The screenshot shows the recommendations from https://join-lemmy.org/.

Still being federated with exploding-heads does not mean the instance supports them. But it means that shit-heads are allowed to take part in the discussions on their communities. They do intoxicate the discussions we will have. They will attack minorities. Maybe you will not be harassed by them, more vulnerable people will be. They are allowed to moderate communities on these instances. Exploding-heads members actively guide young and unknowing people to their hateful instance.

They try to start discussions about the holocaust https://sh.itjust.works/post/227268. They create communities only to crosspost exploding-heads content https://lemmy.world/c/pharma They take over discussions against them https://exploding-heads.com/comment/132189 “WHY are vulnerable people joining a decentralized system? Isnt this why you want a closed, not for public eyes community?”

This was a link to exploding-heads, because when someone copies a permalink of a comment from them on another instance, it will be a link to their instance.

Are we building a place where vulnerable people are welcome and safe or are we building a place where nazis are welcome and safe?

They want you to block them, they comment that everywhere. They block people who are in favor of defederating them https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 When their opponents won’t see them anymore, they can harass and recruit without being noticed.

Blocking will not solve the problem. They will spread even when you close your eyes.

Maybe this was not done intentionally, but now there is a post with a list of ‘health communities on Lemmy’ with the first entry guiding to exploding heads. https://lemmy.world/post/396561

It is still possible that some of the mentioned instances do support them. The owner of sh.itjust.works says that because of “free speech” all other instances would be allowed. It is suspicious to me that his line is drawn only for lemmygrad https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474

The decision to block the Lemmygrad instance was less a question of censorship, and more an issue of personal conviction. As a volunteer dedicating my personal resources and time to facilitating a space for users to create, discover, and discuss - not just on this instance, but across the Fediverse - I admit that this choice was made alone, selfishly, without the consent or thoroughly considering the collective opinion of the community. With the above said, sh.itjust.works has had the lemmygrad instance blocked from its first day.

I’d like to also point out that the lemmygrad instance has far more blocked instances than what is currently blocked here. Maybe you can create a post on that instance to see what that’s all about and report back?

At the same time they seem to ignore the call and vote to defederate with exploding-heads https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483.

They rejected to delete The_Donald from sh.itjust.works until they feared to get isolated from the other instances: https://lemmy.ml/post/1467310. They where aware of The_Donald and ignored early warnings. (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/266248). TD was more important to them than keeping the only mod of their 4th biggest community c/patientgamers (https://sh.itjust.works/post/291747, https://sh.itjust.works/post/388922)

Since The_Donald was removed, I did not find more racist content on the mentioned servers. That is part their tactics. They act harmless but recruit to their instance, attract likeminded people and chase others away. Discussions on sh.itjust.works about such topics are very toxic already, soon they might be able to do more harm.

(My research is very limited, as i could not search for all exploding-heads member content on other instances by entering their domain. I know there are nice communities on sh.itjust.works.)

What can be done? On joinmastodon.org there is a Mastodon Server Covenant with very few useful rules, one of them is “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”. https://joinmastodon.org/covenant It would be a first step to implement these rules for join-lemmy.org. At least instances that want to be recommended on there should have to agree to that rule.

More actions should be taken now. Please make suggestions. Things will only become more complicated. The next reddit wave is incoming.

For those who did not already know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone

This is not the first time new platforms face these problems, do we really have to repeat the same mistakes?

  • gabuwu@beehaw.orgEnglish
    7410·
    1 year ago

    They are going to cause issues sooner rather than later in communities that don’t defederate from them. It’s quite literally just a given. I’m shocked some of those instances haven’t defederated from them already.

    • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
      455·
      1 year ago

      A mix of naïveté and bad faith actors taking advantage of the naïveté are leading to the current environment, it seems like to me

      • gabuwu@beehaw.orgEnglish
        263·
        1 year ago

        I think the whole attitude of “oh just block the community and ignore it” really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren’t cut off preemptively. You aren’t deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.

        • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
          13·
          1 year ago

          The question I always find myself asking is, why is it that people only expect the targets of abuse to do the filtering of that abuse, and why, other than you yourself would like to enact abuse, would you want to leave people engaging in abusive behavior in position to continue being abusive? Beehaw has lamented there not being more flexible moderation tools allowing us to perform more powerful moderation actions, enabling the filtration of abuse on otherwise good servers, but until those tools exist, what good reason is there to ignore and enable abuse?

    • Rhabuko@feddit.deEnglish
      134·
      1 year ago

      It’s this (mostly) American delusion of unlimited free speech on the internet and it never works out 🤷‍♂️.

      • fragmentcity@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Americans who understand the first amendment will tell you that freedom of association is inseparable from freedom of expression. The government (plus its agents) is the only entity constrained by the First Amendment. Everyone else benefits from it, including certain instance owners who don’t want to associate with certain others.

