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!
Is there any actual evidence of this? I've read the posts regarding this topic and what I've seen is an admin defederating an instance over a admin called "Murder all Zionists". I've personally not seen any actual evidence that they're "pro-Zionist, pro-Israel". I think you can definitely question how they handled this though. Seems like there poor communication from lemmy.world's side. On the other hand, I've seen many of the .world communities I'm subscribed to being flooded by newly created troll accounts that spam accusations of zionism, so I'm not sure you can really say that the userbase of those instances is always "well-behaved". At this point, and with the information I currently have, I'd vote to stay out of it and not participate in instance drama.
Yeah, you can start with this, where the admin basically self-identifies as Zionist (this is a reference to the user who had the username "murder all zionists" or whatever):
There's more screenshots and so on in this comment
They're very cagey about openly identifying as zionist, and openly cracking down on anti-Zionism, because they know it's a terrible look - so unfortunately it does require a bit of 'reading between the lines'. What they primarily do is selective rules enforcement, where rules are very strictly and punitively enforced against anti-Zionist users, and pro-Zionist users get a lot more flex.
You can also take a look through the Lemmy.world modlog - again, sometimes they're quite "crypto" about it, sometimes they delete stuff without putting it into the modlog, and regularly scrub the modlogs, as you can tell by the weird gaps in the dates, but often there are some traces:
There's also this recent thread in the comic strips community, and this post: Lemmy.world Is Anti‑Humanity. How Its Admins Weaponized Defederation to Silence Palestine Solidarity
There are probably others out there who can fish out more evidence, if you're still not convinced, there are probably a couple users I could reach out to and see what else we can dig up.
So what this shows me is that the .world admin and his organization have repeatedly been accused of being zionist (including, supposedly, being called a "zionazi" by the AN admin). So when the AN admin changed their name to "Murder all Zionists", the admin took it as a threat against himself, as they consider him a zionist. I can see that - if a guy wearing a "kill all nazis" shirt was screaming at me that I'm a nazi, I'd probably feel threatened, despite not being a nazi.
It's really not clear enough for me. I'm also pretty hesitant to follow the FAF's narrative here due to how they previously treated feddit.org's defederation. That instance simply followed local laws which they had to if they wanted to, y'know, continue to exist, as well as banning things like calls for violence. But the FAF treated them like rabid zionists. After that, I'm frankly not inclined to support them now.
Frankly, I would prefer instances to migrate to servers in a less fascist jurisdiction in that sort of case, rather than comply.
The laws in Germany and Austria (against questioning Israel's right to exist etc) were actually created precisely because they stopped being fascist. That they can now be abused to silence criticism of a regime committing a genocide is a horrible bit of irony I suppose.
The fediverse foundation is an Austrian non-profit organization, who's running feddit on their own servers. Just moving their entire operation to a different country is not really a practical suggestion, as I don't think they have anywhere close to the funds they'd need to do that.
Yeah, that sort of thing is why the First Amendment in the US is (supposed to be) pretty damn close to absolute.
I'm more concerned with lemmy.world than I am with feddit.org, since (among other reasons) that's where my account is. Although I don't know much about lemmy.world's funding or administration, I kinda expect that they're getting enough donations that lack of money shouldn't be an excuse not to move out of German jurisdiction. And even if they aren't right now, I'm willing to bet if they created a funding campaign for that purpose they'd change pretty quick.
Anyway, I think it's worth trying to get them to move so that they can relax the ToS. If nothing else, the response might help us figure out whether they're "follow[ing] local laws" because they have to or because they want to.
I understand how you feel. We had similar issues back in the early 2010s when fascism was on the rise -- fascists would often be very subtle and "hide their power level", and accusers were made out to be overreacting or accusing people of being fascist without any evidence.
History has borne out that, yes, they were fascists, once there were enough of them, they stopped hiding it. This is the exact same pattern, once again.
If you want to believe that otherwise reasonable people are just accusing people of being zionists for no particularly good reason, and that we're all just irrational, and that the lemmy.world admin team are just scrubbing their modlogs for no particular reason, by all means, that's your prerogative I suppose.
Out of curiosity, do you believe that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza?
Yes, they absolutely are.
OK, good! Was just checking out of an abundance of caution :3 <3