Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that
#1: Background knowledge
Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)
We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.
#2: What happened?
There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users
There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)
^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic
^ Later in the argument
^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)
(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)
There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts
#3 Aftermath
Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)
snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.
One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that
Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future
- admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
- im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights
Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.
This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward
I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)
Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward
Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation
I think it would be reasonable to defederate from blahaj.zone. A majority of the toxic, negative, and aggressive comments I see on Lemmy seem to come from users of either blahaj or hexbear. The admin very intentionally curates a cult-like community by posting provocative posts and then banning everyone who expresses even slight disagreement. They have engaged in and doubled down on false accusations of CP against the lemmynsfw admins, which demonstrates that they are a risk for other instances be federated with. I normally very strongly oppose dedederation, but I think blahaj is a great example of when it makes sense. This is because the admin seems intent on starting drama rather than working with other instances to resolve conflict. It almost feels like some form of religious extremism lol
I of course block the instance from my account to avoid seeing posts from there, but toxic users are still visible on comments.
The team is fairly unison in wanting to avoid defederation as much as possible and leave it users to filter out content they personally don’t enjoy. Programming is a big and diverse field, and we want to make it as open as possible to everyone. Unless the instance breaks our own rules as described in the sidebar under “federation rules”, I feel like it would be an overreach by us to defederate an instance due to personal opinion.
That’s definitely fair. You’re a far more patient person than I would be, which makes me feel good about being on this instance.
Personally, I can speak on behalf of blahaj. They’re not bad, they’re just…strict in their judgement. Hexbear, on the other hand, is literally just a combination of the bad parts of 4chan and Twitter.
Not to mention Hexbear literally has a community dedicated to organizing brigades on what they see as problematic posts and comments
Hexbear is hella bad to the point where I won’t join an instance if they’re federated with them (why I’m not using a programming.dev account right now)
(Hopefully me commenting here (in a meta post) from another instance isn’t a problem but if it is I’ll happily delete this comment. I didn’t want to make a top level comment because, well, meta post)
Anyone’s free to comment here. Meta decisions apply to any users of the instance regardless of where your account is hosted
Hexbear we are federated with but its a half federation where a bunch of their communities have been hidden by default in all of the feeds (including the community youre referring to). Usually things are fine with them interacting in the threads here locally and we haven’t had any issues due to it being a specific niche
(Theres out of instance stuff but that should be up to that instance to handle them)
Also going to try to get a better instance block in at some point that allows people to block users if they want that level of control rather than just the communities. Just want these sorts of things to be determinable at the user level rather than instance level defederations since ultimately things are mostly fine
Idk, often when I see someone with pronouns in the username I hover over the name to check the instance, and normally if they’re being an asshole in the comment it’s hexbear and if they’re being nice and reasonable it’s blahaj, so to me it doesn’t seem quite the same.
Eh, best to not get into a pissing contest when you don’t have to. We need instance blocking to optionally affect comments as well as posts and then instances can stick to only defederating the worst of the worst (illegal, spam, or troll instances).
I generally agree they’re very dramatic but defederation isn’t necessary. If you’d like you can block it at a user level, there’s no reason for bad blood between instances and users getting caught in the crossfire.