Hello everyfur <3!
For those of you unaware, Lemmy.World has a significant problem with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel admin team. As one of the largest instances, they have a lot of weight to throw around, and they are acting extremely unprofessionally and counter to the ideals of the Fediverse by defederating with AN/db0 - which are broadly very well behaved and active instances.
More details are available in the OP. You can check this summary by Stamets, or sort the comments by Top, and check the top comments for the receipts of this recent issue.
As a pretty active, long standing member of this instance, I am calling for and advocating for Pawb.Social to join this action in standing against power-hungry instance admins acting according to their personal whims and vendettas, by agreeing to join in by pledging to defederate with Lemmy.world if the admin team refuses to back down from this behavior.
I would like to suggest that this is put to some kind of vote/referendum of Pawb users to decide how to approach this issue.
Thank you for reading! :3
Original post follows, cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67858553
🏴☠️ Hoist the Black Flag: Pledge to Boycott Lemmy World!
... if Lemmy World dares to defederate from any ship in the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla - https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/, https://anarchist.nexus/, and https://quokk.au/.
Mateys, we can’t let a mega‑instance captain bully the rest of the fleet just because their ship’s bigger. If Lemmy World tries to throw the FAF overboard, we’re calling for a show of solidarity: a fediverse blockade of Lemmy World in response, until the landlubbers see reason (i.e., there is an acceptable change in their leadership and/or this policy).
This is about mutual aid, not mutiny - standing together so no single admin gets to rule the seas unchallenged. A united armada of smaller instances can absolutely blunt Lemmy World’s outsized influence (and, let’s be honest, their ego).
☠️ A word to the captains: before hoisting colours or locking in a course, we ask ye to let your crew have their say. Run a poll, open the deck for discussion, and listen to the voices aboard your vessel. These seas belong to all of us, and decisions that shape our fediverse should be made together, not from the captain’s quarters alone.
If other captains be keen to chart this course with us, drop anchor and make the pledge public in the comments. The more hands on deck, the harder it is to sink any one of us. Let us know if you are holding a vote!
dbzer0 and AN members can vote on this pledge in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and quokk.au will be holding their own vote.
🏴☠️ Solidarity forever, and fair winds to the Flotilla!
Yeah, I think we need to really start a push to decentralize away from LW, especially communities. I think most LW users are probably anti-Zionists relatively unaware of the admin team's stances, and there are plenty of great folk and communities there, and it would be a shame to have to defederate with them, but yeah... there's no point at all in having a Fediverse if there's a single instance eclipsing all others, that's just how we end up right back where we started on Reddit. The fediverse is at its' best decentralized.
But we also need to be willing to take a stand and refuse to allow big instances to use their weight to bully smaller instances out, one at a time. That's why this mutual defederation pledge seems like a strong option, it lets us stand together, at least a little bit.
Or who are relatively aware, but have enough history with their account that they don't want to start their reputation over from scratch unless it's really necessary.
(Speaking of "relatively aware," though, it still isn't entirely clear to me to what extent the LW admins are driving the problem vs. Germany itself driving the problem and the admins feeling compelled to comply.)
Yeah, that too, which I do understand - but, honestly, the Fediverse would ultimately be in a much healthier place if users and communities decentralized away from lemmy.world even putting the zionism aside.
Personally, I feel like that's just a convenient excuse. Anecdotally, I've seen anti-Zionist messaging suppressed that wouldn't violate any German laws as far as I understand them. Personally, I very strongly believe that the LW admin team has a pretty strong pro-Zionist/pro-Israel bias, through my years of experience in the Fediverse (I've had other accounts older than this one) seeing the way they approach moderation and so on.
Their scrubbing of the modlogs is also highly suspicious to me.
Was kinda hoping that would happen naturally via other instances growing to match it, rather than LW having to shrink.
That's the other part of the story I'm relatively unaware of: the modlogs are generally shitty and incomplete anyway just due to bugs (or bad design decisions) in Lemmy that have nothing to do with admin actions, so I'm not convinced they're doing any deliberate manipulation of them.
For example, if you just remove a comment the comment text shows up in the modlog, but if you ban a user and check the box to remove the stuff the user posted that content is nuked and (AFAICT) doesn't show up anywhere anymore. That's not an admin thing; that's something any mod can do and it's easier than the alternative that would preserve the moderation history (i.e. manually removing each comment individually before banning the user).
This basically can't work, unless Lemmy gets an absolutely absurd amount of growth, just because of the numbers. According to fediverse observer, LW has 13.5k active users, whereas the next largest instance, sh.itjust.works, has only 2.3k. LW has around as many active users as the other ten largest instances combined. In order for those ten instances to catch up to LW, over 100,000 new active members would need to join the Fediverse and choose one of those ten instances, and new members are encouraged to join a semi-random instance, so in practice, it would most likely require far more than that. And again, this is ACTIVE users. LW has 13.5k active users, and a total of 192K users. So assuming that ratio holds, to gain 100,000 active users across those 10 instances, Lemmy would need to gain around 1.4 million users total. And this is assuming that none of these new users would go to lemmy.world.
Again, I can personally attest to seeing things vanish from the modlogs. This is the problem, it's really hard to independently prove. Even if I set up some sort of automated tool to download the modlogs regularly, you'd need to trust me that I wasn't somehow interfering with the operation of that tool.
I mean, I joined in the first Reddit exodus three years ago, and I've been expecting and hoping that it was the beginning of a mass migration from Reddit to Lemmy in the same way that migrations have happened from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit in the past. From that perspective, 1.4 million users, or 100K active ones, is nothing. But whatever; that's a different conversation.
Wait a second, you're saying you saw the modlogs change after-the-fact to remove information that was previously there? Holy shit, never mind what I wrote previously -- that's definitely fucked up!
(You say "again," but I didn't catch that aspect of the claim before. Sorry about that.)
You're right that it's both important and difficult to have proof, but I have no particular reason to disbelieve you, so for now I won't.
Now I'm second-guessing myself... maybe I just experienced a bug, maybe I just saw a user get purged rather than their content deleted... I think what I'm going to do is maybe find some sort of way I can automatically download the modlog periodically and see if anything goes missing.
Please do, and let me know what you find out! I might be interested in running such a tool myself even just so I can be a better mod (let alone investigating the stuff we're discussing here).