As far as I see that instance is a far-right cess pool. Everything I’ve got from that instance were low-quality transphobic “news articles”.

  • Here at exploding heads we allow anyone to say and post pretty much anything.

    Yeah, that’s just code for “nazis welcome”. They’ll tell you that anybody is welcome, but you just have to ask yourself who would not be welcome anywhere to see who such communities are built for.

      • If enough of the community makes it sufficiently clear that we’re not going to let them peddle their Nazi bullshit unopposed, including by taking whatever moderator actions are possible to get rid of them, most of the Nazis will go somewhere else and we’ll only have to deal with the typical number of Nazis for an internet platform rather than become inundated with them. Making them unwelcome by any means necessary is the name of the game.

      • If enough of the community makes it sufficiently clear that we’re not going to let them peddle their Nazi bullshit unopposed, including by taking whatever moderator actions are possible to get rid of them, most of the Nazis will go somewhere else and we’ll only have to deal with the typical number of Nazis for an internet platform rather than become inundated with them. Making them unwelcome by any means necessary is the name of the game.

      •  kbity   ( @kbity@kbin.social ) 
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        My criteria for what makes “a Nazi” are something like this.

        1. A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept, that reproducing outside one’s race is inherently wrong, and that some races are inherently superior to others; most often the superior groups are “white”, while the “inferior” groups include Africans, Jews and travelling people

        2. Reverence for cultural “tradition”, real or imagined, with any departure from these traditions classified as “degenerate” and dangerous to society. For example, a belief that avant-garde art is immoral and without value because it doesn’t root itself in what are popularly perceived to be the artistic traditions of “the west”, a neat line from Greek marble statues to Wagner.

        3. Hatred of diversity, seeing it as a plague that rots a society. For example, the belief that women are unfit to hold a social position outside of motherhood, that non-heterosexual sexualities are “degenerate”, that allowing people from another race to exist in your race’s society inevitably leads to that society’s destruction, that gender as a concept is a “mental illness” because only two biological sexes exist and each biological sex has a set-in-stone role demanding a certain presentation and certain values, that societies which follow one religion must not allow followers of another religion to exist within it.

        4. Heavy use of absolutism. Everything is either wholly good or wholly bad. Nothing can be a mix of good and bad, or neutral. And everything is a matter of utmost urgency. Anything that is “bad” is an existential threat to all that is “good” and must be immediately and utterly annihilated.

        5. An authoritarian outlook. Anything opposed by a Nazi must be forbidden by the full force of the law. There is no space for differences of opinion, or a nuanced debate, or reviewing the facts. If they oppose something, whether it’s big or small - the use of marijuana, reformative justice programs, abortion, media with female protagonists - it must be banned under pain of death.

        6. Violence. To a Nazi, the use of violence isn’t an escalation, but the norm. They have no qualms about beating people to death simply for espousing an opposing view, or even just for existing if some aspect of their existence offends their beliefs. Likewise, their rhetoric often alludes to the indiscriminate or nonchalant, even gleeful use of deadly force - “physical removal”, “showers”, etc.

        7. Shameless hypocrisy. The people who say “facts not feelings” as a rebuttal are often the same people whose beliefs are motivated almost entirely by feelings, and will happily mock others for trying to use evidence in their arguments instead of simply saying “it’s common sense”. They will shame someone for being rude and aggressive while also calling them the N word and telling them that on “the day of the rope”, they’ll be among the dead.

        8. Veneration of strong leaders and mocking of “weakness”. Consensus-builders are seen as spineless “cucks”, while people who enforce their every arbitrary whim with total force are held up as “based” exemplars of good leadership and models to be emulated. People who are comfortably being themselves in ways that aren’t conventionally masculine are addressed with slurs and told to kill themselves while ignorant, bullying asshats are applauded for “rustling jimmies”.

        You can meet all of these criteria without being a member of a National-Socialist party, or even identifying as a Nazi, but if you do meet most or all of them, your ideology can be pretty confidently described as Nazi-like.

        • By the way, cheers to you for actually answering the question. I’ve seen “BAN NAZIS” before, but I haven’t really understood what the requestors are looking to ban, and when questioned they seem to disappear quickly.

        • This seems pretty well thought out.

          I’m a little confused by: “A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept”. If I was born in Spain and my whole family has lived there for centuries, am I not Spanish / a Spaniard?

          I’d agree that saying things like “all Spaniards are terrible at math” is racist, but I don’t see how one’s race is mutable in this fashion.

          •  kbity   ( @kbity@kbin.social ) 
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            I’m a little confused by: “A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept”. If I was born in Spain and my whole family has lived there for centuries, am I not Spanish / a Spaniard?

            Spanish would be a good description of your ethnic background in that situation, but there are quite a number of ethnic identities within Spain as well - the Basque, Galicians and Catalans, just to name a few. “Spanish” isn’t a racial monolith. There would be plenty of people whose ethnic background looks quite different to yours but who are no less Spanish.

