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.”
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I’m no fan of defederating over minor disagreements but yeah, some types of people are just incompatible with building a welcoming space. Good choice.
I agree with you that it was a good choice and that it’s necessary to foster a friendly online culture.
I haven’t seen any calls for defederation over, “minor disagreements,” though. I have seen lots of people saying that we should defederate from places like exploding heads so that we dont allow them to get bigger and then those people being told that they shouldn’t call for defederation over minor disagreements.
I’ve seen a few around the place but they tend to get shut down pretty quick so I guess that means most of us are on the same page, which is nice.
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.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. Good for everybody
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For the alt/far-right, everything slightly to the left from the “normal right” is far-left.
Hell, if you ask them, Fox News became communist when they said Joe Biden won the election.
Basically this. As soon as you don’t support trump you are a Marxist. Doesn’t matter that you share 90% of their beliefs. That’s the mark of a cult, which by definition precludes rational thought
I don’t see a single pro trump comment in that thread.
Hey but they think they do, and that’s all that matters to mentally deranged people
You always have to put it into perspective. The reaction when beehaw defederated from this instance was also not met with elation here but most just were dissapointed and I did not read any slurs or colored swearing insults.
Edit: I went over to see what the fuss is about. And the first thing I see is “tranny faggot” and justification for “joe biden is a pedo”. Lmfao really? Nothing lost by defederating from that such a cesspool.
Well, shit, they’re just making me like this instance even more.
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
Yikes. Good riddance.
Thank you for your transparency! As always, very appreciated.
Good! The older I get the more I realize that free speech at all cost is bullshit. Every idea or thought does not deserve a platform.
It’s called the paradox of tolerance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
In Spain we have an old saying (maybe it’s international, but I just heard it in Spain): My freedom ends where yours begin. Meaning that you’re free to do what you want, but not when others are affected in a negative way (your noise disturb others, your hostility affect others, etc). When I see some people in the US behaving like assholes claiming that’s their freedom I realise they don’t actually understand what freedom means.
In the US (at least where I’m from) we have a similar saying that goes:
Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my face begins
Same essential meaning but some people here just don’t get it.
We use it in Greece too
Freedom of speech should only ever mean that a government cannot retaliate against or stifile someone’s view on politics. It should never equate to freedom from consequences for hate speech, by anyone.
Free speech does not mean every idea or thought deserves a platform. It’s a doctrine of being able to express one’s idea without fear of retaliation or censorship from the government. And it is also a very indivisible idea, either you have free speech for everyone or for no one. There is no middle ground because as soon as you introduce the idea that some ideas should censored you lay the groundwork for all ideas to be censored.
Free speech at all costs is not bullshit but also, defederation is not censorship.
Not necessarily advocating for giving everyone a platform but an interesting thought here is how we should treat the concept of free speech in an era where so many important things are under the jurisdiction of private entities. If 90% of public squares were owned by companies who restricted what you can wear, say, and who you can talk to on that public square, that would technically not run afoul of free speech but definitely would practically heavily restrict people’s ability to freely express themselves. Meanwhile, this exact scenario is the case on the internet with private corporations owning most of it and are free to remove whatever content they want at a whim.
I’m familiar with the argument I just think it’s outdated.
Free speech is fine. The interpretation of “free access to anyone’s eyes and ears at any time” is bullshit.
Voat is an excellent example of this. Unmoderated speech -> Nazi infiltration -> removed from app stores and shut down.
Come to think of it, are there any libertarian “no rules, block users if you can’t handle it” social networks that haven’t catastrophically collapsed into toxic hellholes? …like are there ANY examples of this idea even working?
The thing free speech absolutists never understand is people have tried their plan PLENTY of times, in fact it has been tried over and over again in an exhausting cycle of amnesia. It never works, running a community fundamentally requires choices and moderation.
It’s a curve, you think you are getting wiser while it’s the exact opposite
Or you can build a better argument and debate the idea. If its not a call to violence, its just words and ideas battling it out.
I believe COVID showed very well that this isn’t the case. Not to mention, when you’re debating something like an astrophysics concept, it makes no sense to allow a professional basketball coach to weigh in.
