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.
Examples:
https://lemmy.world/post/577526 - Community Moderator Harassment
https://exploding-heads.com/post/92194 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/90780 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/91488 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/93725 - Community Moderator Post
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.
Lemmy Code of Conduct
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
Citizen Code of Conduct https://github.com/stumpsyn/policies/blob/master/citizen_code_of_conduct.md
“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.”
I don’t like memetically enforced political agendas that parade around as people’s personal decisions. And you’re right, now that I see joining this instance was against my personal interests without realizing it but also understand why a larger instance would need to curate their content. Right-wing memes aren’t usually good at pretending to be a joke. Easy to censor half the politics in the country under the guise of being inclusive.
It’s not censorship. The bigots at exploding heads are free to say whatever they want. We’re just not going to listen to it.
Nor is it half the country’s political beliefs. Calling people slurs and making fun of people’s race isn’t a political belief that makes up half the country.
Free speech doesn’t mean people are forced to listen to anything and everything that is ever said.
While I understand and respect your perspective, I’d like to offer a different viewpoint. Let’s not forget that the principle of free speech is fundamental to maintaining a democratic society. It ensures that everyone, irrespective of their beliefs or ideologies, has the opportunity to express their opinions.
The statement “Easy to censor half the politics in the country under the guise of being inclusive” raises a valid concern about how inclusivity might be misused to silence dissenting views. Certainly, bigotry and hate speech have no place in a civil discourse. However, it’s important to distinguish between these and legitimate, if controversial, political views.
While you are correct that free speech doesn’t obligate anyone to listen, it does protect the right of individuals to speak their minds without fear of censorship. When we begin to label certain political ideologies as inherently offensive and seek to silence them, we risk creating a homogeneous society where only one set of beliefs is considered acceptable. This undermines the very concept of diversity and inclusion, as it prevents the representation of a wide range of perspectives.
Furthermore, it’s a slippery slope. Once we start censoring political discourse under the banner of inclusivity, where do we draw the line? Who decides what views are offensive and should be silenced? It’s easy to pretend that defederating from an instance because there are SOME users posting ‘hate speech’ isn’t censorship of half the country’s political beliefs. But the people who can tolerate those people are also being defederated. In my own experience, those people don’t tolerate that behavior by choice, but are more understanding that a persons circumstances usually impact their habits and behaviors and that not everyone can afford enough therapy to straighten those things out.
By your definition anybody who does’t open their home to any travelling neonazi preaching their ideology is “censoring” said neonazis.
The impression that passes is that your black & white absolutist definition of “censorship” is just you just trying to weaponize the word for your own political ends rather than having given it genuine thought.
It’s not a “slippery slope” because it’s not the kind of situation were a little bit of limitation leads innevitably to total limitation: there is an actual point somewhere in the middle where somebody’s right to speech stops and somebody else’s right to not be drowned in the shouts of those they consider abhorrent starts.
No rights are unbound in a society because there are other people who want different things, often contraditory, who have rights too, and its mathematically impossible for everybodys rights to be unbounded, and that applies to the right of Speech as much as it applies to, for example the right of not being insulted or the right to Silence.
Those who are genuinelly trying to be fair about all this are not looking at the Right To Free Speech as an absolute right because any right being an absolute would trample on everybody else’s different but related rights - a situation of maximum unfairness against everybody else - what they’re looking at is were that right ends and other people’s rights start, or in other words the right ballance between everybody’s rights.
Personally, whilst I think Lemmy users should be allowed to, themselves, totally block instances rather than it being delegated to unelected server admins (and yeah, I know that sufficiently technically expert users can set-up their own instances - and I am one such user - but that’s not scalable and discriminates against most people, who have no such expertise), I see this as temporarily acceptable action given the current status of the code since anybody who wants to hear that speech can make an alt on that server.
“is just you just”
…nawh it’s just you just.
https://www.interviewcoachingsolutions.com/interview-coach-insights-for-the-job-seeker/minimizing-language-undermines-communication-avoid-it#:~:text=Period!-,“Just”,....”).