            What I mean in that statement is that Nazis believe that “race” - as in “Germanic”, “Hispanic”, “Black” (they tend to lump all sub-Saharan Africans together), “Middle Eastern” - is a useful way of classifying people, and that substantial differences in things like intelligence and physiology between humans are primarily the result of these categorisations.

            • Spanish would be a good description of your ethnic background in that situation, but there are quite a number of ethnic identities within Spain as well - the Basque, Galicians and Catalans, just to name a few. “Spanish” isn’t a racial monolith. There would be plenty of people whose ethnic background looks quite different to yours but who are no less Spanish.

              But none of that is mutable, is it?

              •  kbity   ( @kbity@kbin.social ) 
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                Your DNA isn’t going to change, but those ethnic groups are transient things rather than an inherent feature of reality. An ethnic group is ultimately a relative thing. Some “African-American” people might be genetically closer to the African people from whom their ancestors came than the other ethnic groups living in America, but they’re not simply “African” - they are a separate diaspora. Those ethnic groups change their makeups over time.

                It’s not like, say, elements. 1,000 years from now, the average genetic makeup of any given ethnic group will be observably different from how it is today, but a Hydrogen atom will still be defined in exactly the same way as now. Nazis believe that races are a concrete, reified structure that doesn’t shift over time - it is a “pure” and “natural” state that becomes degraded and diluted by what they term miscegenation, rather than a fuzzy construct that changes over time.

                Let’s say you were born in Spain and your whole family has lived there for centuries, but your family are black - say, some of your ancestors arrived from North Africa long ago. I would still call you Spanish, but a Nazi would call you African (or more likely some kind of slur). They care about the colour of your skin more than your actual background. Likewise, no matter how many generations your family has lived in a country or how well they pass, Nazis assert that if any of your ancestors was a Jew, you are also a Jew, and that as a Jew, you are inherently inferior to non-Jews and consequently a racial contaminant.

                • Just adding to this, following this same supposedly biological argument that advocates for a natural and morally correct path for the furthering of genetic lineages, Nazis persecuted homosexuality, bisexuality and trans people as a national policy, shutting down sexology research institutes, literally burning years of scientific advancements, and revoking official acknowledgements the Weimar Republic granted transgender people. It’s often forgotten, but the inherent homophobia, biphobia and transphobia of neonazis and adjacent movements is not a recent development at all: https://www.advocate.com/news/holocaust-lgbtq-victims-german-parliament

                • I wonder how anyone stereotyping individuals based on far-distant ancestors square up these beliefs with hominid evolution. I guess the answer is “they don’t”.

      • My criteria for what makes “a Nazi” are something like this.

        1. A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept, that reproducing outside one’s race is inherently wrong, and that some races are inherently superior to others; most often the superior groups are “white”, while the “inferior” groups include Africans, Jews and travelling people

        2. Reverence for cultural “tradition”, real or imagined, with any departure from these traditions classified as “degenerate” and dangerous to society. For example, a belief that avant-garde art is immoral and without value because it doesn’t root itself in what are popularly perceived to be the artistic traditions of “the west”, a neat line from Greek marble statues to Wagner.

        3. Hatred of diversity, seeing it as a plague that rots a society. For example, the belief that women are unfit to hold a social position outside of motherhood, that non-heterosexual sexualities are “degenerate”, that allowing people from another race to exist in your race’s society inevitably leads to that society’s destruction, that gender as a concept is a “mental illness” because only two biological sexes exist and each biological sex has a set-in-stone role demanding a certain presentation and certain values, that societies which follow one religion must not allow followers of another religion to exist within it.

        4. Heavy use of absolutism. Everything is either wholly good or wholly bad. Nothing can be a mix of good and bad, or neutral. And everything is a matter of utmost urgency. Anything that is “bad” is an existential threat to all that is “good” and must be immediately and utterly annihilated.

        5. An authoritarian outlook. Anything opposed by a Nazi must be forbidden by the full force of the law. There is no space for differences of opinion, or a nuanced debate, or reviewing the facts. If they oppose something, whether it’s big or small - the use of marijuana, reformative justice programs, abortion, media with female protagonists - it must be banned under pain of death.

        6. Violence. To a Nazi, the use of violence isn’t an escalation, but the norm. They have no qualms about beating people to death simply for espousing an opposing view, or even just for existing if some aspect of their existence offends their beliefs. Likewise, their rhetoric often alludes to the indiscriminate or nonchalant, even gleeful use of deadly force - “physical removal”, “showers”, etc.

        7. Shameless hypocrisy. The people who say “facts not feelings” as a rebuttal are often the same people whose beliefs are motivated almost entirely by feelings, and will happily mock others for trying to use evidence in their arguments instead of simply saying “it’s common sense”. They will shame someone for being rude and aggressive while also calling them the N word and telling them that on “the day of the rope”, they’ll be among the dead.

        8. Veneration of strong leaders and mocking of “weakness”. Consensus-builders are seen as spineless “cucks”, while people who enforce their every arbitrary whim with total force are held up as “based” exemplars of good leadership and models to be emulated. People who are comfortably being themselves in ways that aren’t conventionally masculine are addressed with slurs and told to kill themselves while ignorant, bullying asshats are applauded for “rustling jimmies”.

