Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591

This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:

• For: (4), (3), (1), (8)
• Against:
• Local Community: +0.8
• Outsider sentiment: Supportive
• Total: +16.8
• Percentage: 100.00%

This vote will complete in 1 days

Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.

If I have to choose between this user and federation with db0 I would side with db0.

However I must comment frankly that moving immediately to defederation over a thread in which the subject - @[email protected] - has never been the subject of db0 moderation action (with over 4k combined comments and posts over 6 months) in some attempt to strongarm me into action is, at minimum, distasteful.

Trust me, I'm a card carrying Communist party member. I do not care for conservative views at all. But I did not create The Lemmy Club to be a partisan instance - but a general instance to replace reddit. I do of course have limits, however in reviewing the posting history of @[email protected] I do not find anything worthy of banning. I do not like some of the sources they post. But they also post non-conservative stories and sources as well and generally conduct themselves in a reasonable manner in all posts and comments. They do not appear to me to be some wild-MAGA idiot, although they do seem to be conservative. They post unfavorable things about Trump fairly often. The fact that it has come to this is to me, a bit bizarre.

Thanks for having this open to outside comments, though.

@bdonvr, admin of The Lemmy Club here. I'd like to provide an update and some comments.

What went wrong:

One prolific user (realcaseyrollins) of my instance has created several communities and is usually one of the only submitters to their own communities. The posts in them generally garner very little interaction but once in a while hit some main feeds and get a few comments. One such post by this user to the (relatively) largest community, /c/[email protected], was a link to a Breitbart article. The content and headline of the article was not particularly objectionable, but as one user pointed out, Breitbart is a terrible news source whose use should be discouraged. The aforemenioned moderator of the community removed the comment citing a rule they had: "Using the Poisoning The Well fallacy to attack sources shared in a post is presently not allowed (this rule may change in the future, and isolated instances will not subject you to a permanent ban)". This sparked a post to /c/yepowertrippinbastards.

I have previously checked into this user's post history and comments and although I don't agree with them politically (or in the way that they moderate), they did not appear to me to be an extreme MAGA/neo-nazi type and was otherwise reasonable in interactions with others, so I did not ban them. I saw it like this - if you don't like their little news community, use one of the many other communities on the fediverse. Such is the strength of our platform. The one moderated by this user would continue to languish in obscurity.

After some interaction with db0 staff in that thread it was pointed out to me that many of my instance's "top" communities were right-wing or adjacent to that kind of thing. This is something I was aware of and not at all fond of. I had already been debating removing several before this. The only reason I hadn't was that all of these communities were essentially dead. The posts in them barely ever got more than 2-3 votes, and comments even rarer still. I was more hoping that some more normal communities would take hold here and just drown them out. We are a very small instance. But seeing my defense of not immediately banning realcaseyrollins and the community list a db0 admin then moved to open this thread.

As realcaseyrollins was the only point of discussion so far, I made a comment saying that the issue presented thus far were not worthy of defederation talk. After some more discussion it was pointed out to me that there were two videos posted to my instance which were very much explicit neo-nazi propaganda. I had not seen these posts because they were made to the very much dead (no more than a dozen posts in it's six month history) because they garnered basically no votes, no comments, and had not been reported to me until now. I also would not have known by the title of the videos without looking into it further. The posts were made by an outside user.

What I have done to address it.

I do not tolerate nazis or their ilk, nor will I ever. The moment I was made aware of this the two posts were promptly removed and the user banned.

Furthermore I had discovered one user of my instance - @marathon - who had been posting things that weren't so explicitly awful but trending that way. After careful inspections of their posts and comments I discovered that they were ban evading from other instances and upvoting their own posts with alts. They were also banned and all of their communities were removed.