For all the times I’ve heard this, I’ve yet to actually see it happen. The only people who claim this happened to them turn out to be bigots of some kind.
There’s your line. Bigoted speech is not welcome. Value judgments about born traits are not welcome. You have to be a pretty pathetic person to dislike someone for a trait they were born with.
It’s hard to understand what you’re responding to with the first paragraph, so I’m kinda lost on what you’re saying in the second one.
I’ll just post another reply since you probably already saw the other one. Hopefully it reaches you before you spend time writing a reply to the other one. Either way you’re just playing with identity politics. You say bigoted speech isn’t tolerated. The term “bigoted” refers to having or expressing strong, unreasonable, and unfair dislike or hatred towards a particular group of people based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics. However what you’re doing is discriminating against a population based on how they express themselves. Sounds like bigotry. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Am missing the part where changing the word from discrimination to bigotry somehow excuses the thing you’re claiming to be against by doing the same action.
Generally speaking, how someone feels about those characteristics is not one of the characteristics. Bigotry is usually understood to be about born traits.
By your argument, everyone is a bigot. You have to accept all speech, otherwise you’re bigoted against whatever speech you refuse. But at the same time, by accepting all speech, you’re also bigoted. You can’t be both pro trans rights and anti trans rights – there is one you like more than the other.
So with the notion that we’re all bigoted, let me rephrase. Bigotry against born traits and religion is unacceptable.
It’s also worth mentioning the paradox of intolerance here. You can’t have tolerance without having intolerance.
“Generally speaking, how someone feels about those characteristics is not one of the characteristics. Bigotry is usually understood to be about born traits.”
Right so only specific types of discrimination are frowned upon.
“You can’t be both pro trans rights and anti trans rights”
No one has to identify at all.
“It’s also worth mentioning the paradox of intolerance here. You can’t have tolerance without having intolerance.”
There’s a paradox of everything with this framework though. You can’t have good without bad, you can’t have white without black, you can’t have symmetrical without asymmetry, you can’t have victims without perpetrators, you can’t have an I without a you. Essentially making the point arbitrary…
What seems to have happened was division based out of convenience for the many at the expense of the few. And yet again, I UNDERSTAND why the decision was made. I’m saying it’s inconvenient for anyone doing their due diligence to keep an open mind.
While this is a valid perspective, it’s important to understand and acknowledge the nuance between our values as ideals and our values as they interact with our other priorities.
There will always be concerns about how inclusivity might be used to silence dissenters. Yes there is a difference between trolling and hate speech vs. legitimate controversial views. But this exists NO MATTER the approach administrators take, or refuse to take. The difference is that admins can be held to account by the community that follows them. But dogpile flamewars that arise organically when there are no limits to free speech ALSO silence dissent. And unlike admins, participants in a gangland comment war cannot be held to account by the community in the same way.
And while you are right that it’s important for individuals to speak their mind without fear of censorship I seriously question whether disconnecting an automated P2P exchange of online posts rises anywhere close to the level of censorship you seem to be so concerned about here. We don’t risk creating a homogenous society from defederation because it’s not censorship, merely categorization and fragmentation.
Did the creation of cable TV risk censorship because people had to flip the channel to watch something different? I would argue the opposite. Comedy gets better when the people actively searching for comedy are it’s audience. Serious discussions are more insightful and productive when people know this is a place where we are comfortable speaking seriously. Creatives feel more open to getting weird and niche when they are in a space where diverse modes of creativity are encouraged.
How is defederation so different from creating more options for the tone or genre of content you’re looking for? There’s nothing to fear about the slippery slope of censorship so long as this community is not a whole entire society that can put limits on your internet browser. This fear seems to hint at a worry that people can’t be trusted to know how a web browser works.
And while censorship can be a slippery slope, we should celebrate how the admins are doing the precise opposite of that. I think it’s important to acknowledge that here we see a case-by-case investigation into whether the Instance is adhering to the agreed upon code of conduct, attempting to understand context prior to defederation. But we always knew there were trolls on the internet, and we always knew some of them would start hosting their own Instances. The function to defederate exists because the developers of the protocol realized this was an inevitable eventuality and that without safeguards, any space could devolve into 4chan.
