Lemmy.world Admin Response to Defederation from Exploding Heads
We're closing this thread. Everything that could be said has been said. Thank you
Original Post:
Today, we want to inform everyone that we have decided to defederate from https://exploding-heads.com/. We understand that defederating should always be a last resort, and individuals can certainly block communities. However, blocking alone does not prevent potential harm to vulnerable communities.
After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and multiple comments from the community, we have concluded that exploding-heads is not adhering to the Lemmy or Citizen Code of Conduct. Therefore, we cannot, in good faith, continue to federate with an instance that consistently promotes hate, racism, and bullying.
Again, deciding to defederate from an instance is not taken lightly. In the future, we will continue to review instances on a case-by-case bases.
As for our community, please refrain from posting or commenting with hateful words as well. Arguing back and calling people names is not the solution. The best course of action is to report the posts or comments violating our server rules.
“We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.”
Everybody crying about free speech because they got cut off from the nazis are very welcome to go sign up with the nazis and let the door hit you on the way out.
That seems like the right choice. Those seem to be some pretty vile people. They can have their free speech, but it doesn't mean we have to listen to it. Normally I'd not be in agreeance about defederating, but hate speech shouldn't have a safe haven among us. Thanks, for defederating from them.
Thank you for your diligence, transparency, and for being proactive about this. I, for one, am glad to see that racism, bigotry, and homophobia are not welcome on lemmy.world, and that the admin team takes that seriously.
Thank you. One of those dudes were over on sh.itjust.works when they defederated it, arguing that the exploding heads community was totally fine! As you can see... no, it was not: https://lemmy.world/comment/577634
You can expand the rest comment section for context but the screenshot in the link speaks for itself.
Edit: here come the downvotes! The exploding heads guys really hate that I screenshotted & exposed the cesspit they call home. Lol
And this right here is what separates Lemmy from voat: active community moderation that works to limit the reach of hateful bigots. While I’m a big proponent of free speech myself, I do agree that many kinds of ‘speech’ aren’t the most conductive thing for building a welcoming platform; especially one that caters to many vulnerable groups.
This move also highlights the core strength of a decentralized platform, by the way: while people who no longer want to engage with this content can stay safe, nobody was deplatformed! We achieved a clean break without banning or ‘silencing’ anybody.
So, good job on responsibly using the defed hammer!
Fantastic. I don't want to have to block all transphobic shithole communities since that requires me looking at them. If hateful people could just group together in their 4chan bubbles which are defederated from sane people, that'd be awesome.
I'm not a fan of de federation except in extreme circumstances... but this is a good choice. Its not a couple mods being slow to respond to reports, but real nasty speach from admins.
In case it hasn't been suggested before, it might be a good idea to give users the ability to block a whole instance, rather than one magazine at a time
To those whinging about the decision to defederate Exploding Heads, think about it this way.
Mastodon once got a massive influx of users because Gab attempted to expand their influence as a far-right Twitter competitor by joining their fediverse. The various other instances responded in kind by collectively defederating Gab because they didn't want their platforms to be flooded by the racist and bigoted gruel that Gab's clientele were spewing out.
And here lies the beauty of free speech and the fediverse. People are free to create an instance with their own rules, but others are also free to disassociate from them.
Good. I was getting sick of blocking them every time one of their new communities popped up that wasn't blocked yet. I have yet to see a single thread from that instance that didn't immediately make me block the user and community.
I'm the head mod of /r/darkbrandon (75k) doing a voluntary migration to Lemmy & Kbin. We do not condone the behavior shown in that moderator post. I've setup a community on this instance so I'm just reaching to say that officially. Take care and thanks for hosting.
I am trying to create a tolerant NSFW community on lemmy, it's the first time I hear about this "Citizen Code of Conduct". While I am totally opposed to Doxxing and general harassment, there is this part which concerns me:
Unacceptable Behavior
The following behaviors are considered harassment and are unacceptable within our community:
[...]
Posting or displaying sexually explicit [...] material.
Where does this apply? In lemmy code contribution? or in the communities? If this applies to the community, this is quite worrisome.
Went over to their site. I found it ironic that their ten level reply thread complaining about the defederation made me realize that the different level reply colors form a rainbow. Hopefully that isn't for just June, it is very helpful when trying to figure out who is responding to who.
Good move. We don't need to tolerate nazis. Though the code of conduct is admittedly progressive and this in itself will exclude people who are conservative. I am OK with seedy underbellies, or areas with people I don't agree with and I think we should avoid being moral police where possible, but the rhetoric on exploding heads is too much. They aren't actually conservatives they are just insane people, literal crazies that belong on 4chan or voat, or maybe truth social if that's still a thing.
