It was banned on Reddit because it is racist, hatefull and spread Conspiracies.
In my new community I expect the exclution of racist communities. It is easy now with defederation. Nazis can do whatever they want on their instances, but the instances I want to be part of should not amplify their shit and flush it into our timelines.
The instance-admin of !thedonald@sh.itjust.works did not reply to my message. Big instances seem not to defederate with them.
The new TD may not be a success, the point is not to give Nazis a platform like it is happening now. Fans of TD are racists.
Where are the instances that show face against racism?
edit: to contact the admins: @donut @TheDude @smorks
edit2: @TheDude deleted the community :)
Definitely better to just block the community in other instances instead of total defederation. Admins can do so pretty easily. I know beehaw is usually pretty proactive about this kind of stuff.
And yeah…fuck Donald Trump. He’s fucked up the US so hard and has put our country into such a mess. I hope they nail his ass straight to jail.
Seriously. Defederation should be a last resort against spammers and outright attacks on other instances, not because you dont agree with a single community.
Historically this group has been responsible for an absolute shitload of spam and outright attacks.
I was doxxed by them. They had links to a discord group that included my full name, address, email, and phone number. There was a whole list, it’s one of the first reasons they were quarantined. There was a comment that read “anyone with spare bullets can send them here”.
This is a lot more than “I simply don’t agree with that community”. They are trash who will trash up any platform they can reach.
I support defederatiom personally because it sends a stronger message from the community. Blocking the community is “I don’t want to see this.” Defederating is “we don’t want to see this.”
So, from what I’ve gathered, many consider the broad lesson learnt from various defederation dramas over on mastodon is that making a genuine attempt to voice concern with the instance admins prior to defederation is almost always the better way to go. It avoids drama and inconvenience while promoting a better ecosystem of cooperation between instance admins and their users.
Obviously at some point when there aren’t better options and users need to be protected, use defederation, that’s what it’s for.
But at this point, I’d try to talk or have our admins talk to the instance admin first.
I agree. It may help send a message that the community isn’t tolerated, hopefully getting it removed.
Yeah I guess it does put pressure on instance admins to remove the offending community from their instance. I am just not sure if we want to cross that line into penalizing everybody on an instance for simply being near a bad community though. I also think doing this kind of proactive censorship also forces these people into deeper echo chambers as they get more and more isolated.
Just blocking the community doesn’t prevent the users in that community from harassing minorities and generally spreading disinformation and hate. It’s offloading extra moderation work to every instance who federates with them. Unless that instance is also okay with fascists interacting in bad faith, of course.
Yes! Hold the instance owners accountable for allowing that shit to fester and be rebroadcast.
Nine people dining at a table with a Nazi means you have ten Nazis.
Nine people dining at a table with a Nazi means you have ten Nazis.
This doesn’t make any sense.
One of my long time friends is a genuine racist. Am I a racist then too because I’m friends with him even though our views on this topic (and many others) differ quite dramatically?
Depends. Do you just keep your silence or do you call them out when they’re being shitty?
I agree that it depends. However such nuance was not included in the original statement. It was absolute
Oh, no, it is absolute: if you say and do nothing, then at best, you’re allowing the harm they cause to happen, and at worse reinforcing their behavior.
So yes, if you have racist friends and you sit silently then yes, you’re a racist supporter.
It could be extra moderation work, but I think it’s a bad line to cross to assume everyone on an instance is guilty before they’ve actually done something bad.
Bad comments can come from anywhere though and mods still have to remove them.
No one is saying everyone in the instance is guilty; people are saying that the instance is going to become toxic to the point where it becomes hard to tell.
If you are in that instance and don’t want to tied to this rhetoric, talk to your admin about banning the Donald.
No one is saying everyone in the instance is guilty
Defederation is basically treating them like so. I mean, I get it, moderation is hard AF, but pre-emptive defederation when we haven’t even seen a ton of toxicity from sh.itjust.works yet is not a good precedent.
You’ve got a good point. Ultimately every instance is responsible for its users and their behavior. Harassment should not be tolerated.
SIJW needs to make a decision. IMHO it’s perfectly fine to say that your instance is not prepared to deal with that kind of shit regardless of how open and accommodating you want to be.
If they believe there’s a space for “moderate trump supporters” that’s their decision but they are on the hook for any harassment caused by their users.
the users in that community is one person
Defederating from an entire instance for one community seems a bit overblown tbh. Blocking would prob be effective enough. That said, beehaw will likely be most proactive in removing td nonsense from its feed
Leave it to Redditors to be OK with everything turning into a Nazi bar.
