The Lemmy Club is currently suffering from "The Nazi Bar" problem. All of their top communities are run by three right-wingers as illustrated below.
The Lemmy Club instance admin doesn't seem to want to ban them, for the reasons mentioned below:
This vote is on whether or not we should defederate from this instance until they address their Nazi Bar problem.
Upvote = for defederation. Downvote = against defederation.
Edit: As others have mentioned, happy to treat this a only a temporary measure until the problem is resolved.
Edit 2: The Lemmy Club admin has said they will implement a rule against right wing communities, and has taken action on some problematic posts and users (see original comments below).
I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the admin here, as they have responded in good faith:
If you implement those changes then I’d be willing to withdraw the defederation proposal and consider the problem resolved.
I would have preferred a vote first to see if we should just ban those comms, or defederate. If we ban those comms and the right-wingers, we can take a more "surgical" approach. Personally I will vote against, in favour or B&B (block & ban). But I am open to be convinced otherwise if the problem is worse than I thought.
Edit: After the revelation that there's literal neonazis posting neonazi videos in there already, I switch my vote to defed.
I thought about that, but tbh I also wanted to put pressure on the admin to take action against the right wing communities and community bans would not have achieved that.
These were two posts by a non-user of my instance that had zero points or comments. They had not been reported to me until now and I have promptly banned them and removed their content. I do not now nor have ever tolerated such content.
Although this content has garnered near zero "community" or interaction on my instance I have decided that I cannot effectively moderate nor leave conservative communities be and have therefore removed them.
I hope that this addresses any concerns you or your userbase may have. Please report anything like that you see - it is possible otherwise that I may miss it.
But this is part of the problem, you have to see that, right? The fact that you have literal neonazi content and nobody is bothering to even report it to you, means that those comms are too far gone. Before fascists can thrive in a community, you need to have a large silent majority which are ok with fascist content.
We also can't be responsible for moderating your instance. We can maybe point one or two examples, but eventually we'll have to label the whole instance as unsalvageable.
I saw in your other updates that you removed some of these comms and have added some rules and this is good, but this is also a time to be vigilant on your own, at least for a while.
The comms were essentially dead. It's hard to say anything 'thrived' there. The posts in question had zero interaction. Of course it's concerning it was there at all however these were not "communities" where any kind of discussion happened. 2 people would've made a large silent majority of people who were actually browsing in these comms on a weekly basis.
If this had been somewhere where people actually made comments or posted more than a handful of times a month (there were 12 posts and 6 comments in the entire history of the comm) - I'm sure I would have identified and taken action earlier. Additionally, they were both video posts. It's entirely possible nobody ever clicked on them to watch them and I don't know these videos by title and did not realize what they were, and without further action to prompt me I did not look further into them.
Of course I will be more vigilant going forward.
I mostly lurk but I'm with the B&B approach for now.
If it starts to spread to other comms on the instance, it'd be worth taking another look at defederation.
I agree with your surgical approach in general, though I don't want to vote one way or another in this case, because I'm torn between whether it's a good idea, or too soon to act so broadly.
Despite Lemmy and the fediverse at large being an international community, I would predict a very American style community schism at some point based on political ideology. I think we're going to end up with a conservative zone, a liberal/progressive zone, a tankie zone, and then... Instances like this one. They're "neutral", they will have to experience the Nazi bar problem before they either take action or put on an armband.
db0, you know the tech better than I do. Is this sort of thing possible? Fractured and semi exclusive fediverse zones that are connected very loosely by neutral parties?
I honestly don't know if it's a good thing, but I definitely understand the sentiment of not wanting to interact with whatever American conservatives have become.
Not really connected. If we defed a fash instance, we can't see them in a "neutral" space either.
Gotcha, thanks.
I feel like we're gonna head towards that community schism sooner rather than later. I'm glad for you that the decision doesn't lie solely in your hands thanks to the governance system. Hang in there.
Thank you both for the great read.
My initial reaction was "defed", but now that I've seen this back-and-forth, I'm going to remove it and stay ~~neutral~~ in the b&b camp as well.
Signed, Another (mostly) lurker