The Agora

Aye

As far as I know the whole concept of agora was just announced yesterday, and now we are saying that entire instances can be defederated based on a vote ( with no rules defined for when the vote ends or how votes are tallied ).

This is ridiculous and dangerous. This is poorly thought out. Above all, this is a terrible precedent. That any motivated group of users can go to an instance, clip some pics of bad behavior, create a thread and then spam it with 'aye' votes and close the vote whenever they please, and that result in the cutting off of an entire instance? Not even a freaking poll?

Please consider withdrawing this until the rules of agora voting are clearer.

Aye, and here's why. Exploding heads are not coming into our space and having discussions in good faith. They are acting as a troll farm and being abusive toward our members, and generally not following the rules of the road laid out for our instance. "Beehaw defederated us and I didn't like it" isn't a valid argument as this is a different situation. Beehaw defederated from here because they couldn't deal with the scale of moderating all the traffic coming from here which including abusive troll accounts. Exploding Heads is going by the alt right playbook and is almost exclusively being abusive, even if it's a small number of people.

And it is noticable. I see some people arguing that individuals who don't like that instance should just block it themselves, but that's not an available function of the threadiverse yet. You're saying that our server at large should endure abuse coming from that server because someday the functionality may be implemented for individuals to handle it themselves. I don't think this is a good moderation strategy and will only allow abusive actors to find foothold.

Aye. Looks like this instance is not very nice.

EDITED

I've changed my mind. I vote:

Aye.

I initially voted the other way, as I don't agree with the content there, but I didn't think that defederating should be our first action. I still believe that, but this instance has now proved to me that it is extremely toxic. See this post: https://lemmy.world/post/747912

And additionally, many folks will use the fact that we do not defederate from such a community as justification to defederate from us.

Could we have some links to examples so everyone can get an informed view of the kind of content you're talking about? I don't browse that instance normally.

Given the examples, aye

OP, as this seems to be almost exclusively discussion, and there's currently a discussion about how we should split things between discussion & votes, maybe you could retitle this as a Discussion and hold a proper vote after a day or two of convincing people here? If you want to ofc, those formats haven't been voted on yet.

I do agree with your cause, but with how much of a touchy subject defederation is, it's an excellent test-bed for doing things in as transparent and as rigorous a method as possible.

Aye

Aye

~~Overall~~ Aye, but I'd like to see some incriminating evidence of what we'd be blocking as an explanation and a warning before we do it. Pics, text posts can be banned and deleted.

Edit: Aye

Nay.

Personally I would feel that people that are present on those instances will find a home there and not enjoy being here or in other more reasonable instances. If they become more of a problem then consider it then.

Nay

I think we should also unblock Lemmygrad. If you want to access hateful content, you do you, but I think we should only block instances if their users cause problems here. I am not impacted by you accessing a stupid instance.

aye