No it’s not that. Lots of us never interacted with that sub. Just block them no need to defederate a while instance
If the instance won’t kill the sub, the members of the sub will take over that instance.
I’m seeing some people testing the waters of some subs to see what they can get away with.
a better analogy is dropping the whole town the nazi bar is in
Yes, the vast universe of Lemmy is like a fucking bar lmao. Great analogy
sh.itjust.works hosts it. They should kick them out.
As soon as they brake rules they absolutely should be banned.
Hm, is it possible the community was already kicked by the instance? I don’t find it.
I don’t think it is. R/The_Donald was a cancer on Reddit, spreading around and harming other communities. If an instance is willing to tolerate a community like that, I don’t see the value of anything else in that instance.
It’s not overblown. It’s sending a message to the admins of that instance.
Blocking the community itself is the smallest Band-Aid in the world. The kinds of users who join that instance for that community aren’t going to be quarantined to just that community.
its entirely overblown, the smallest band-aid in the the world is entirely appropriate for one user shitposting
OP may come across a little alarmist, but it’s really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren’t carefully weeding out the ne’er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.
And yeah, they follow “the rules”, and free speech and all that, until they don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.
Actively purging communities of reactionaries is pretty important and the hands-off attitude that some Free Speech Warriors inherited from Reddit advocate for is only going to spread reaction. If they care so much about Free Speech, they can go back to their pedophile website and talk about how r/jailbait needed to be kept up for the sake of free speech.
I think deleting the sub is the right call simply because it’s trying to replace a community that did enough in the past to deserve a ban on any platform.
Tired of all the calls for defederation though.
Everyone keeps repeating that defederation should be a last resort. Fine, but we should also acknowledge that the list of resorts is very short:
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Server admins talk to the admins of the server hosting the offending community, in an attempt to get them to clean their house. If they don’t;
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Defederate.
There really isn’t anything else for server operators to do that isn’t just letting the offending community continue unabated.
Offloading the responsibility to individual users to block users / communities is lazy. Most of us don’t want to spend our limited time playing whack-a-mole.
I suspect we’ll see user accounts shuffling around so that they land on a home server whose defederation policy matches their preferences.
I think instance owners need to be able to block specific communities in other instances instance-wide.
So, if lemmy.ml wants to block c/the Donald!sh.itjust.works they should be able to block that community for all users of lemmy.ml, but not the rest of the sh.itjust works instance.
Best of both worlds IMO
this is already an option, as shitjustworks pointed out in the update post
It’s not about ignoring them or not having to see the content. It’s about not providing them a platform.
They would seep into other communities
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Defederate their asses. Fascism is a cancer.
Anyone who’s been on Reddit or Twitter knows what happens if you give those psychopaths an inch.
Deplatforming works. That’s why the chuds whine about it.
Wasn’t The Donald originally a subreddit making fun of trump? I saw that TD was created here but my assumption was they wanted to restore the original purpose. I haven’t looked at it since then though.
Edit: Nope. It is in fact a pro trump community.
At the very beginning, yes. The tricky thing with having fun pretending to be bigots is that you eventually find yourself surrounded by actual bigots who very much missed the fact that you were joking.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
… Albert Einstein.
just joking, it was Descartes.
see also: gamersriseup
Trump was a joke until suddenly he wasn’t.
He’s still a joke, just one that stopped being funny a long time ago.
No, he’s still a joke. It’s just America is a joke too.
theres a antifascist placeholder on https://lemmy.world/c/the_donald
Friggin hilarious that one
This community exists solely to document Trumps crimes. If you support tr*mp. If you were a member of reddit’s biggest hate community, then you will cry. You. Are. Not. Welcome. Here. Fascism is a curse on this world. This is a safe space for those who oppose conservatives scum. support abortion rights. support trans rights. support women. support minorities. Destroy fascism. Destroy hate.Amazing sidebar
I think that’s the one I saw originally.
Maybe for the first few weeks, then it stopped being a joke.
Nazis shouldn’t be able to do what they want on their own instances either, they should be crushed there as they should in every space
But also blacklisting is a basic first step that everyone should do, so you aren’t wrong there.
In defense of some instance admins, I think they can just literally not know because it’s hard to keep tabs on every instance that gets made, but that also means that, if you use that instance, you should totally DM them to let them know (I’ve had to do this with certain other instances). If the admins persistently ignore those warnings, they should be treated as complicit.
