We need to have a serious talk about this instance being federated with Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and tankies in general
TO THE ADMINS: Read this thread and give me one good reason why federating with toxic, propaganda spreading tankie loons is a good idea.
No one wants those fucks, or the alt right dipshits for that matter, around, and they're spreading blatant lies, yet I see they are here. Does lemm.ee only care about boosting its numbers and is willing to sink to new lows to do it, I wonder? 🤔
For the time being, I have no plans to change our federation policy. I realize this is not what you want to hear, and I'm sorry to disappoint you. It's just not a goal for lemm.ee to curate external instances for now.
There are probably many instances out there that have horrible content (content which would get users banned if they posted it on lemm.ee), but vetting instances and maintaining a defederation list is a big effort, and I believe this effort is much better spent elsewhere.
I've stated this in many other similar threads, but let me also reiterate here: the above should not be taken to mean that lemm.ee is some bastion of free speech absolutism. Users or communities breaking rules on lemm.ee are dealt with. Also, we do reserve the right to defederate any instance which starts causing problems for lemm.ee on a bigger scale (so in cases where banning individual users is not effective).
I realize this is a topic where it's impossible to make everybody happy, because each person has their own view on what should be federated or defederated. At the end of the day, for anything that's not illegal or directly hurting lemm.ee, I believe it's best to leave these decisions up to users - you can make your own choices with which users and communities you block, and I'm certain that soon you'll have the tools built in to Lemmy itself to make the same decision on an instance level as well. And if that doesn't work for you, then there's always the possibility of joining a different instance with a different approach to federation.
Thanks for this attitude. Lets me know I’m on the right instance. I want to be able to choose who I block, and I don’t want someone else choosing that for me.
For the record, I changed my opinion regarding hexbear. While I generally very much appreciate the open federation policy, I think users from that instance overwhelmingly deteriorate the culture in comment sections. Appreciable individual exceptions exist.
Why don't you just start your own? You can defederate any instance you want.
I'm on lemm.ee but I've personally blocked communities I've found to be toxic, some of them were on lemmygrad. I see very little tankie shit. Took me like 5 minutes.
I second. Please do the instance a favor and disconnect from them. They are bad faith actors here to do nothing but cause chaos. If I could block them on my own, I would have done it day one.
Most of the apps allow you to block communities or entire instances. I've been using connect, it's free and let's you block. Most of the reason I downloaded it.
It doesn't really work for comments though (it only places a content warning over them) which is 75% of the reason why hexbear is so horrible in the first place.
I've personally found the hexbear locals to be really inclusive, and pleasant to interact with. I couldn't say I agree with the totality of their political outlooks, but I've not found them particularly unreasonable.
I don't have an opinion, because I really haven't interacted with the Lemmygrad folks. Their instance culture just isn't really my bag, so I don't find much opportunity or common ground to engage.
Clearly I'll have to, and it will be expensive, but we sane folks have no choice. These piece of shit admins on several different instances have shown us that they clearly don't care about their users (this is not the first instance I have seen that's pulled this crap).
I shouldn't have to as that costs money. It's the admin's job to fix his server, not mine.
If he's a tankie or a supporter of them, he has a responsibility to us to be honest about that fact instead of allowing them to run roughshod and inundate the instance with propaganda. He KNOWS they don't belong here but he's ignoring the problem. That means he either is one of them, supports them or is being taken in by them. And that's a serious problem that will affect the whole federation, not just this one instance.
If tankies get away with doing that here, they'll do it to other admins, and poison the whole federation. It'll be impossible for new instances to flourish without kowtowing to them, and so it has to be stopped here and now with the bigger instances.
EDIT: Welp, clearly I’ll have to, and it will be expensive, but we sane folks have no choice. These piece of shit admins on several different instances have shown us that they clearly don’t care about their users (this is not the first instance I have seen that’s pulled this crap).
How do you foresee tankies poisoning the whole fediverse? Do you find their arguments compelling? It doesn't even seem like they are trying to make a case, they are just bluntly stating misinformation. If we are going to remove all misinformation then we are going to need paid admins because even at the current scale its a full time job. Or should we only remove certain misinformation? I see blatant misinformation everywhere on the fediverse already and only a tiny percentage is tankie related.
