[Discussion] Should we defederate exploding-heads.com? (Closing arguments)
[Discussion] Should we defederate exploding-heads.com? (Closing arguments)
Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you're not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I've linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn't the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
You're viewing a single thread.
Who here has concrete examples of content from exploding-heads that is objectionable and wasn't immediately downvoted, blocked, and/or banned? Terms like "Nazi bar" have been thrown around quite freely recently and it's giving me a bit of boy-who-cried-wolf vibes. Being conservative does not make you a Nazi. Being a troll does not make you a Nazi. Voting for Trump does not make you a Nazi. Perhaps some members of exploding-heads ARE Nazis, but calling any viewpoint you don't agree with as fascist or evil cheapens the term and prevents discourse.
I'm sure there is stuff on that instance that I won't want to see. But that's what the "block" option is for. When I first joined sh.itjust.works, nearly half of my /all was Hentai which I have no interest in seeing, and frankly found some of it disturbing. But I blocked those communities and now have an experience I enjoy.
Count me in the "defederation as a last resort when all else has failed" crowd. Over-fragmentation leads to less content, less engagement, and more echo chambers. If an army of Nazi bots suddenly floods us out, then we can take an appropriate action - but I have no evidence to suggest that is currently happening.
Spend an hour over there. That what I just did. It's a public website. Look at the front page. It's all alt-right, transphobic, antivax posts. All of it. I saw at least 8 posts celebrating the SCOTUS ruling to end to affirmative action in higher education. That's an interesting topic to discuss, but holy shit did they make it seem like a "white victory" party.
Notice I didn't say Nazi. People use that term colloquially to mean bigots and white nationalists. Don't get hung up on people calling other people Nazis.
I want to defederate them specifically because they are Trump-supporting, alt-right bigots. Not because they're "Nazis".
The admin married a black girl, and he had gay friends growing up, so he's clearly not a bigot, right? And yet when poked, he spat out an enormous list of the most tired Fox News talking points like blaming Biden for gas prices and anti-trans fearmongering. There were so many. Nonsense that's easily debunked. He's overly concerned with "sexual perversion", and he's just the kind of person I would never want to hang out with.
And he runs the whole place! What "concrete examples" do you need? Do you really think bigotry is going to get downvoted over there?
(For the record, I'm not a Biden supporter. I'm just pointing out you can't blame a US president for a global price increase.)
First link in parent post, original vote thread had lots of examples. Edit: the Lemmy.world posts also have examples.
There is quite a lot in that thread that I find distasteful and wouldn't personally engage with. But I don't see anything that is a "Nazi bar" as you describe it. I see a lot of unfunny shitposts, some political bait of questionably authenticity, and some bad faith discussion of transgender issues that other users attempted to moderate. I don't see doxxing, inciting to violence, NSFL material, CP, or anything else heinous enough to warrant defederation. Just a lot of Fox News talking points which, like it or not, a large percentage of the US would agree with.
Then we disagree on what is heinous, and I suppose that's how it's going to be. I think they are well past the line for "people I want to platform on social media", which is what federation ultimately is. It is not a legal action or something.
From these replies and others you seem to be of the opinion that any conservative ideology is heinous - and for what it's worth many here seem to agree with you. Personally I feel that turning some communities into liberal-only safe spaces while isolating others into conservative echo chambers only radicalizes both groups and makes constructive discourse increasingly less likely. People with other beliefs exist, vote, pay taxes, write laws, etc - perhaps if we spent less time demonizing each other and more time understanding why people feel certain ways we'd all be better off. Lemmy may not be the ideal place for such conversation, but where is?
I don't particularly care which side of the neoliberal coin you want to place their memes. In fact I think by focusing on that you think this is a conservative/liberal debate is kind of telling on yourself a little.
I just don't want to platform people who, for example, call me a child abuser for allowing my kid to live the life they've asked to live. They can be as "liberal" as they like.
For that example, you are referring to the sarcastic comment about the child in a mask? Why not just downvote and move on? Idiots say dumb shit all the time, online and in life. I legitimately don't understand why this has you so concerned.
First, federation isn't just a passive series of links, it's paying to host and serve their content from our instance. I'm not going to be part of, and very much not going to donate to, an instance that's fine with hosting material like that.
