile, and failure to cut them off reads to them as tacit approval. The longer it goes on, the more attractive this instance looks to them, and the more likely it is that other instances that actually host content people want to see will choose to defederate this instance to stop the spread.

It’s up to you to come together, discuss, and reach a consensus. If you wish to add, remove, or modify a rule, make a post, garner support from other members, and I’ll implement the change. This invitation extends beyond our immediate community - I welcome input from everyone across the fediverse. Again to be clear, I gave an example of modifying rules but this applies to anything that I have the ability to do on this instance.

@TheDude@sh.itjust.works what constitutes “consensus”? A majority, a supermajority? 100% buy-in on most important topics is simply not on the table, and setting a bar too high for action is tantamount to predetermining that action will not be taken.

(I have no problem with the tyranny of the admin, either, as long as it’s clear what direction the site is headed in so I know whether to stick around or not.)

De-federation should not be used as a political tool to divide social media along partisan lines.

I certainly agree with the statement, but bigotry isn’t a partisan issue. I don’t think anybody here is calling for defederation over estate taxes or redistricting or infrastructure bills. We’re talking about people’s right to exist and hate campaigns that are the equivalent of someone posting on behalf of ISIS, to put it charitably. Apologists for people engaged in ideologically motivated violence, literally out there killing people.

Yeah, I think basically people have a reasonable right to know if the site has a hard line on tankies and a soft line on fascists, because if so, it’s a cryptofascist site IMO.

Like, I think absolute free speech maximalism is not a sustainable moderation principle, but even if I did, that’s not we have here to begin with.

See first post in previous thread on the main community: https://sh.itjust.works/post/151703

Not an ideal response to a report, to say the least.

I think they are low hanging fruit that would represent no GREAT loss if chucked, but I also think this is a good chance for everyone here to think deeper about the process for this.

I agree! Kicking these questions to the newly formed “Agora” without defining a process (which was done after there was already substantial discussion on exploding heads which surfaced more than enough material for admin to make a decision IMO) invites this kind of “well shit, let’s vote then” thread.

But if the instance is going to be healthy going forward, standards and a process are a must.

The question is not, are there some assholes there, the question is whether the admin/moderators there are operating a right wing extremist troll farm. So for example, is bigotry taken down promptly (or at all) when it’s reported? Or is it left up?

I think in this case it’s quite easy to say chuck 'em. But there is absolutely a need to discuss standards and a repeatable process for defederation generally, because this certainly won’t be the last time it comes up, either way. I started a discussion thread here

Created a separate [Discussion] post for general defederation standards.

It will be important to articulate what standards are intended to be applied to instances generally; it’s not just about the particularly awful vibes of this particular one. There will be dozens or hundreds more like it, not to mention the spammers and whatnot.

Aye

Going forward, will be necessary to articulate standards and processes for defederation, to avoid having to relitigate the concepts of free speech, hate speech, etc. every time.

Nay

Also wtf

The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti

You have no right to tell me what I can see and respond to anymore than I have a right to tell you who you can and cannot block.

That’s also not what defederating is. Nobody’s speech or ability to see speech is being restricted, since we are all free to set up accounts on other instances. Users are making a reasonable request to the instance owner for a normal moderation action that is in line with stated community standards and past defederation decisions (i.e., lemmygrad); the instance owner is free to honor it or not.

The basic question, which every fediverse instance has been having to deal with since inception, is how to draw the line on communities that willingly include bad actors. It has to be drawn somewhere, and where you draw it says a lot.

lol, defederating is not anything like jail

• Federating is like sitting at a big table with a bunch of people in a restaurant.
• Blocking is moving a couple seats down from someone who’s being an asshole so you can’t hear them anymore (but meanwhile they’re still harassing your friends, you’re just ignoring it)
• Defederating is separating the group so that you’re no longer at the table with the asshole and their asshole friends

Now, in a tolerant society, we should be tolerant of people who are merely annoying. But not people who are normalizing violence and hate. There are people you fundamentally should not sit at a table with.

It’s important to understand the difference between a good faith disagreement and bad faith propaganda and harassment campaigns, which is what the right wing troll farms deal in.

Nazi instances will proliferate and it benefits nobody else to stay in federation with them. It makes the whole fediverse less usable and more dangerous. And whether you like it or not it sends a message to people who are targeted by them that they are not truly welcome here, regardless of whatever moderation rules are espoused.

And in North America, as in many places, these people are acting as a propaganda arm for a literal violent terror movement. Sometimes under a fig leaf of ”irony” but it makes no material difference whether they’re chuckling when they spew shit to me

They can do this from any instance with open registrations. Instances with closed or moderated registrations are a different story. So, could just as easily say, why doesn’t sh.itjust.works restrict new user creation, which is a common practice on smaller fediverse instances including beehaw.

(Answer: then you can’t onboard new users in a mass migration. But that’s what creates the tension.)

If all the new trolls are coming from two instances, and defederating those two instances will keep the load manageable for them, why wouldn’t they?

This kind of decision is a big problem for scaling up Lemmy as a reddit replacement and welcoming huge volumes of new users, but I don’t think that’s Beehaw’s goal and certainly not their responsibility.

The tricky bit is figuring out how to set up fediverse-wide communities in places that most (non-troll) users won’t be cut off from them.