I’m not usually a fan of defederation, but I'm actually glad to see it in this case. It's beneficial to have healthy disagreements in opinion and interactions with people who don’t share your views. However, I haven't witnessed anything positive resulting from these interactions so far.
I really appreciate your transparency and responsiveness to the community.
This is great. Free speech and edgy jokes are one thing, but this is literally just random crazy racist sexist bullshit with a classic case of Biden derangement syndrome. Why even bother federating with these boggarts
It's crazy to me that people find those types of racist and distasteful posts funny. Does anyone here know if kbin has already defederated with exploding-heads? And yes I have already blocked the domain. This type of shit doesn't belong on the fediverse.
Good, and thank you. No need to tolerate hate and I would be happy if we had a low bar for instances that encourage hateful conduct.
How hard is it to defederate and re-federate an instance? I'd like if the admins had the ability to remove instances if they weren't properly moderated, and then add them back if things improved.
To all who don’t like this decision, that’s fine. This isn’t the only Lemmy instance, that’s the whole point of a federated system. Go to another instance that aligns with your values.
Good call. I think within my first day or two here some idiot from exploding heads was commenting on here about being banned by beehaw and just acting like a complete tool. We’re better off without them.
I'm sure there are a lot of nuances here I'm not familiar with--but, in general, I'm always in favor of insisting on ('enforcing'?) "adult behavior". I have a zero tolerance policy where I solo-mod. If you can't talk/disagree politely with someone, then you need to go somewhere else...
This was definitely the right move, and one of the big selling points to me. Like reddit would ban subs, but the users were still there. So all the bigots still got to post everywhere and just create a new sub. Now they can keep their area and be over there.
Is there a definitive list of defederated instances? Since this would be a dynamic list I would hope each instance has this linked on the main page, (ideally with justification on who the said instance was defedarated and why).
I would really love the ability to further delineate how severe a block we create. Ex we might want to block their content, or their users, or both. We might still want to allow them to view our content but not comment, or we might want them to be able to participate in a limited set of communities.
It would give federations a way to "keep the lines open" and allow a way for a possible future where we refederate.
I think Lemmy needs something like filter instead of cut off or not.
Similar to search engines save, medium, no filter. Before cutting everyone appart completely.
I'm not sure I agree with the decision but I'm not against it either. I would much prefer a recommended block list that can be default on upon signup, but that is not currently an option. I liked the email analogy of lemmy, it would be strange for gmail to full on block any communication to another email provider. Yes, spam filter all of it, but cut it off completely, I'd have to see something violent or dangerous coming from the admins.
I don't like this. It might be ok in this example but ... generally, defederation should be a democratic decision, voted by the users of an instance. Defederation blocks access to all communities on this instance. Its like my ISP blocking the country of France because he don't like their leader. Users should decide for them selves which community to block. We have the tools for this.
Yes one can create a second account on another instance but constant switching instances is no solution.
While I agree that EH contains some hateful material I would have preferred if the lemmy.world community was some how included in the decision beforehand.
I'm sure in this case the result would still have been federation. But it would feel less like someone else needs to protect me from some idiots trying to be edgy.
Genuinely curious, whats wrong this post: https://exploding-heads.com/post/90780? Seems like they are making fun of the actress, and even then thats a edited picture. All the other ones make sense in violating the rules, but not sure why this was flagged as inappropriate?
“We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.”
Oh really? Then please explain why you guys let this slip.
With the level of control and how power hungry the mods are, trying to stifle the discussion in the exact same way reddit does, this place will just become a smaller reddit with somewhat more intelligble posts.
Are we going to defederate from lemmygrad and lemmy.ml too? Or is blatant tankie spam OK? I have a feeling that this community just wants to censor anything that’s right of center. Which sounds pretty fascist to me if I’m being honest.
I am not too familiar with the instance.
But I fail to see how are the linked posts harasment?
Only the screenshot of the private message is bad.
Sure they are dumb and bad memes, but not enough to defederate.
These posts are not any worse than what everyone is posting about u/spez these days.
I was hoping Lemmy could be the reddit replacement I was looking for, but obviously not. This type of idiotic bullshit "by design" is precisely why none of these federated sites stand a chance of replacing something like reddit.
I've only been here a week and there's already been a bunch of defederations. I wonder how long it will take for all instances to defederate from each other?
Please don't defederate just like that. Defederation tells your users that we are not smart enough to make our decisions, and that we need the admins to make the decisions for us. I assure you that is not the case. We can block users or communities that we see problems with.
Huh. Those posts actually don't seem too bad. I actually am a user over there, and seen some actual racism there from time to time.
I'm always not happy whenever a free speech instance gets blocked, but as was the case with Poast, I can't be too mad about it if the users are participating in racism.
I was hoping to change the culture over there but I'm just too busy IRL to change the overall tenor of that instance on my own.