After further consideration of some of the commentary here by users and admins I decided that I could not be host to any communities that were conservative/right wing. Even if they did not reach the level of neo-nazi. I am very much a leftist. I was never comfortable with these communities but I did not create The Lemmy Club to be a partisan instance. I had not removed them to date because they were small and dead and was hoping they'd amount to nothing rather than having to foray into actively moderating on an ideological basis. Some of that is definitely naivety on my part. In theory I don't have too much of a problem with communities that aren't politically aligned with my personal views existing on my instance (to a point, of course). I made The Lemmy Club as a general instance. But I now realize, as sole admin of the site, that I can't effectively moderate any such community centered around politics that differ from my own to that extent. I can't be hands off in case it becomes more extremist either. So I have implemented a new site-wide rule: "Users or communities that, in the view of the admin team, jeopardize the good standing of The Lemmy Club with other instances may be removed.". This allows me broader, more generic power than a rule explicitly banning "right-wing" communities, and entirely avoids the debate of what constitutes "too right wing" while accomplishing the same thing. After implementing this rule I moved to remove all communities that are themed around these kinds of politics.

In addition, after seeing this thread - and with no prompting from me - realcaseyrollins has decided to voluntarily close /c/[email protected], /c/[email protected], and /c/[email protected].

I hope this addresses any concerns that you might have.

A few comments on the situation.

I started this instance because I was excited by the fediverse and wanted to contribute. I pay, personally, hundreds of dollars a year to run this site and provide space to some users in the fediverse. With the generosity of a few of my users half of my costs are now covered by them. This is something I think both the db0 team and I share, though their operation and contribution to the fediverse have been far larger than mine, which I commend. We are a very small instance. We are not pushing for growth for growths sake. I think with this in mind and the interactions you've had with me thus far have shown that I'm a reasonable person who is more than willing to engage in dialogue.

With that said I really am not fond of the way this whole situation came about. I would have very much appreciated a PM or message on Element before taking such a drastic step. I don't think that this strongarming was at all necessary. I believe such actions should follow an escalation process. The scope of the issue should be taken into account in this as well, as far as actual neo-nazi posts we're talking about two, to a dead comm, that got no interaction. A quick report and I would have immediately banned the user and removed the posts, and probably have just went ahead and removed the community as well. Or we could've continued discussion on /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Not that I have an issue addressing issues publicly, but the title of this thread will make it seem to many users (and let's face it, we're mostly ex-redditors here. Most of us read way too much into headlines and don't read further) that The Lemmy Club is some right-wing instance full of unsavory crap. I mean the governance comm on db0 has only ever had seven total posts and this is one. Gotta be pretty bad right? And that impression will not go away very easy. Just the suggestion that db0 should defederate would signal to most people that the instance is toxic and the problem quite serious and that the admins had probably already attempted dialogue that went nowhere. And that upsets me because that is not the case at all, and does actively harm this small little project that I've put in a lot of time and personal effort into. We all want to help build the fediverse. Let's work together in a constructive manner, that's all I ask.

Thanks for reading,

@bdonvr, sole admin of thelemmy.club

I read the comments here, starting from the perspective that merely being a "conservative" was no reason for defederation (I have a 1990s idea of what the word "conservative" means), then it turns out we're talking about people posting Nazi shit at will and it staying up, which definitelly justifies defederation and the "Nazi bar" label, but apparently (from his own participation here) the Admin of the instance is willing to ban the Nazi types and possibly the groups in that instance which were ok with Nazi posts.

If the admin does this, then I'm against defederation, if not then I'm in favour of defederation. Sadly I can't encode such a view in just a Yay or Nay metric (i.e. upvote/downvote), hence I will neither upvote nor downvote and instead am leaving my rationale here as a post.

I don't let Nazis/Fascists into anywhere that I frequent. Defederate.

I'm in vote of a temporary defederation, until they address the problem. This shit is not okay, and is not a matter of just "different opinions".

Defederate. Zero tolerance for Nazis.

Defederate.

I understand why the owner of the instance finds our reaction distasteful, but unfortunately, we have no choice but to defederate from an instance whose largest community is run by this individual.

This is a governance community, meant for decisions (such as, should we be federated with a specific instance), not a diplomacy community. We don't vote on "should we ask the owner of this instance to actually moderate in ways we find tolerable"? The unfortunate truth here is that instance is currently mostly this kind of garbage, so until it isn't, defederation.