Sometimes you can have two people from the same fields with different point of views. Even if they’re not, there still may by new perspectives and ideas that may lead to something better, whatever it is.
Of course, but that doesn’t mean I bring a freshman college physics student equal grounding to a seasoned quantum physics expert in a debate about quantum breakthroughs.
Even within the same field, you have to look at the weights. If 1 climate scientist says global warming is bullshit, and 9999 climate scientists say global warming is an obvious and clear phenomenon, I’m going to believe the 9999.
Even if just falls down to being a dumb opinion, I still rather be able to be said.
Debates don’t convince people to change their minds.
I have a tendency to debate people, even when I already know I might as well bash my head into a wall for all the good it’ll do me. But I still do it and here’s why:
You’re not trying to convince the person you’re responding to. Everyone knows that certain people, e.g. anti-vaxxers, will never be convinced, no matter how many sources you cite. You’re not putting in the effort for them; you’re doing it for the people who might be reading, the ones who aren’t lost causes yet, the people who simply aren’t knowledgeable about a subject and could fall victim to such misinformation if it were to go unchallenged.
It’s a public forum, there’s always someone reading.
Edit just to say: I fully embrace this defederation. That instance is a cesspool and no amount of ‘debate’ would ever change that. I don’t want that on my feed and everyone who does is free to join them or make their own instance.
Debates don’t convince close minded people from changing their minds.
This kind of attitude is defeatist - if the person you’re discussing with isn’t willing to budge on an issue then it’s not a real debate. We should all approach discussions knowing that we are all fallible, but can correct our misjudgements.
I mean that’s literally debatable lol.
COVID-19 proves that rational debate doesn’t work. Heck, even the results of recent US and UK elections prove that people are so brainwashed and incapable of rational thought that they’ll support their side like a local football team, no matter how badly their policies screw them over.
Arguing with a right-winger is like playing a game of chess with a rooster. No matter what you say or do, the rooster will knock over the pieces, shit all over the board and strut around triumphantly.
Wait I’m confused because people got banned for speaking about vaccines, and a lot more information is still coming out about them. My point is even if that person is a person with a brain of a cock he should still be able to speak.
I’m not gonna lie that more testing could have been done on the vaccines that came out (AstraZeneca was specifically linked to substantially increased risks of blood clots in young people weeks after the first jabs were administered), but there’s a difference between this and outright anti-vaxx rhetoric.
COVID-19 was also an international health emergency that could have gone so much worse if every country governed their efforts like the ass-clowns who ultimately prolonged the pandemic by dismissing their seriousness and half-assing their efforts (Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro come to mind.)
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Good call! Thanks for creating a welcoming atmosphere for all!
It’s weird to say that as they defederate from a community. I don’t know anything about “explodingheads”, but I always prefer to choose what I do and do not see.
I have no doubt that the “explodingheads” community is shitty, but I don’t like the precedent of protecting me from the world on my behalf.
The Paradox of Tolerance: If everyone is tolerant of every idea, then intolerant ideas will emerge. Tolerant people will tolerate this intolerance, and the intolerant people will not tolerate the tolerant people.
To create a safe space for all ideas, the intolerant ideas cannot be tolerated
Then maybe this isn’t the federation for you. I’m sure there’s at least one host out there without standards.
You are free to still join exploding heads and their instance if you want. That’s the beauty of lemmy. It’s also other instances choice to join with them or not. This one chose not.
It means when choosing between allowing people who are minorities, or people who want to harass minorities, the admins here prefer the minorities.
You can have one or the other. I know which I prefer.
Also, horrible politically incorrect jokes are fun, however, the last few years have led to people genuinenly believing in them instead of making fun of them, so things are a bit more uptight generally in the world.
The thing is… it isn’t to protect you if you don’t feel you need protection. But this is a community, not a monolith. Consider that you always have the option to join a second community rather than forcing two communities to stay together for your convenience.
