Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
The instance is currently federated with every instance (including places like lemmygrad and explodingheads) as the current stance is defederation should be a last resort with users being able to choose what they want to see instead
Exploding heads has some very questionable content though so its status is currently being discussed by the admins
I wish there were a way to block entire instances per user.
This is actively being discussed too
This would make my life so much easier
Yeah it should be a per user decision..
Server runners should be able to make their own decisions too.
Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you're participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It's no different for disinformation campaigns.
It's not like they're just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they're taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it's very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.
I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn't mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.
My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.
It's why I kind of wish that "engineer" was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they're respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up in things like the all feed if their instance is problematic
Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we get everything sorted out before we push anything and been a bit slower due to vacations
That's much more reasonable than I expected =D I'd argue they can make an account on another instance if they want to participate
Yeah thats why defederation isn't as bad of a decision currently while things get coded. It ruins a bit of the fediverse mechanics though of only needing one account to interact with different sites which is why having them able to interact in the instance communities while their outside posts are hidden is ideal
The main sorts used in the instance are local new, local active, and subs which is what we are mainly optimizing for. Default sort when people make an account is local active which is a bit different from most other sites that default to all so it hasn't been as big of a problem for us as other instances but since we're growing more and more been working on some different guidelines for things like bots, federated instances, etc slowly on the side
I understand the reasoning but I think it's not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent. Exploding heads is just violent propaganda. I hope you defederate.
What about hexbear? Is programming.dev federated with them? Or are they intentionally defederated with everyone?
hexbear split off and has been running their own fork for awhile separate from the rest of lemmy (so they couldnt federate with lemmy instances). They are coming back now though so lemmy instances will start to be able to interact with them soon
Thanks for the info.
I am not a fan of reaching for defederation often; I actually came here from beehaw because I felt like they just pulled that trigger too fast and too frequently.
However, I do think that we should defederate from exploding-heads and hexbear. I don’t go looking for chances to be offended, but I do notice that when I see something truly distasteful on All it is almost exclusively from one of those two lately, and at this point removing them from All would make my lemmy experience just a bit more friendly.
It’s not even worth reporting content about them because when you do it seems like a common theme is that they just tag you so they can harass you. I tested this myself recently by reporting obvious misinformation/propaganda and the next time I logged in there were indeed items waiting in my inbox calling me a coward, etc.
Edit: fun fact, even if you block a user, and you block the community they are posting from, any time they mention you in a post you still get a message in your inbox, which seems like a pretty ridiculous oversight and a tool for harassment.
For those not aware of any drama, could you spill the beans?
Here's the front page of exploding-heads.com. It has a picture of a trans person hanging themselves with slurs I censored with an emoji since it's probably against the rules to post here
God, that is actively depressing. Why can't people leave us alone 😟
There's a lot of disinformation and propaganda on it. They also used rammy.site to post exclusively harmful shit because it's unmoderated
Thanks for the info
Definitely looks like a place you don't want to interact with
Np, I left my previous instance when I learned they don't defederate at all. Beehaw might take it too far, but I can't be part of a free speech absolutist group that doesn't understand the consequences of giving a platform to those types of campaigns
Sad to see it. I'm still holding out hope that they'll do the responsible thing.
Dear programming.dev userbase,
Before downvoting me to hell please read this:
As you can see I'm an EH user and I really like to look around here. I don't comment as much but if I ever want to coment I would like to be able to.
RN the communities where "harmful and dangeorus propaganda" is being actively posted on are [email protected], [email protected] and one more which I can't remember the name while writing this moment. If you don't want to look at them please block them or ask the admins to purge them.
Defederation is not a good option. The fediverse was not made to be defederated from.
I'm ready for conversations
The issue with purging them is it can devolve into whack a mole if more problem communities pop up (and they likely will considering the current communities are not being handled by the admins when things like drawings of people hanging themselves are posted) (Could also be whack a mole with instances but a community on an instance with 10 members can do a lot less than a community on an instance with 7k members)
The solution would be limiting the exploding heads instance so that posts don't show up but would still allow users there to participate in coding chats. Unfortunately though that functionality is not currently built into lemmy (and can't be coded into this instance for awhile) so the next best option is just defederating and users there having two accounts which would be the case on any other site
If we get more things coded into the site we can revisit what we decide later since we would have more options to manage it
I would like if you just purge those communities or let users block them. The same way we are technically federated with lemmygrad but if you go to the "All" tab you won't see many posts from them.
As you've said a community with 10 members would do much less damage than a community with 7k members, we are an instance with less than 20 active users. We aren't doing too much damage and the "damage" we are doing could be mitigated pretty easy without defederation.
For anybody that stumbles upon this post, pushed out our decision on it and it was talked about in the august newsletter https://programming.dev/post/1671024
The exploding-heads communities that break our rules have been removed from the instance (and if you find any more in the future report a post that shows it breaking the rules and ill deal with it)