Second, no, their admins are pretty visibly transphobic. It was seeing their transphobic memes in my feed, before this conversation even came up, that was my initial problem. Since then there's been far more stuff. Had it been a few users maybe this conversation would be different, but it's the admin and from there the entire community. I intend to be an active part of the community I join on Lemmy - I think that's really the entire point of the federation model - and I'm not going to be an active part of a community that, as I said, stores and serves that kind of stuff.
Further, I'm on here for fun. My job deals aplenty with stress along these lines... I don't need it in my relaxation time as well.
You're quite welcome to feel differently. If the vote goes against me I'm just going to leave for a place that fits my needs. Likewise I encourage you to do the same. That's how it's supposed to work.
That's a fair point and an interesting distinction regarding hosting content - I had assumed that your home instance was simply fetching content hosted from elsewhere but I really don't know much about the underlying technology.
And we can certainly all pack up and go separate ways. I just worry that excessive fragmentation is an existential threat to the success of the ecosystem. Today I don't feel like there are enough users on Lemmy to reach a self-sustaining critical mass - if the barrier to entry is too high, we won't get enough engagement and this could turn into another failed experiment like Google+. If the price to pay for having a full vibrant community is downvoting and blocking some bad users every now and then that's something I am willing to do.
Finally, I think this interaction has been a good example of what I hope to get out of Lemmy. I don't agree with many of your points, but I am glad for the conversation and think I have learned something by exploring a point of view different to my own. If we had been siloed with only like-minded people, that would not have happened. Food for thought perhaps.
Should be noted, I don't plan to silo myself with only like minded people. I have a line though, and exploding heads is well beyond it.
Thanks for the conversation!
Edit to explain further: for example,.even if I leave this instance, I don't have any plans to defederate from it in my other instances. It will clearly be a place far more "okay" with the alt right than I am, but that doesn't mean I need to remove it from my feed entirely.
Personally I feel that turning some communities into liberal-only safe spaces while isolating others into conservative echo chambers only radicalizes both groups and makes constructive discourse increasingly less likely.
I completely agree. This is why I vote not to defederate. I believe that demonization of the opposite group is propaganda. There are good and bad people in both groups. People have different views and it's a spectrum.
While I'm inclined to agree I have yet to see a working example. I haven't even heard of anyone successfully convincing even a moderate right-leaning person of a more progressive view online.
Because that never happens. No one has one conversation and thinks "Wow my entire world view is totally wrong, thanks for enlightening me!" It happens over a long time and many different discussions. There is no specific moment where everything changes with a post to catalog it. It'll happen internally to the person and so slowly if you look at their recent history it'll seem like they've always been that way.
And I haven't seen the inverse. Should all leftist instances be defederated?
To the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody, "social justice wizard" considers dissent to be heinous.
There's a lot of examples of EH content that's been reposted in other threads on this topic, I'd suggest looking through them.
The phrase "Nazi Bar" is a reference to a set of tweets that are fairly well known on the Internet. I try to link context when using the phrase but it doesn't already happen. It's less about the 'Nazi' part of it and more about these being nasty hateful people who want to be nasty and hateful and throwing them out before they get the chance to chase off all of the decent folks. There's also a fairly famous quote attributed to a German saying (that I can't actually verify if it's a German saying or not) "If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table." (I don't completely agree with that quote but the stance it takes on enabling intolerance is one I generally do agree with).
Also, while voting for Trump and being conservative don't make you a Nazi, when it turns into vilification and (sometimes indirect) calls for extermination of marginalized groups in combination with a support of fascist government actions harming those marginalized groups... EH isn't just about conservative politics, conservatives who aren't openly bigoted aren't being banned from other communities just for being conservative. Some conservatives are being banned for openly stating their hateful views, and that hatred of others is what EH is about because it's not allowed elsewhere.
Just for some historical context here, so everyone is on the same page, the Nazis also went after trans people. Transphobic people aren't all Nazis, but they do hate some of the same people. (And incidentally there's been actual Nazis show up in support of TERFs.)
Is EH a Nazi instance? I don't know, but if the Neo-Nazis had an instance it'd look like EH. Also, it frankly doesn't matter - their views are hateful and I think they should be shown the door.