      • gabuwu@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yep. And (obviously) America is going to one day be forced to come to that same understanding that Germany was painfully forced to. I’m just hopeful it doesn’t take a genocide or some sort of dictatorship for a similar reckoning to occur. Germany might not be perfect, but there are many things American society could learn from that exist within modern day German culture especially in regards to cultural reconciliation with historical wrongs. It’s hard to really describe how happy it makes me feel that as a Jewish person I can say I would feel very safe and welcome living in and visiting most places in Germany, but it also makes me sad to an immense degree that I can truthfully say I’d probably feel safer most places there than in the most places in the states right now… :(

      • Landrin201@lemmy.mlEnglish
        76·
        1 year ago

        I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those “free speech absolutist” types. It’s a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.

        • Tb0n3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          32·
          1 year ago

          That’s why I moved there from lemmy.world. I’d rather not have somebody else tell me what to think or see.

          • Landrin201@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            You cannot have a space which is welcoming to nazis which is also welcoming to minorities.

            Nobody is telling you what to “think or see” when an instance gets deferderated. You’re welcome to think whatever you like, and to go seek it out. You’re just not welcome to bring it into some spaces.

  • Belgdore@lemm.eeEnglish
    582·
    1 year ago

    IMO the best defense is education. Make these people and their bigotry known. I had not heard of them before this post, but now I can be on alert for them, and avoid interacting with them and report them in the future.

  • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
    579·
    1 year ago

    They’re playing the traditional Alt-Right playbook, and they’re playing a bunch of instance admins like fiddles. I’ve noticed a consistent pattern of abusive trolls being from that instance. My secondary account is on sh.itjust.works, and I’m looking for another instance to be my secondary instance that I use to look at lemmy.world content I can’t see from this, my primary account. Thus far, there aren’t any instances I can find that have a federation / defederation list that matches my ideal list, so for now, I have my happy account and my “it stresses me out” account.

    It seems like there are two camps here in the threadiverse. People who are excited to find an instance admin who moderates the way they like, and people who think an instance admin is only responsible for uptimes and that this entire experiment should be fully unmoderated

    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
      173·
      1 year ago

      Be the change you want to see. Setting up an instance is surprisingly easy, it’s the admin stuff that will take much more time, and finding users that will probably be hard. Also scaling once you hit a certain level of size/traffic, but that’d be a good problem to have. To me the most beautiful part of the fediverse is that if you’re not finding the instance with rules/defederation/etc you want you can make that place exist.

      If you are interested in doing so I’d be more than happy to give what advice or help I can.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
        123·
        1 year ago

        Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don’t defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.

        Being outside of the US, I wasn’t aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it’s easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.

        If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don’t see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.

        I’m sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven’t already.

        • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          I may not be able to help too specifically with that then as I don’t have any experience with it, but I would still encourage you to do so. One of the helpful folks in [email protected] would probably know more about Kbin specifically.

          • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head. I’ll either be able to do a great job of it with my devops background, or a terrible job of it with my devops fulltime job

            • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              Ah, hello fellow DevOp. If I were to apply some of the stuff I do for clients, I’d end up with an AWS bill bigger than my car payment… It’s really neat to see just how far your dollar can go running on a non “Big 3” cloud provider, or even in my homelab. And then weighing that efficiency and limited feature set with availability… fun times

      • MrMonkey@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Last I tired to set one up the docker image just vomits. The install instructions are for ubuntu, but everything in my server farm is all debian and they don’t have the same versions of packages so it doesn’t work.

        I could spin up an Ubuntu instance and try the manual install instructions again, but having a one off system doesn’t make me happy.

  • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    497·
    1 year ago

    Making the basic rules like Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia should be a no brauner. Pls add this rule

  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlEnglish
    467·
    1 year ago

    I think this is The Alt-Right Playbook being used on Lemmy. Watch the video with same title on YouTube, it has a whole playlist attached to it. Very valuable.

  • Altair@vlemmy.netEnglish
    4110·
    1 year ago

    Absolutely agree that instances featured in http://join-lemmy.org/ should all follow those basic rules:

    Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia

    Concerning to see that both vlemmy.net and lemmy.world are federated with them; I’m mainly on these.

    • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.eeEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      “Yes but who gets to decide that What is racism, sexism and homophobia and transphobia?”

      Who watches the watchmen Batman? Who Rorascshes the big blue dong? Hmmm??

      We should pretty much give up and let society be nothing but anarchism because trying might lead to failure, and then where would we be??

      Ohio. No one wants to be Ohio.

