** Update: I was tired when I wrote this comment, and I got some of the details mixed up. Basically I had misremembered and thought it was Luminous in part 1, but that was actually Deceptichum. Sorry for any confusion. I only just became aware of the mistake since someone pointed it out to me. I don't think it really makes the actions seem any more justifiable in either case. **

There really hasn't been any particular ongoing issue between our instances, until now, other than the usual mild frictions. Let me lay out the chain of events, as I understand it.

1. Mr Kaplan made a post about the Fediverse Hosting Foundation taking over the running of lemmy-federate. This was the comment that raised the ire of Mr Kaplan (see pic below). At the time, Mr Kaplan complained to me in a DM he had been called a Nazi. I equivocated a little because I thought it was a stretch of the imagination to take it so personally. But in good faith, and because I could tell he was very angry, I chose to ask LuminousDeceptichum to remove the "ZioNazi" phrase from his post in order to calm the situation down. LuminousDeceptichum had also posted the FHF icon with a swastika on top to YPTB, and I asked him to remove that too. Yes, he's a bit of a shit-stirrer. I thought that was the end of it.

2. I believe that sometime after LuminousDeceptichum got banned by LW, heLuminous banned Mr Kaplan for being a Zionist.

3. On Sunday, I got a message from Mr Kaplan claiming that anarchist.nexus was "calling for me to be murdered". I could hardly believe it. But when I looked into it, it appears he had noticed some provocative slogans in Luminous' user bio on Anarchist Nexus saying "Murder all Zionists", "Murder all Nazis" or something along those lines. I don't know how he noticed them, maybe because he got banned. There was absolutely nothing specifically naming Mr Kaplan afaik. It was just those slogans in his bio.

Now do I agree that wording was way over the top for an instance admin? Yes. And it is obviously not something that would lead to good relations with the other instances with whom we federate. So it was bad judgment, agreed. Luminous agreed to step down from the role as a result.

But for me, personally, I see stuff similar to that all the time on both leftist and mainstream instances, though usually in less edgy forms like "death to the idf" or "death to zionists". I never imagined anyone would take something like that as a legitimate threat of anything, unless having a moral compass is a threat. Because the Zionists currently taking potshots at the testicles of Palestinian boys for ethnic cleansing purposes are the very people Luminous was wishing death upon in reality, not Mr Kaplan.

If Mr Kaplan wants to make this all about him, that's his prerogative. But it seems like a heck of a leap to go from an [admittedly provocatively worded] slogan to a claim anarchist.nexus wanted him personally murdered. Or otherwise it's just a pretext for defederation, I'm not sure really what his motives or goals are in this.

I'll also note that he made the defederation decision himself with no consultation with his own admin team, or with our admin team. We were given no heads up and no time to act or assess the situation. There was also no consultation with the LW community. So that was, in my opinion a bit of a PTB move for the admin of Lemmy's biggest instance to take in response. It also felt wildly disproportionate to me over one user, even if it was an admin.

I get that he felt personally attacked by Luminous, but was he really, or is that just the worst possible interpretation that could be made about what is, in fact, a fairly common sentiment on lemmy? And the fact that one admin running the largest Lemmy instance can make kneejerk decisions like this that impact thousands of users with no accountability and no checks and balances is kind of worrying. Remember spez?

Whatever y'all think of dbzer0 and AN, and I know we have our haters (hi!), one thing I hope we can agree we do well is that our whole instance gets to vote whether we decide to defederate another instance. It's never up to any one person. It takes all the drama and kneejerk respones out of the process.

Anyway, I'm not going to post anything else here, just wanted to put our side across where you could all see it so we could get a chance at a fair hearing in this forum. As far as I'm concerned if LW reverts the defederation and puts some better processes in place for these types of situations then we are all good. Will they drag it out for weeks and then double down, as they nearly always do? Or will they reverse course? Stay tuned folks, I have no fucking idea, and that sucks.

Yes, I would say this is looking looking like an interpersonal fued more than level headed moderating decisions.

Welp, this is the nature of federation. Some folks will buckle up, others will eject. I'm glad that the network will survive either way.