Hello all,

This is a heads up that this weekend we will be asking the community to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and Rammy.site, following an increase in their content making its way into our instance and moderation queue.

This content borders on illegal in my/the servers locality (if it was to be clearly iilegal we would have defederated with them immediately to protect the instance) and is usually hate-filled and targeted towards minorities.

So far we’ve had very little to do with them, but have come across some posts wishing (although not directly stating) harm on trans people and other minorities.

My personal take is the content being generated in those communities is not the content that this community needs to see or be a part of. Given the increasing visibility of this content coming over to us, I feel now is the time for the community to vote.

However, as I have said from the start, these decisions are not mine to take alone, and are for the community to come together to agree on. I never take defederation lightly, and have not defederated with any other instance (except threads) yet. Therefore this is a decision for the community to weigh in on.

In order to protect users here the vote will be held anonymously (we’ll release details on Friday), and we encourage discussion to be held on our Matrix space so as to prevent users here being targeted for any views.

The vote will be held at some point on Friday and run for 48 hours over the weekend to give everyone time to vote.

For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don’t think this would produce any valuable discussion, they’re unlikely to change their instance’s purpose for us.

  • shogun5000@exploding-heads.comEnglish
    538·
    11 months ago

    Lemmy is going to quickly just turn into a frustrating, confusing echo chamber because everyone’s hurt feelings is going to require defederation. I think defederation is being abused more and more because of overly sensitive people who would probably be better off avoiding the internet entirely.

      • CrozekielEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        This is the best part imo. I don’t think people from the affected instances should have a voice in what our instance does either. I’d hope that the vote is only open to members of this instance.

        The problem these guys don’t seem to understand is they absolutely become guilty by association. If you hang out with bigots all day and defend their “right to free speech” anytime someone calls them a bigot, then you are also a bigot. Also, you know, Freedom of speech doesn’t mean requirement of others to listen.

        • DemigodrickOPMAEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          Just quickly to say yes, only open to lemmy.zip accounts with a minimum age limit.

      • shogun5000@exploding-heads.comEnglish
        422·
        11 months ago

        Nah. Sensitive types will just call the things they don’t like “hate speech” to justify pushing their opinions on others. Authoritarian semantics. Yawn.

        • RedDoozerEnglish
          7·
          11 months ago

          Authoritarian semantics that is taken to a vote. Bravo, you live in a perpetual circlejerk.

        • EfwisEnglish
          6·
          11 months ago

          If you are worried about the “sensitive users” calling something hate speech just to defederate an instance, rest assured the admin here looks at everything from all angles before making a decision on what to do. This is discussed in on the matrix channel quite a bit before the admins of lemmy.zip make their decisions on what to do.

          Demigodrick and Sami listen to information provided and research it before even starting to think about to decide what to do. And like he posted, he does not want to defederate unless absolutely necessary based on his local laws since he is in the UK.

    • RedDoozerEnglish
      82·
      11 months ago

      Your definition of “hate speech” is childish. Hate speech promotes a specific belief filled with prejudiced meanings, leading to disrespect to a certain group of people’s dignity. It is defined by objective standards and has negative impacts on society. This kind of behavior can harm our community as a whole. Strongly in favor of defederating any server that cannot differentiate between “hate speech” and “free speech”

    • brandonEnglish
      6·
      11 months ago

      Am I missing the part where this will have a large impact on EH users? Nobody is trying to take down the content on your home instance.