(Also I spent an hour trawling this individual's comments to make sure of my opinion because I have ADHD and can't stop myself, and while my normal reaction is surgical, this is too conveniently a case where every individual involved could have been acting in bad faith. Better to be thorough here than not.)

Defederate.

Tolerance of intolerance isn’t good.

For a culture of tolerance to flourish then the intolerant must be purged. I love freedom of speech but Nazis should be given no quarter for their ideologies to metastasize into the rest of the fediverse.

I would have preferred a vote first to see if we should just ban those comms, or defederate. If we ban those comms and the right-wingers, we can take a more "surgical" approach. Personally I will vote against, in favour or B&B (block & ban). But I am open to be convinced otherwise if the problem is worse than I thought.

Edit: After the revelation that there's literal neonazis posting neonazi videos in there already, I switch my vote to defed.

We don't abide by no Nazis. Defederate. Take away their bullhorn.

I'm for temporary defederation if the admin does not react to an ultimatum to clean house. Being federated means increasing the reach of their message, and the message is hate. If Xitter was worth banning, then this is too.

The admin seems caught in the tolerance paradoxon, and doesn't realize that his inaction is an indirect endorsement of the content he's hosting. Seems to be too nice for his own good, maybe a warning cannon salvo is in order.

yeah, i don't want our bar connected to a nazi bar

Don’t recall seeing them when scrolling through All so I wouldn’t miss them if we defederated.

Defederate until the problem is solved.

I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say defed them all!

Defederate. If they get better, they can have a second chance. If they don't, no skin off my balls.

I think temporary defederation is sensible.

Sure, you dbzer0 admins could play whack-a-mole with the right-wingers attracted to that instance, and your users could play it too... but come on, too much effort. Specially because I expect your users to gravitate heavily towards anarchism, so this sort of "democracy doesn't work!" muppet will likely rub them off the wrong way.

Also, didn't dbzer0 ban Twitter links? I remember you guys were voting on something like this. If you did, then defederating thelemmy.club is even more sensible, as it's consistent with previous decisions.

(Just my two cents. I'm not from this instance, I don't even know if I can vote [I probably can't].)

Voting against defederation. I’d prefer we have a clear protocol of escalation: let people block those communities, if it gets egregious and we start seeing hex style brigading or continuous support for bans, consider an instance wide community ban, then go for full defederation

Haven't seen enough of it on main to warrant hair-trigger actions IMO

“Keep a weather eye and steady as she goes”

never heard of the instance before, never seen any of their content or posting. If it's problematic by all means, defederate them, but then i would also think the instance admin would ban them as well.

Otherwise maybe we should watch with apprehension until something happens?

The nazi bar problem is a real problem, but so much as the nazi bar problem is real, there is also the anti-nazi bar. The bar that invents and creates nazis, just to kick them out of the bar, to ensure there are no nazis. It's not really an easy problem to solve.

i'd be more concerned if they were doing the hexbear thing where they started infiltrating other instances and causing problems there. Personally, don't really care if they exist in a vacuum though. Assuming they don't cause any problems.

I don't think this is a Nazi bar problem just yet. I have not really seen any heinous comment on Lemmy so far and I spend too much time on here. We can always defederate later if this instance gets out of hand.

Voting against defederation.

If I understand federation in lemmy correctly, we wouldn't see comments and posts from the users from lemmy.club in communities on other instances too, right?

I'm absolutely in favour of doing something about it, but defederation as a first step seems to be a bit too much, even if it is temporary.

Having not actually run into any of the mentioned nazi content myself, I don't feel personally invested in defederation.

I personally prefer for the nazis to be clustered together in one corner so that it's easy to mute or block them without their knowledge, and I do have some apprehension against defederating this early and causing them to scatter into wind on other instances.

If any of those comms they're moderating actually have nazi content, it should be an easy decision to cut them lose since we have a vested interest in keeping that shit off our servers, but if the fear is simply that the right-lean of the comms may create a place for nazis to gather then I might be on the side of waiting for signs of infection before amputation.