The instance is currently federated with every instance (including places like lemmygrad and explodingheads) as the current stance is defederation should be a last resort with users being able to choose what they want to see instead
Exploding heads has some very questionable content though so its status is currently being discussed by the admins
Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you're participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It's no different for disinformation campaigns.
It's not like they're just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they're taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it's very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.
I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn't mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.
My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.
It's why I kind of wish that "engineer" was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they're respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up in things like the all feed if their instance is problematic
Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we get everything sorted out before we push anything and been a bit slower due to vacations
False information is a global problem, but arguing against free speech absolutism sounds more dangerous to me.
I hear people say free speech absolutism is dangerous because it can lead to loud extremist voices overwhelm the more "moderate" ones, often referencing Nazi Germany and the success of their propaganda. However, any limiting of free speech can lead to censorship of voices falsely labeled extreme and fake. The entity regulating speech would need to be absolutely immune to corruption, which just isn't possible.
Extremists voices often reach further because of how radical they are, but sometimes the radical ideas are the right ones, even if at the moment the general public disagree with them. After all, we have no idea of knowing that what we really hear is the general public opinion or bots deployed by a currently dominant entity, and the general public is not always correct. For example, in certain countries the general public still believe homosexuality is sinful and should be banned, which is horrible. In these places we need radical voices. If there is a regulatory system of speech, it could be skewing and mislabeling what is considered public opinion, and what is considered extreme views.
My views do not align with the right, but I am a strong advocate for free speech and privacy, especially on the internet. Free speech and privacy must be absolute, or it isn't free speech or privacy.
I understand the reasoning but I think it's not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent. Exploding heads is just violent propaganda. I hope you defederate.
What about hexbear? Is programming.dev federated with them? Or are they intentionally defederated with everyone?
I understand the reasoning but I think it’s not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent.
Lemmy grad actively denies Genocides. Lemmygrad says that that Tienanmen Square was fabricated by the U.S.
Exploding-heads will poke fun at gender dysphoria in two communities, dank memes and dank taco.
EH is morally superior to lemmygrad in every way.
Finally,
You all should be using nostr where admins can't take your voice away or your right to hear opposing opinions.
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I am not a fan of reaching for defederation often; I actually came here from beehaw because I felt like they just pulled that trigger too fast and too frequently.
However, I do think that we should defederate from exploding-heads and hexbear. I don’t go looking for chances to be offended, but I do notice that when I see something truly distasteful on All it is almost exclusively from one of those two lately, and at this point removing them from All would make my lemmy experience just a bit more friendly.
It’s not even worth reporting content about them because when you do it seems like a common theme is that they just tag you so they can harass you. I tested this myself recently by reporting obvious misinformation/propaganda and the next time I logged in there were indeed items waiting in my inbox calling me a coward, etc.
Edit: fun fact, even if you block a user, and you block the community they are posting from, any time they mention you in a post you still get a message in your inbox, which seems like a pretty ridiculous oversight and a tool for harassment.
For those not aware of any drama, could you spill the beans?
Here's the front page of exploding-heads.com. It has a picture of a trans person hanging themselves with slurs I censored with an emoji since it's probably against the rules to post here
God, that is actively depressing. Why can't people leave us alone 😟
I thought this one was funnier tbh
They are not left wing, mainly.
A particular flavour of right wing though. One that goes out of it's way to say the most aboherent shit on people that are not like them.
In France we've got laws to regulate this type of speech. Say that AIDS is god's punishment to the homosexuals -> get a fine (or if it's the twentieth time you do it, go to jail).
I don't find it shocking that people are banning content that some countries judge so problematic that they are ready to put people in jail for it.
No, it's that they're massive bigots that harass people
Go find me a left wing instance that spreads hateful disinformation and incites violence and I'll ask to defederate with them too. Just because the right is the only side doing it doesn't mean they'd be removed for being on the right.
If someone goes to jail because they murdered someone, it wasn't because of their political preferences.
Dear programming.dev userbase,
Before downvoting me to hell please read this:
As you can see I'm an EH user and I really like to look around here. I don't comment as much but if I ever want to coment I would like to be able to.
RN the communities where "harmful and dangeorus propaganda" is being actively posted on are !freeorum@exploding-heads.com, !dankmems@exploding-heads.com and one more which I can't remember the name while writing this moment. If you don't want to look at them please block them or ask the admins to purge them.
Defederation is not a good option. The fediverse was not made to be defederated from.
I'm ready for conversations
The issue with purging them is it can devolve into whack a mole if more problem communities pop up (and they likely will considering the current communities are not being handled by the admins when things like drawings of people hanging themselves are posted) (Could also be whack a mole with instances but a community on an instance with 10 members can do a lot less than a community on an instance with 7k members)
The solution would be limiting the exploding heads instance so that posts don't show up but would still allow users there to participate in coding chats. Unfortunately though that functionality is not currently built into lemmy (and can't be coded into this instance for awhile) so the next best option is just defederating and users there having two accounts which would be the case on any other site
If we get more things coded into the site we can revisit what we decide later since we would have more options to manage it
I would like if you just purge those communities or let users block them. The same way we are technically federated with lemmygrad but if you go to the "All" tab you won't see many posts from them.
As you've said a community with 10 members would do much less damage than a community with 7k members, we are an instance with less than 20 active users. We aren't doing too much damage and the "damage" we are doing could be mitigated pretty easy without defederation.
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Note if two instances are defederated from each other they can't see each others posts & comments on some third instance
So if people from world and people from beehaw comment on a post here people in p.d can see them both but the beehaw users can't see the world users (if you check this thread on beehaw theres some comments missing)
Due to this and the nature of this instance the people in different instances interacting with each other hasnt been a problem and its mainly the all feed. As you said people deciding whether they want to join the instance can't curate their all feed while they lurk so having that not be shit is ideal (and reducing the amount of blocks people need to do)
I found an option when digging through the lemmy code yesterday that allows a community to be hidden so it doesn't show in the all feed which might be the best thing to do currently. (It just can only be set from the backend and has no ui to set it for some reason ). Still allows users to interact here since that hasnt been a problem and still allows people to sub to those communities. Would have to be extended eventually to be able to cover entire instances and could make it a screen when somebody joins the instance of if they want to see things like politics, sports, etc. which could enable or disable different things to be hidden
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For anybody that stumbles upon this post, pushed out our decision on it and it was talked about in the august newsletter https://programming.dev/post/1671024
The exploding-heads communities that break our rules have been removed from the instance (and if you find any more in the future report a post that shows it breaking the rules and ill deal with it)