And in an online space that’s federated, there is a really strong incentive for the admins and mods to keep us *informed when defederation is happening because the community on the other side are extremely likely to notice and let us know either way. So at least you can keep track of how censored these communities are is in some fashion.
You’re able to launch your own Instance and it will federate with everyone and you can do what you have stated.
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The admins and mods are doing this out of a sense of duty to the community at likely a financial cost to themselves.
I’ve abandoned many a website because moderating was ruining the experience because users wanted to give too many people too many chances (notably competitive gaming spaces)
And what’s stopping you from checking out exploding heads? The site runners have said that exploding heads stuff isn’t appearing on their property. They don’t, last I checked, have any control over what sites you visit using your property.
See how that works? Freedom of speech means the shitheads at exploding heads can say what they like, but it doesn’t mean other people have to listen. You want to read shitfuckery, they’re right over there. Head on over!
This instance smells like Spez, good luck not getting cancelled here
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Lemmyworld isn’t a state. If you don’t like bigotry being delt with here, go to a different instance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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“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).
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You did ask, when you joined the Instance you kinda agreed to that instances Admins choices. I mentioned above but if you dont want a “nanny-state” because the Admins of this instance make choices you don’t like, you’re welcome to launch your own Instance and it will federate with (almost) everyone else at the start, and as the admin of that Instance you can disable who to federate with.
Yes, I can now see that my choice was poor with no prior experience with the protocols involved and just joining someone else’s instance.
I think a great many of us are learning how it all meshes, and interacts. Many may have a similar complaint to yours, and not aware they can launch their own Instance yet
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Lemmy mods are no different from Reddit mods really
Literally go and see yourself. It’s so incredibly lukewarm that it’s hilarious to see the level of groupthink and conformity in this thread.
Good riddance
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!
Free speech includes my right to not listen to you.
Agreed! A country with free speech is a free country, which means people have the freedom to ignore speech as well.
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.
Damn those sysadmin posts are dire.
I’m hoping that eventually a free speech Lemmy instance pops up that has admins that are less cringe
While almost everyone tends to agree with the principles of freedom of expression, whenever someone says, “This space is an absolute free speech zone” or similar, you can almost always assume they’re just fascists who got told https://xkcd.com/1357/
I think most people strongly dislike free speech, but they want the right to express themselves, and the government allowing dissent is a necessary evil so they keep their own free speech. That’s why they jump at any opportunity to limit everyone else’s speech. People loved to say reddit was a private platform that can do what they want, so long as they kept the censorship to their political enemies.
No, people don’t dislike free speech, people hate bigots, Nazis, etc. If the political position you want to discuss is based on hate it’s not “a difference of opinion” and it’s not “censorship” when you get your ass shown the door. go to truth social or one of the .win sites with your fellow shitstains if you want that.
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Can we please not do this “style of arguing” here? If you reply to a comment, reply to that comment by replying to the points and arguments in the comment. Don’t make up stuff or twist words.
Dont worry, it was removed for your protection.
I am always wary of people using ‘freedom’ as an argument. Most of the time it is followed by ‘because I want …’.
Equality and freedom have to find a balance. I don’t do to others what I don’t want for myself. Even if that is limiting my ‘freedom’.
I think most people strongly dislike free speech
Depends on what you mean with “free speech”. If you think “free speech” is about having unmoderated online spaces, yes, most people definitely dislike unmoderated online spaces because most don’t like toxic communities…
the government allowing dissent
But you do realize that the government cracking down on speech is an entirely different issue to defederating a lemmy server, right? The exploding-heads are free to run their community however they want.
Feel free to create one, just don’t get upset when other instances want nothing to do with the toxic community this inevitably creates and everyone de-federates you…
Sure, in principle, as long as “free speech” isn’t just cover to spew toxic bullshit all over the place. No one has to put up with that and you better believe it’ll be defederated by most instances.
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Sure, in principle, as long as “free speech” isn’t just cover to spew toxic bullshit all over the place. No one has to put up with that and you better believe it’ll be defederated by most instances.
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You already misunderstand free speech completely, nice
Me too. But exploding heads will probably be bigger in the long run anyway.