Yo, they’re shouting ‘bout ideals, values, online fields. Sayin’ trolls be silenced, while admins flexin’ their alliance. Claimin’ it ain’t censorship, just some healthy fellowship.
Defederation’s the new sensation, but ain’t it just segregation? They say we’re innovating, but what if we’re just isolating? They talk of a better web we’re making, but is it freedom they’re really taking?
Edit: as an aside, I see what you’re saying. I probably will start my own instance, but I have this nagging feeling that it’s not quite as easy as ‘flipping the channel’ as you put it. ;)
Lemmyworld blocked Exploding Heads’ Tsar, Lemmyworld blocked Exploding Heads’ Tsar
In your mind, they may have gone too far, But noone’s saying you can’t play in both parks.
It’s just that there was one park before and to get it that way again, now I have to create a third park to hold the two parks together that were originally one park. So yes, complaining. That’s my choice of input though and it did get me to what I needed to know.
Imagine thinking only people in the US uses lemmy.world
It’s just not a funny joke though.
Here because it’s the internet I’ll one-up you: Imagine that the only way you knew how to start a joke was by saying “imagine.”
… see how funny.
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You’ve made two astute observations. How kind. Your time is well spent digging through trash.
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“This is a private website, not a country where the government is censoring you.”
In a world where other people need to narrate the setting for you so you remember where you are…
“If you don’t like it for any reason you can easily sign up for another instance or create one of your own.”
The only way to come across helpful information is by being beaten by a crowd for expressing dissatisfaction with administrator choices…
“Nothing is even stopping you currently from signing up there and using both.”
The majority rallies around the idea of the admins doing the work for them while repeatedly telling others if they don’t like it go do more work…!
“America also isn’t the only country on Earth that uses this site.”
And users repeatedly get stuck on the idea that a website that has a community called politics that seems to only post about the United State’s politics has minimal users from the United States itself…
“Nobody is going to think you have good intentions when the place you’re defending for “free speech” are people freely using the n word and other slurs.”
And the main character is so bogged down by having to repeatedly point out that conflating what they’ve said with a user’s own biased interpretation of what is happening to get anything else done.
“The usage of the term comes across as disingenuous and people have a right to not want to engage with it or its members.”
Unilateral decisions by the admin team rule, with hungry packs of users ready to pile on to an already resolved conflict, Reddit style…
Somehow I don’t think this community is losing anything when you leave in a huff (or get banned).
Classic passive-aggressive nazi-like minded degenerate who somehow thinks he’s in the right
Oh, how fortunate we are to have a self-appointed spokesperson who possesses such an intimate understanding of the entire community’s sentiments. Your profound insight into everyone’s thoughts and feelings is truly awe-inspiring. Your ability to declare who or what the community is losing with absolute certainty is nothing short of extraordinary. We can all rest assured that your unilateral proclamation represents the collective will and consensus of every single member. It’s a true marvel how one person can possess such omnipotent authority. We are eternally grateful for your unquestionable wisdom and unparalleled ability to speak on behalf of an entire community.
What’s speaking a whole lot louder than my comment is both how hysterically butthurt you’re getting over it and, well, just the community response in general to your posts. But do please carry on proving the admin team’s decision to be the correct one.
<frasier>I’m listening.</frasier>
Hey, you drop in like a dime-a-dozen bore, recycle hate like you’re on an encore. You’re noise in a void, your words fall flat, are you the poster child for tedious chat? Now, the admin’s decision you confirm, your creativity crash and burn.
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In our chat, you’ve cast a stone, Claimed I use a harsher tone. “Just” this and “just” that, you say, Diminishing what I convey.
But let me tell you, here’s the scoop, Your argument’s an endless loop. It’s clear that you can’t comprehend, So this charade, let’s put to end.
Not “just” this and not “just” that, Our talk is more than simple chat. Your words are weak, they’ve lost the fight, So off you go, into the night.
It’s written for a child. I hope you just understand.