        You can all of these criteria without being a member of a National-Socialist party, or even identifying as a Nazi, but if you do meet most or all of them, your ideology can be pretty confidently described as Nazi-like.

  •  tookmyname   ( @tookmyname@lemmy.ml ) 
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    3810 months ago

    Bigotry should be banned, and removed from this instance. That means not allowing bigotry on our instance. That means defederating from less clever wannabe 4chans, and less moderated The_D replacements.

    They can enjoy their shithole federation.

  •  Milan   ( @milan@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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    I am trying to examen the instance, it would have been helpful to have some pointers to speed up the process although it somehow sounds like a familiar domain. It sounds like such content at least was against their rules. but that of course does not have to mean much.

    Looking at the comments from their team is no good impression to say the least hmm

    Update: found some more potential evidence that they are not welcoming nazis, but i think there are quite a few misinformation and “the usual” shitpost things on there that are not very … enjoyable (and of course as the op implies, transphobic trash and such as to expect from a shitpost instance).

          • You’re making the same not-necessarily-true assumption that OP is making.

            In Kbin, which I am using to view this instead of Lemmy, it shows it in two places that are both well disconnected from the content of the post itself. There are a bunch of different 3rd party apps being developed for both Kbin and Lemmy right now with various UIs, I haven’t viewed this in any of them yet. I also haven’t viewed it in Mastodon, which I’m told can be used to view Lemmy and Kbin threads. There are innumerable different possible UIs out there in the Fediverse.

            And even then, it’s still possible in this case for OP to have been discussing petitioning everyone to defederate from exploding-heads. That’s a reasonable alternate interpretation and I can’t read OP’s mind, only what they wrote.

            What I’m suggesting is that we should keep in mind that the only thing that people are guaranteed to see about a post is the actual post, there’s no way of knowing what the surrounding context is going to be. The place you’re posting it is not the only place it will be seen.

      • It appeared on kbin.social’s “all” feed.

        Perhaps it would be a good feature to be able to flag a community as “local only” to prevent it from federating at all, for this kind of thing.

  • I am against defederations being decided by instance admins. Lemmy needs (kbin being more mature project at least has domain blocking) tools to let users decide themselves what they want or don’t want to see. Are you an adult or you need others to decide for you? I have blocked lemmygrad and other tankie/nazi (same shit) instances (domains) myself. If I don’t want to see eg. transgender stuff then I don’t cry about it but just block it. Grow a pair and do the same.

    • While I disagree with your opinion on admins, I appreciate the sentiment. But if you want to be on an instance that isn’t defederated or view any content, run you own instance.

      That said, the ability for users to moderate the content they see on their own profile could definitely use more flexibility. The ability to block communities as a user is good, but they should absolutely also be able to block instances on their own. Beyond that, the ability to filter out content based on keywords (title, content, urls) would also be a nice addition.

      Coming from RiF on Android, the app had filtering and let me say, being able to block Elon, Kanye, Meta, TikTok, a bunch of shit spewing fascists, etc made my Reddit viewing experience much better. This was, of course, after already leaving all of the default subs and finding niche communities but for some reason people had a hard-on for those topics and I could literally not care any less about them.

    •  hi65435   ( @hi65435@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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      I have blocked lemmygrad

      so did I

      and other tankie/nazi (same shit) instances (domains) myself.

      didn’t see that yet but at least some user with a name in that direction.

      Anyway, I found it quite not amusing to see this stuff on my second day of using Lemmy - which was 2 weeks ago or so. Honestly, I’ve seen enough online communities degenerate and having a few power users/enthusiasts who like fine tuning every setting is not enough to get a healthy community going.

      I think if Lemmy doesn’t get it’s shit together in that regard, it’ll be like Mastodon where there are alt-right communities powered by it and then another normal (or whatever you want to call it?) part. However I’ve been quite surprised when my first subscriber was some alt-right dude. That was enough for me to delete my account.

      At the moment I see chances 50/50 that Lemmy can make it. But this highly depends on:

      1. making it convenient for non-technical people (discoverability across instances)
      2. have a reasonable filtering system (if it’s fully democratic and it works that would be awesome. but to be realistic, that would be a first…)
  •  JshKlsn   ( @JshKlsn@lemmy.ml ) 
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    1210 months ago

    Lmao, their rules:

    • Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
    • No threats or personal insults
    • No discrimination

    and yet almost every single comment I read is calling everyone pussies, toxic, and racist words.

    Whats the point in having those rules when literally NO ONE is following or enforcing them? Damn.

      •  hendrik   ( @hendrik@lemmy.ml ) 
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        Just directly write them a message. I don’t think it needs a vote by the majority of the community to exclude some right wing crypto bros who like transphobia etc

        Also if you focus your energy here instead of notifying an admin, they might not read it and you kinda did the opposite of what you intended. Focus your energy here only if the admins and moderation don’t do their job properly.