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For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don’t think this would produce any valuable discussion, they’re unlikely to change their instance’s purpose for us.
While we could block individual users, they do have 7000 accounts over there (although admittedly a very small % of active users). If we block a user they can just keep creating new accounts, which just increases moderation time and doesn’t resolve the issue, as we would still be open to unblocked users posting that sort of content.
Similarly we as an instance can’t block a single community, so our instance moderation tools are only very broad in scope.
As I’ve said in another comment, I would prefer per-user instance blocking but that isn’t a feature in Lemmy yet - that would be that the ultimate win-win in my opinion.
Our moderation policy is laid out here which came about as a result of this discussion. I’ll also add that hate speech is defined as: abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.
I’m loathe to link directly to content and drive traffic their way, but I’ll link some content below from browsing their site for a couple of minutes that breaches the above definition:
Warning: explicit content
These posts clearly breach the hate speech definition, and at least one of those posts is likely to be seen as a breach of UK laws which is against this instance’s rules.
This isnt a decision we’ve taken lightly, rather its something we’ve been discussing for days and have feedback on before we announced the vote. If the community wishes to remain federated, then that is the communities decision, but it runs the risk of a couple of things:
How many communities over tgere have people from this instance sub’d to them? If you do defederate you should give some notice prior to allow migrations