There's a lot to unpack here. For brevity I'll just say I've looked through a few of the linked threads and spent a few minutes on the EH home instance. I don't claim to be an expert or know the full back story. I have seen some horribly unfunny memes, several jokes in poor taste, and some problematic assertions with regard to LGBTQ issues. Not my crowd at all. But in my admittedly limited time it also hasn't been enough to induce the moral panic many users here are having. I mean really, "calls for extermination of marginalized groups in support of fascist government actions"? That's quite a leap from the childish shitposting I saw.
At the end of the day, a majority of sh.itjust.works does not want to associate with exploding-heads, it will likely defederated, and life will go on. I just worry that when the first response is always to silence those we don't agree with, the future of Lemmy looks very fragmented and full of tiny echo chambers. As I said elsewhere, blocking and banning a few bad actors is a small price to pay for having a vibrant sustainable community.
My friend, I'm worried I'm going to come across dickish here in my next paragraph, so let me say that you've proven intelligent and pleasant to talk to and I think well of you from our conversation here.
With that out of the way, I'm not sure how - as someone who seems legitimately pretty intelligent and reasonable, overall - you could hold an opinion like this in the year of our lord 2023. Have you not seen what's happened to public discourse over the last seven years? I think we're long, long past the point of wondering what the consequences of letting things that seem distasteful and unfunny in the particular vein of e-h go unchecked. It's an experiment that has been tested, tried, tested again, and tried again, and always to the same end. How many times do we need another /pol/ or r/t_d or r/conservative or r/asktrumpsupporters or on and on and on and on before people are allowed to point at something like this and say "yep it's this again" and be understood?
Have you watched the alt-right playbook? It's a wonderful summary of what people are concerned about.
Based on our positive interactions thus far, I'll respect the spirit of the question and try to answer truthfully.
I live in a blue city in a very red state. Many of my friends and most of my family are deeply conservative. I have a lot of empathy towards poor, rural, (mostly white) conservatives. They are told since birth by their parents, teachers, pastors, and other authority figures that if they work hard and pray harder they'll have a good life. Of course, this rarely works out because various demagogues like Trump abuse their loyalty by promising the moon and then robbing them blind.
The majority of these folks aren't inherently bad people. They're poorly educated, economically oppressed, and sick and tired of being told that they are the part of the problem because their ancestors owned slaves and Reagan was an asshole. They've gotten the short end of the stick for years! Is it any wonder that they cling to misinformation that gives them a common enemy or insists that the shitty state of the world is not their fault? Can you blame them for making a distasteful joke out of ignorance?
Hate is never acceptable. But all too often, "liberal" communities go straight to demonization and never attempt to open an honest discourse or rehabilitate people from years of lies and misinformation. Poor rural conservatives are victims too and deserve our respect and our empathy. Many are too deeply indoctrinated to engage meaningfully. But some aren't. And shunning them, refusing to talk to them, leaving them alone in their echo chambers doesn't do anyone much good. At the point where nearly half of Americans think that Trump is a good idea, the rest of us need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our institutions and ask how things got this way. I refuse to accept that it's because people are inherently assholes, there must be more to it than that.
I don't blame anyone who just wants to come online and look at pictures of cats and unwind and not deal with all this heavy bullshit. But I think the world would be a better place with a little more empathy. Call me naïve. Call me idealistic. But for my part I'll keep trying. Thanks for the meaningful dialogue on the subject.
I don't disagree with any of this in principle, but I don't think any of it applies here. Time, evidence, and even some sociology have shown us that all we gain from trying to mix alt right communities online with other ones is an increase in conflict, alienation of people disgusted by alt right, and strengthening of the alt right as a result. This isn't a place for conversation and conversion in those regards. Helping someone through ignorance and extremism requires an empathy and understanding that is almost impossible to achieve online, and certainly isn't suited to this kind of environment.
As I said, I deal with this stuff in real life all the time. I talk to these people often, and have I think even opened a few minds now and then. I don't even attempt it online. It's fruitless. That doesn't mean I think they're all lost causes individually, but it does mean I don't want their distasteful opinions stanking up my leisure time as well as my professional time.
"It's okay if I'm not nice to you, but it's not okay if you aren't nice to me."
People are too quick to call who don't agree them nazis. People lose level-headedness and rational thinking in situations like this.