Nope, sounds like you need to go sign up for a tankie instance and leave the rest of us decent people alone instead of invading every space and expecting others to be okay with it.
I don’t think a worldwide general-purpose instance should be removing content, users, or instances based on an opinion of the content. That’s censorship by definition.
Removing content based on an opinion is very different than removing users or instances that are manipulating Lemmy votes/accounts or expressing extreme targeted hate towards an individual.
Oh no, there is, because it's their responsibility as admins and third party apps are not an excuse for them to shirk their responsibility toward their users.
Needing a third party app for that kind of basic functionality defeats the point of Lemmy anyway.
The point of Lemmy is federation. If it doesn't solve your needs, then it's your responsibility to make the decision if it's a healthy ecosystem for you, and if you should keep using it or not.
Modern day tankies are indistinguishable from fascists since they shill for fascist shitholes like Russia and China. I don't care about intent, everyone can lie about it. You can't lie about outcomes.
This is my problem. I support communist and socialist eonomic ideals and reforms, all these tankies claiming China or worse Russia are somehow actually communist hurts the cause. They're basically fascist nationalists claiming to be communist. It's infuriating...
I don't have an issue with people having different views, but I had to block a ton of that shit due to the blatant propaganda. I have to think it's filled with Chinese bots at this point. Saying the Tianamen square massacre didn't happen is akin to Holocaust denial. It's insane blatant shilling.
Your argument makes absolutely no sense. "Don't defederate because you disagree with their views" when it comes to left-wing/communist extremists, yet you turn around and complain about places with right-wing/fascist extremist places existing. As others have said, doesn't matter what "side" they're on, violent extremists are cut from the same cloth in that way. Personally, I'm with the admins here, in that I don't mind being federated with either of them so long as they play by the rules here. But then again, I tend to stick to my own interests and set my default view to Subscribed, and don't venture into the All feed much. Even then, I haven't really noticed what people are complaining about very much. If people here are smart enough to know real misinformation when they see it, they can just scroll on and ignore it.
Tankies denying the existence of atrocities for the sake of political convenience is the reason this thread sprang up.
Tank man was never seen again. It’s assumed he was interrogated and killed or sent to live in a farm upstate full of comrades and comradettes where he could politically demonstrate and frolic his days away.
I hate these instances too but don't want to change the instance policies. Pretty soon instance blocking should become a thing and you'll be able to block them outright.
You know? We are open to discussions and polite exchanges in Hexbear. If there is good faith (and no racism, hate, ableism, homophobia, etc) there are a lot of bridges to build and learn.
But you came to Hexbear to start shit. And now you are resurrecting a 2 days old post because you are angry about not receiving upvotes in our instance.
I have enough luck to have joint instances that don't federate with fascists, being they red or not. However, when one of those instances decide to federate with them (not going to happen, but let's pretend), I'll protest like you're doing. And if it doesn't work, I'll go to a more inclusive instance.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that a fascist is not the same thing as a communist. But they're equally despicable.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that a fascist is not the same thing as a communist. But they're equally despicable.
Fascism is inherently anti-democratic, communism isn't. I know communism is a shorthand for stalinism, maoism and other totalitarian ideologies that use socialist facade (similar to national socialism) but it's worth to make an effort not to discredit the whole idea.
Yes, you're right. Sometimes I think that communism is merely an economic system. But thinking about Stalin, Mao and Il-Sung, whose communist developments where economic, social, democratic and whatnot, it's sometimes hard to discriminate the noise from the useful information too.
Besides, I can't understand why communists / tankies are so prone to support dictators. Dictatorship is not exclusive to communism, even capitalism had and has some kind of dictatorships: Hungary, Belarus...
You got mad having a debate in one thread and you want the admins to go win it for you by blocking an entire server of different people and communities.
"We kicked extremists off our platform, now they're congregating without oversight and becoming more extreme. Who could have seen this coming??"
If you actually think a massacre at Tiananmen Square happened, and actually think it was a worthy event to remember, wouldn't you want to be aware that people are trying to rewrite it?