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2y ago

@TheDude What is the Deal with Lemmygrad and Are You Going to Block Other Instances for Personal Reasons?

sh.itjust.works Why was lemmygrad blocked? - sh.itjust.works

Did the admins poll the community about it? Why was such measure so needed? If the tankie content is so annoying why not let users decide what they want to see or not and what they want to block? I don’t like that the admins want to censor the content I can view or not. You guys are not protecting u...

EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.

First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.

Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.

Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.

Now on to the meat:

I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.

When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.

It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.

Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.

Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?

Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.

tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?

125 comments

Hi Nahvi.
Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.
Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I've since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.
One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.
That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn't be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the "be a good human" category.
I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.
- Hey dude, thanks for dropping by.
  Just wanted to say that I appreciate the direction you're trying to herd cats towards.
- @TheDude
  Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.
  I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you've struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.
  I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.
- I hope Lemmy will one day support defederating from content and users separately. As I wrote in other threads already, and I will just take your word for it that lemmygrad really is promoting hate speech, I can understand and support defederation from instances pr9moting hate speech, but at the same rime, it robs me of the opportunity to engage with tgeir users even on other platforms. As such, if the option to separately defederate from content and users ever becomes available, I hope the lemmygrad users will be federated again.
- Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked
  Then how about not lock every discussion post as soon as you see people agreeing with you on who to defederate and actually allow discussion?
- will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech
  That's great but please define hate speech and give us some examples.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
  Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".
- Are you planning to actively moderate against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?

I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I'll see if I can find it.
- Thank you. I would be interested to read it.
  
  I think this is the thread https://sh.itjust.works/post/37624

The instance called lemmygrad promotes an ideology that's considered extremist by many instance owners, so it has been defederated by many big instances. The other ones one the list that are defederated because of an unusual number of users to content ratio, leading many instance owners to suspect that they are bot accounts used for spam so any instance with these suspicions are also defederated, not because of ideology, buy simply because of the perceived spam threat. Now I don't know how true is the bot threat, but that is what people have been saying is the reason for defederation.
- If this was one of the larger instances that has defederated a bunch of instances like lemmy.world, I wouldn't have blinked that it defederated another one. Sh.itjust.works has exactly two blocked instances, one of which seems to invite pedos the other seems like a political group. In my mind, those are a bit different and worth asking a question or two about before deciding this place isn't as welcoming as it seemed from the outside.

I’m gonna park my car here for this.

When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml "Introduce yourself" thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying "Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are" (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact words).
When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and "fighting" people isn't something I want to see here.
- That sounds like a good reason to block that idiot or maybe even that community from my own thread, but I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don't need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
  On the other hand, blocking burggit so I don't have simulated CP showing up in my feed is not the kind of choice that I need clarification about.
  
  I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.
  it seems like you have a fundamental issue with instances like sh.itjust.works and would be better off joining a different one, or even better making your own then
  
  Sounds like you would be happier swapping instances. For the most part, the people here want it to remain a civil place without having the side project of keeping up with which instances are trash and manually having to block things. I'm sure there's instances with much more liberal views on defederation that suit your personal preferences better.
  
  I should clarify that this wasn't just 1 user that was isolated. This was an upvoted comment, with many other users congratulating him on his commitment to "trolling the libtards".
- Well that's a shitty person then. I'm a ML and I joined over there on a different account because I like talking communism without the western prejudices. (ie people using Tankie as a slur but can't define why)
  That and communism memes are fun. Good discourse on organizing ect.

Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.
Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don't have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren't, given how many instances have defederated them.
Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don't speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.
Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.
You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.
I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there's anything I left out.
- I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude's intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.
  I really don't care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn't had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
  
  The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?
  I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
  It's a single event. Anything else?

I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be defederated. I will say they openly brigade. That is just my personal observation, and you shouldn’t trust a random comment without data to back it up. But maybe keep an eye out and you’ll see it.
- FWIW, my original response here was 7/0 upvoted and then I checked a few minutes later and it was at 11/6. Certainly an unusual upvote pattern.
  
