(not sure if this is the right community, sorry)
Hi, someone posted this on another server. I’d like to request we defederate with rammy.site and exploding-heads.com as well. I scrolled through some of their posts and comments and it’s full of ridiculous anti-left propaganda, for example a post where some liberal Florida family fleeing the state when some child protection laws got passed, implying liberals abuse children and won’t live in a state that doesn’t allow them to. Just take a look for yourself.
" Admins of Lemmy.ml please consider defederating from rammy.site it has been taken over by right wing malicious actors from exploding-heads.com and the admin is nowhere to be found.
It is imperative that you take action as soon as possible the users on rammy are using the site to spread their messages to a further audience, we must nip this in the bud. If you don’t believe me check the instance for yourself, you’ll see it dominated with bigoted right wing posts and spam communities."
Edit: So many commenters think this is about political opinions or disagreement. It’s not. If I said “Mixing bleach and ammonia is good for you” I bet some of you would call that a political disagreement.
Lemmy was designed for both federation and defederation. It doesn’t make sense to blindly federate with every instance in existence, if for no other reason than some of them will be full of spambots and/or illegal content.
Illegal and spambots are one thing… I just don’t want thought police on sdf. If your reason for defederation is “I don’t like them, we should make them go away.” Then maybe we are no better then the people who say those things about us.
I think that users should be able to block instances, but being able to block communities may be good enough, at least at this stage in Lemmy’s development.
Another issue with extremists is they like to orchestrate coordinated harassment campaigns against people they don’t like. If that kind of thing starts to happen (which seems likely), that would be a good reason for defederation.
Everybody has the right to freedom of association. Nobody’s making a website “go away”. You’d still be free to go there and read their stuff on your own. I do think defederation should be a last resort, though.
I’m not saying there’s no place for defederation. I’m just saying the reasons given seem… Idea driven. Then again my experience with Lemmy has been pretty good so far. The post I saw was a “I don’t like these people and that group over there is thinking about blocking them, let’s join in”. People keep telling me it’s not about taste… Maybe I need to go look for myself. I’m just thinking about a conversation I had on mastodon where someone showed me a (hilarious) screenshot of Facebook telling them that they used hate speech… And it was just talking about a car. I guess… If they “stay in there lane” and leave our instances communitys groups alone, what is the harm in allowing two servers to speak. If on the other hand, they make threats, or mucking up the system (like is the concern with meta on mastodon) then perhaps defederating is the issue. MY PERSONAL CONCERN: Lemmy takes off, mom/grandma makes an account, and starts following content only mom or grandma would like. And boom… I’m horribly confused at the dinner table about those murder parties she’s planning to go to… And I’m going “what the hell? what are you talking about.” Let’s be honest, I want the firehose… I need to keep an eye on those crazies… All of them. Plus… I like to be offended. Keeps me humble to know people don’t like me.
There are two different problems
The exploding-heads website is the one that is “… Idea driven” (nicely said by you). Just as someone else mentioned, somebody might find my ideas distasteful and want to defederate with my instance just because my opinion doesn’t agree with theirs, I wouldn’t want to be treated that way, and that consideration should probably go both ways no matter whether I like their opinion or sense of humor/irony (or not). As a user, I have felt no impact about this “problem” but Federation or not is more of an administrator question and I am not an administrator.
The rammy.site website Is a website that has lost its administrator somewhere, so nobody is minding the store. That is concerning because it becomes an attractive nuisance to the network itself. Should there be concerning posts or other forms of malicious traffic, there is no one to raise those concerns to. As users, this doesn’t bother us very much, but this may be something for the administrators that federate with it to consider.
And as an administrator (or user), it makes sense to address the root of the problem. Many of the malicious actors on rammy appear to have ties to EH. Maintaining federation with the former is problematic. Maintaining with the latter is implicit approval of behavior harmful to the network.