I wouldn’t de-federate sh.itjust.works for that now. But stuff like this doesn’t look good and the “Just ignore it bro” crowd shows that they never had to deal with organized harassment themselves. The_Donald wasn’t just a harmless sub with a little bit of trolling, it was responsible for extreme radicalization and people died because of it. The reality is that such hate groups never stay in their place and behave everywhere else. They brigade and harass every time. Should the community grow and attract more people, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. People are responsible for their own instance and are free to choose whatever they want but that’s the same for other servers if they should decide to de-federate.
And that was indicated when they migrated to Voat. Nobody else used Voat, it was just them. Also when reddit changed their policies to prevent one sub from appearing on the front page more than once.
The whole point is to be obnoxious in spaces where it isn’t welcome. When they realized they couldn’t do that on a platform that only consisted of them, there was no incentive to engage. The whole point is to shit up a platform enjoyed by others, and that’s exactly what they’ll do here.
I hope that newcomers to the fediverse come to understand that defederation is a feature, not a bug.
So this is a quick way to ruin the fediverse: Create a The_Donald community on the big instances.
There’s one on lemmy.world I believe, but it’s not what you’re expecting.
I was expecting a community about Donald Duck, but it is even better.
I was kinda hoping it would just be dedicated solely to Donald Duck but I guess this is also fine, haha
No, why would it? The instance could simply enforce its moderation guidelines and block the community.
I’d imagine this is one of the many reasons why beehaw went ahead and defederated from sh.itjust.works. It’s a bit TOO lenient over there in some ways.
Agreed. And Beehaw didn’t say they were kicking any instance to the curb permanently. They’re simply waiting on Lemmy to add more effective moderation tools, like the ability to defederate communities rather than entire instances, and for bot checks to become the norm.
Users aren’t tied to communities, but instances.
Yes, but what we’re talking about here is how to effectively target and limit violence, bigotry, hate speech, etc., and that happens best at the community level not the instance level. Let’s say you have something like this:
- MixedBag.social - a popular fictitious instance that has some good communities and one really bad one
- MixedBag.social/c/BigotsRUs - a community of bigoted content that YourInstance.com doesn’t want to deal with
- Users of MixedBag.social - a mixed bag themselves, who mostly flocked there because of open signups
How do we limit harm to YourInstance.com?
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The Users: Most of the MixedBag users are harmless and contribute to the growth and diversity of the fediverse (including YourInstance), so defederating them is a last resort. But what about the BigotsRUs subscribers? On Reddit, some mods use bots to ban or mute people subscribed to problematic subreddits. We could try something similar here, but that’s not the only option. After all, I live over here, not in the community where they’re trash-talking. It’s when they bring their shit into my house that I get pissed. If they put on their Sunday Best over here and want to have actual conversations, I’m fine with that. That more tolerant approach has the benefit of not ostracising and radicalizing users who are on the fence and just hang out there on occasion for the memes. So basically, ban the bad actors when they cross the line while on your turf, but leave the rest alone.
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The Community: If BigotsRUs is poorly moderated, frequently spews hate, and its inclusion in All harms YourInstance’s users, that’s what Remove is for. As an admin, you can remove communities from the feed without affecting users or the instance, which feels like the first and best step to handling most issues.
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The Instance: Like I said, defederation is the nuclear option that impacts all communities and all users on MixedBag.social, so I’d rather limit that to a last resort. However, sometimes the instance itself if the problem by either encouraging bad actors or centering around a topic that has no place in your instance’s vision. For example, what if you’re running an orthodox religious instance for your friends and want to defederate from the porn-only lemmyNSFW.com? Or what if your instance is being overrun by bots from LaxSignUps.social and you don’t have a big enough mod team to separate out the trash? For me, that’s the ideal use case for instance-wide defederation, and it’s the main reason Beehaw is defederating from others. Yes, they’re protective of their culture, but right now it’s mostly about the small mod team’s inability to filter out spam from instances with lax signups.
It’s an absolute lie that they are just concerned about hatespeech – albeit one that the admins themselves very actively promote. They pretend to be ideologically neutral, even going as far as saying “beehaw is just a collection of individuals”, an ironically Thatcherite statement that suits them quite well.
That’s a pretty big accusation. I don’t have enough information to say one way or the other and have just read a handful of posts from the Beehaw mods, so I’d appreciate some context and direct evidence if there is any. From what I can tell, they’ve never pretended to be ideologically neutral, and seek to actively defend minority rights and push back against what they view as fascist movements.
Thankfully they had the evidence pinned for some time:
Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation.
Later:
Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it.