      Except maybe Ohio. Disgusting

  • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
    302·
    1 year ago

    I expect the moderators of communities to do sufficient policing of their community to make sure it follows the rules of the instance it is on and the rules of that community. If those rules permit something you disagree with (or don’t permit something you do want to see) the power is in your hands as a user to not participate or even see that community. The only way for a user to guarantee they won’t interact with someone from instance X (whether that is exploding-heads or lemmygrad or whatever you don’t like) is to only interact with communities on instances that have them defederated. There are places you can get a more curated and aggressively moderated experience, and have been recommending places such as beehaw to anyone looking for that.

    I will take action against:

    • Local users harassing someone
    • Local users breaking local rules
    • Local users repeatedly breaking remote rules
    • Local communities that break local instance rules
    • Remote users harassing local users
    • Remote users repeatedly breaking local rules
    • Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to break local rules
    • Remote instances that repeatedly allow its users to harass my users

    The first rule on my instance is a catch-all “Be welcoming”, that will be wielded to aggressively remove far more than just “racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

    As an admin I don’t have the time or desire to police:

    • Local users interacting on remote communities, so long as they are following remote rules
    • Remote communities
    • Remote users interacting with remote users/communities

    I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the “All” feed, at the very least for anyone who isn’t logged in. Given the general rules above that feed may include disagreeable posts, and is not a good representation of my instance or the type of community most users there will experience.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
      101·
      1 year ago

      I do hope for a way to better curate (or just disable for now) the “All” feed

      I really don’t want to see that done, because right now that has been my primary method of community discovery, outside of the small number I’ve discovered through explicit Reddit migrations.

      /all should be a feed of everything available to users on your instance. That’s…what the word “all” means. Defederating is the way to curate that. An instance being able to block individual communities within another instance could be a good tool to have as well, perhaps, but beyond that I’m not sure I would want to see curation of /all.

      • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of “Suggested” feed rather than a replacement for “All”, like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I’d just take being able to filter the “All” view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.

        Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created “All” is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere… I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      43·
      1 year ago

      That’s pretty much my philosophy on my instance.

      I’ve only defederated instances for pedo (usually loli) crap - I don’t want their communities in the “All” feed. I don’t want users joining my instance to access such things (when they upload images, even when posting on remote communities, that gets hosted on MY server).

      That and spam.

      • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, illegal things are sort of an existential threat to any instance, so I will not hesitate to defederate over embracing of and failure to moderate such content at an admin/instance level. That is another one of the rules on my instance.

  • hawkwind@lemmy.managementEnglish
    25·
    1 year ago

    Join an instance that does not allow local communities. Then you can subscribe remotely to whatever you want and block whatever you don’t.

  • eating3645@lemmy.worldEnglish
    284·
    1 year ago

    Even if these servers federate with exploding heads, the individual servers would still moderate content coming from exploding heads users on their servers, no? I agree that there are clearly a lot of shitty users there, but I have not seen a strong argument from you on how federating with them is a problem. Their content here is actively moderated.

    I could very well be wrong, in which case I will eat my words, but it seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.

    Just took a quick browse of their instance, eww…

  • Carcosa@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    3011·
    1 year ago

    "First they came for the Communists

    And I did not speak out

    Because I was not a Communist

    Then they came for the Socialists

    And I did not speak out

    Because I was not a Socialist

    Then they came for the trade unionists

    And I did not speak out

    Because I was not a trade unionist

    Then they came for the Jews

    And I did not speak out

    Because I was not a Jew

    Then they came for me

    And there was no one left

    To speak out for me"

    • Pastor Martin Niemöller

    Watch for those instances that choose to defederate from the communist instances, for the most effective anti-fascists have been the communists.

    10 million fascists were killed, wounded or captured during the Second War War on the eastern front.

    Watch for free speech absolutists, centrists, and those who claim to be apolitical. Silence is violence. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.

  • Scrappy Duncan@lemm.eeEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    So, dumb question but what is exploding-heads? Are they actual Nazis or like far-right wackos and MAGA nuts?

  • Atarian@vlemmy.netEnglish
    121·
    1 year ago

    ELI5 (because I signed up about an hour ago) - what’s wrong with the Exploding Heads instance? I thought about joining up because I suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome (really)

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
      352·
      1 year ago

      Theyre basically the_Donald: fediverse edition. They troll, raid, and generally cause problems across the threadiverse in the name of promoting their authoritarian world view

      • Atarian@vlemmy.netEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        Oh, fuck that. I’m so tired of that shit.

        I’m not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.

          • Atarian@vlemmy.netEnglish
            34·
            1 year ago

            Thinks… Well, one side generally annoy me more than the other side.

            I can generally be around right wingers longer than left wingers and traditionally the right have been more tolerant of libertarians like myself, so I guess maybe.

      • Atarian@vlemmy.netEnglish
        131·
        1 year ago

        Yeah you know what? I’ve had enough of fundies, I’ll leave that thought there.