  Yep. I’m thats usually how it goes. Once of of them makes a comment or posts about a comment they don’t like they show up. And then the downvotes begin. They are openly narrative driven, and the way they “discuss” things comes off as digital warrior-esque. They’re here to for the showdown of their lives.
  I actually wouldn’t mind their odd positions if they weren’t so hyper aggressive and unwilling to discuss facts. I’ve been banned from threads over there for pointing out that while I see their frustrations with western interventionism, it’s odd how they don’t seem to mind BRICs members also intervening in conflicts worldwide.

If you want to ask TheDude specifically there's no need to open a comment thread here, you can just PM him directly.
- That makes sense and I probably should have considered it more, though I also thought it would be useful if the response was public. Since I went searching for it myself, I thought other new users might do the same.
- When I skimmed the announcement where he created the Agora, I missed that part completely. I thought it was just about people donating. Based on the link in the post, I thought he was making all these decisions himself while maybe considering input from others.
  Doesn't seem like there is much point in DMing him now.

This shit is so tiresome already. If you don't like the atmosphere of one instance then find another. It really is that simple. Quit harassing the instance admins they don't owe you shit.
- I don’t see @Nahvi@sh.itjust.works harassing anyone but asking questions I also personally find interesting. I started my life in the fediverse on this instance since a) I wanted to distribute the load new users were (still are?) generating moving away from Reddit b) the rules were good (upvote/downvote, nsfw, etc) and c) the name. I didn’t bother about checking the instance-admins preferences and only now learning about de-federation. And now I am wondering if I should ease down my enthusiasm because I might need to switch to an other instance (later than sooner).
  So yes, maybe a few personal words about the instance and especially about other federated instances I would be curious to read.
  Please keep up the good work though @TheDude@sh.itjust.works . I can’t imaging how much work is involved in keeping this instance alive and have great respect.
- Seems like you didn't actually read my post.
  This is the new parking lot that I am checking out. It seems pretty nice so far, but there is a weird statue in the corner. If it is just a one off that is cool. If it is the first among many then maybe I need to keep driving around.
  Edit: Seems like I combined the two posts when responding, but I think I am going to leave it as is.
  
  You're asking a person with a day job who is doing a cool thing for the fediverse community and set up a community in sh.itjustworks (Agora) to handle these possible future blocks to give you a granular breakdown of the blocking of one instance in a justification they don't really owe you.
  The community itself is trying to be chill and just vibe. If what we're doing fits what you're looking for, welcome.
- Exactly. There’s so many instances for anyone who don’t like one to migrate to
  
  I fully agree and if you read through my post you will notice this is not my first instance. It is just one that seems like a pretty good fit and has a name I like. I am hoping this one oddity is just that and not an indicator that @TheDude plans to block a bunch of other political instances later.

Dude. You're late to the party. This has already been posted about and discussed to death.
You don't have the background info to understand yet. Hang back a bit, read older posts. There are very good reasons that there are several instances that are damn near universally defederated.
- I both looked around and did a search. The only comment I found from @TheDude was the one linked in my post. I am just asking for a little clarification as to whether this is a one-off or typical fare.
  Edit: Just re-read the last bit. I don't want to wait around for weeks or months only to find out that I should have realized on day one that this was a bad fit.
  Is it really so wrong to ask for a little clarification about one of two total Instances that have been blocked here?
  
  Do you have a thread over on lemmygrad asking about all the instances they have blocked? Just curious if you only concern troll in one direction

There is now @goat doing a "lemmygrad findings" collection here: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for anyone who is interested in those gems.
- I know goat pushes some buttons (whether just due to being contrarian but earnest or actively trolling - I'm still kind of on the fence about that beyond 'they're kind of a dick'), but I've said this would be an interesting concept before, so it's neat to see it in practice.
  Will reserve judgement until I see what's being curated, though.
  
  what's your opinion now?