And there’s more but you can just read it yourself:
https://beehaw.org/post/524300?scrollToComments=true
Obviously I support cracking down on hate speech, you can see my activity throughout this thread, which consists entirely of me doing that while taking maybe two or three asides to knock beehaw when someone else mentioned it. What I don’t support is taking the absurd position that it’s not a political stance.
Of course, this all works as an excellent bit of smoke and mirrors for an audience of credulous radlibs to whom you don’t want to confess you are splitting with instances that are decidedly to your left – such as Hexbear.net , the only instance which actually has site-mandated use of self-identified pronouns, which was put on the blacklist pre-emptively before it had federated with anyone (and it still hasn’t) for reasons that the userbase are left to conclude are “hate speech” or its “endorsement”.
What does it about the other users in MixedBag that they are ok on the same instance as BigotsRUs?
If BigotsRUs was formed on the instance I was on, I would be talking to the admins on banning BigotsRUs before looking for a different instance.
Maybe you should switch to beehaw. I think they align more with your interests
Haha, you likely have a point. Judging from most of the whinging responses, a lot should consider joining beehaw.
Personally, I’m subscribing to the belief that the fediverse’s attribute of “true censorship is impossible” is a benefit, not a curse. Every prior example of censorship has just morphed into “advertiser palatable”. Which is bad for everyone.
More than happy to have access to instances that will take the kind of drastic action you’re suggesting, access to my own “block” function, etc. Let them come.
The fediverse will inevitably host some messed up stuff. Counting it a blessing that those people have a clear place to go to and sequester themselves off.
So ultimately? More than happy to have an instance that agrees with this extreme anti-censorship posture. Sh.itjustworks is fine in my books. I can block the community, just like I could block subreddits on Reddit without abandoning the whole platform. Hell, even write a script to block everyone who’s subscribed to the community. The power is yours now, and nobody can take that away. That’s the fediverse.
You’re probably going to have a bad time in the Fediverse if you’re hoping to avoid viewpoints you don’t agree with entirely. The best advice I can give you for now is to just block that community and move on with your life. As much as I hate TD and its members, the sh.itjust.works admin has the right to administer their instance however they want. If they end up with a sufficiently toxic total userbase where their users are causing problems on other instances to the point they are a net negative, they will end up being defederated by other more reasonable instances. Beehaw is being pretty aggressive with defederation for things like this, so if you’re looking for the safest of spaces in the Lemmyverse they really might be more your speed. Or you can start your own personal instance and defederate whoever you want 🤷
hoping to avoid viewpoints you don’t agree with entirely
the viewpoint “these immigrants need to be gunned down and trans people need to be eradicated” are not things i “dont agree with entirely” they are a vile evil toxin that cannot be tolerated.
the sh.itjust.works admin has the right to administer their instance however they want
yeah obviously, idk who is pretending otherwise?
You have no room to talk, your instance bends over backwards to be a safe space for neoliberals who support unipolarity and the exploitation of the third world.
“But some users disavow the US, etc.”
Yeah, but virtually all of them nonetheless parrot the State Department’s talking points about its enemies. That token “both sides” bullshit only supports the status quo while undermining the possibility of a positive alternative.
That’s the great thing.
SIJW admins are admining their instance how they choose. They choose to allow TD.
Other instance admins can choose to admin their instance how they want.
If they don’t want TD, they can choose to not have any TD communities in their instance, and they can choose to defederate from any instances that choose to have TD communities.the viewpoint “these immigrants need to be gunned down and trans people need to be eradicated” are not things i “dont agree with entirely” they are a vile evil toxin that cannot be tolerated.
You’d need to point where the people on TD are actually calling for these actions (even if their members would agree with those sentiments). Calls for violence are not protected speech and are not acceptable on any platform. I don’t make a habit of browsing TD, but what I see is mostly the dumbest of dumb right wing memes with a side of bigotry/misogyny, not openly supporting nazis and calls for violence. Those latter 2 would be a pretty solid case for instant defederation unless/until the admins of sh.itjust.works ban TD and its members imho.
yeah obviously, idk who is pretending otherwise?
You’re the one trying to tell the admins of sh.itjust.works what they should do on their instance instead of blocking and ignoring them. I certainly wouldn’t let TD and its members stay on my instance, but it’s ultimately their decision. If they let the shithousery continue to grow and fester, they will see themselves defederated, I assure you. Until then, TD will be downvoted mercilessly into oblivion and that’ll be pretty funny. I kind of don’t mind seeing these clowns mocked by the fediverse relentlessly myself.
