Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you're not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I've linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn't the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
While I generally agree with the sentiment and I was very amenable to this argument originally, I have since seen enough and read enough that I now believe that a free speech absolutist instance that allows very close to anything will just cause any new users to see the communities with bigoted content and walk away. We will be left only with those that are ok with bigoted content. This will degrade our instance.
You might be right and maybe I have not spent enough time here to become fed up with it yet.
Cheers for your feedback.
Well, all of us have seen the content by now, and we're still here.
However, you do make a good point. The limitations of this platform are quite grating at the moment. The solution would be a blocklist of communities and users that would be immediately applied to new accounts, and they could turn it off if they wanted.
It's hard to argue that having each new user potentially encounter bigoted content is worth it. The question still remains how much of that content actually pops up in their feed.
I logged into this account after several days of inactivity to participate in this discussion and not just appear as someone from another instance. I left this instance because this decision-making process about what to do about an instance whose users consistently harass users on other instances was too arduous and was beginning to give me concerns that this problem would fester and get out of control. Not only that, but I picked the instance I moved to after a discussion with a few users about 4 other instances (lemmy.world was added to that list later in that conversation) that had moved a little bit faster on this issue. This was three days ago.
There are people who I've talked to that are still keeping an eye on things and intend to leave or stay depending on the outcome of how this discussion goes. The things that absolutely must be communicated are what the defederation policy will be, and what kind of time frame can be expected for executing a defederation based on this policy.
The point I'm trying to make is that "All of us have seen the content by now, and we're still here" is a form of selection bias, and is precisely the concern. Not everyone who has seen the content is still here. The users who have stayed are more okay with seeing this kind of content than the entire set of users who started on the instance. Whatever decision you come to will influence the long-term community that matures here on sh.itjust.works. Whether you think you're leaving it purely in the hands of all of us or not, the timing of when you're holding the discussion and having the vote, and all of this changes the outcomes of the discussion and the vote. If you keep putting this decision off forever, the more favorable the community will become for and towards what the exploding-heads community represents to the greater fediverse.
This is a well reasoned point and worthy of consideration.
I believe we still have some time before our community begins to resemble the exploding-heads community, but I see what you are saying.
This may be true, and I don't like to see users go to other instances, but just because they go to another instance doesn't mean that we lose them from our communities. All of the people on other servers are still federated with us and able to continue to influence the evolution of this community.
First of all, we are not putting it off, we're literally voting tomorrow.
Secondly, that is not true. The reason we are not instantly defederating is not because we are favorable towards their community, but because we are trying to be careful and judicious about overly utilizing defederation in the early days of this platform.
This should be viewed as a signal that we are not going to be reactionary and impulsive when it comes to blocking people.
As long as you are intelligent and open-minded enough to listen to the arguments that have been presented, I don't think we are signaling any approval or proclivity for the content at exploding.heads.
Of course, you are probably corect that some people are getting the wrong impression and leaving this instance because of this. I would argue that's their loss, more so than ours.
I'm sorry, you're the only representative of the instance in here responding to stuff like this and as a result I feel like I'm coming down harder on you than you deserve...
But you already have this guy and me in the thread who have left because of the instance's inaction and through it, tacit support of e-h. We're two who bothered to watch the server to see if anything actually happened. By nature, most people who left will definitely not have done this. They're just gone, they're not popping into agora to see if you got your shit together. I only did because I have a community I was working on and don't really want to restart it.
Your "oh maybe, I kinda guess it's possible" attitude here is the problem. You are acting now, great, but this was an incredibly slow response, it doesn't matter if your vote is tomorrow. It's already incredibly, mind bogglingly slow, and you still decided to post a day long debate thread before the vote (it seems to show overwhelming support for defederation, which I consider totally unsurprising, and makes me wonder again what you've been waiting for).
I understand a little about why it was so glacial, but you continue to appear to not understand that this was actually a huge issue, that in that time you let the server bias towards the alt-right, showed a general support for alt right topics, and alienated an unknowable number of users in the process. Those are all the sort of users you probably wanted to keep, the ones who aren't just content to see things go badly and will take action when they see it rather than stare like a deer in headlights. If they're like me, they were probably posting and trying to find out the delay before leaving in disgust. They're folks that care about having an instance that reflects their values, and you've let them - us - down.
That can't be undone, but the way you keep shrugging it off as though you really don't see it does not inspire confidence. It tells me that you think it's not really a huge issue that you lost a bunch of users who aren't comfortable with hate media showing up in their feed, stored on the servers they're using, because you're more worried about alienating the people who are okay with it by acting too quickly.
Yeah, I was a bit hyperbolic to make the point. But still, over time this will change those who stay.
It's selection bias. I wrote a big, long comment just now before seeing this. sh.itjust.works has already bled users, even if the MAU has continued to grow. It's just that the makeup of those monthly active users is shifting, and will continue to do so the longer nothing is done one way or the other
That's also what the admin of exploding-heads insists on: "Just block those two communities and you'll be fine"
But then problematic exploding-heads users will just create new communities that admins then have to remove, like this one: https://exploding-heads.com/c/positive (CW: transgender slur)
It's a lot less hassle to just block the instance that willingly harbors these individuals.
I wouldn't. The community I linked is still there.
Actions speak louder than words, and that admin has done nothing to follow up on the things he says he will do