federating with lemmygrad means opening your communities up to the same behaviour displayed there, such as active calls for political violence, suggesting users kill themselves, ableist slurs etc
having personal convictions against this sort of behaviour seems entirely reasonable
- So then block people instead of trying to shovel your personal feed curation onto everyone
  
  alternatively, dont go on an explicitly curated instance
- That would be perfectly reasonable. It might also be perfectly reasonable if @TheDude's grandmother was killed by communists. It might also be perfectly reasonable that he and the main admin at lemmygrad.ml have known and disliked each other for years.
  My concern is that I don't know which one of those things that it is or if it is none of them. Before I settle down here, I would like to have a better idea of what here is.
  Let me pill out an analogy:
  Right now, I am sitting in a comfortable lounge with pretty chill people and all along one wall are a bunch of doors with windows in them, but for some reason two of the doors are locked and have their windows covered. One has a little note near it that says, "beware pedos beyond this door" which is all I want to know. The other door has a note that says, "beware politics beyond this door" which leaves me with a couple curiosities. After asking around all I hear is that it goes against the hosts personal convictions. Is it really so wrong to go ask the host what is going on?
  I am not arguing the door should be unlocked or telling anyone that they are wrong. I am just asking what are the odds that he is going to lock more doors, and if so, what kind of doors should I expect to get locked in the future? Oh and as a side note if he is interested in engaging my personal curiosity, "what made this particular political door so bad in his eyes?"
  
  thats fair
  
  Sounds perfectly normal. :)

That instance is full of sympathizers of Mao Zedong, Stalin, they're in favour of a authoritarian regime. If you are in favour of that stance may as well migrate there if you don't believe in the so called free world.

If you or anyone else doesn't like an instance then leave. Go find another one. No one needs to be holding your hand as you ask a million questions to evaluate if an instance is "right for you" or some other such nonsense.
- If you prefer to remain ignorant until you accidentally stumble across the truth then that is your problem.

For example, I don't perceive !latestagecapitalism@lemmygrad.ml as extremist, but rather as insightful. It's the one sub for which I need an alternative account.

"I want someone else to pay for hosting and maintaining an instance for me, to admin it and moderate its communities, but when they make a choice I disagree with that's not okay."
Well, good thing there's a way for you to stand up your own instance that you can federate or defederate whatever instances you want.
- Thank you for literally putting words in my mouth, quotation marks and all.
  If you had bothered to spend one minute reading the post, that I literally spend thirty minutes typing up, you would have noticed that the first sentence was to express appreciation for the time and money @TheDude on creating and maintaining this instance. At no point did I say he was wrong or even that I disagreed with his choice. I just asked for clarification on the matter.
- I assume you raise the same concerns under each and every post calling for further defederation from instances since they aren't being posted by the person/people in charge of hosting?

You can also see previous discussion in this post: [Vote] Clear the federation blacklist
- That is interesting.
  Edited since I mixed up which comments were for which poll.

Go look over lemmygrad.ml and decide on how much you want to argue with passionate communist and tankies everywhere. Lemmygrad.ml will brigade posts and comments on other instances they are allowed on to spread their beliefs and they are not interested in the same happening on their own instance.
- I don't make a habit out of arguing with people online; experience shows me that it is neither enjoyable, nor productive. I am also not above filtering out communities that I consider irritating. That said, I don't want to be a part of a community that is going to block any voices that are different from their own.
  I am just trying to find out what kind of community this is before making it my home base for the foreseeable future.
  
  It’s not about you wanting to argue - they want to argue. When I first got to Lemmy I was “confronted” with shocking commentary basically arguing to me the justification of Russia killing women and children in Ukraine.
  Are those your beliefs? Then you know where to find them.
  
  It won't matter if you block communities from lemmygrad they will come to your posts and comments especially if they are pro west, leftist, capitalist, anti china etc...
  https://lemmygrad.ml/post/229915
  https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/444856
  https://lemmygrad.ml/post/714337
  If you are those things they literally hate you, if you post in their instance and are anti china you will be banned. It's a giant echo chamber and they want to be able to post in your instances and communities. There is not point talking to them since they are hyper fixated on that, just browse their instance. Most other spicy instances at least know and tell their users to keep spicy shit inside their own instance and not take it elsewhere.

Welp looks like its time to swap instances, admins are damn cops, sure ban the loli shit but defederating with ppl because they hold the same views as a billion+ ppl on the planet is borderline insane

125 comments