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?
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.
While I want to blow off this comment with something like, “zealots will be zealots”, that first link reads almost like a fantasy novel description of cartoon bad guys. It is a bit weird seeing it laid out like that, and that is from someone who spent a bit too much time in church during my late teens.
I think it’s just a sign that echo chambers are bad, while yes you should block some communities that are bad actors or host illegal content. You shouldn’t block everything that you don’t like. Reddit almost feels the same way these days but from the left perspective. Politics does crazy stuff to people, it’s wild.
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.
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.
Are you planning to actively moderate against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
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Why switch accounts? just say no.
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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”.
@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.
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?
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.
Yeah, its not their political positions, it’s their behavior. I have absolutely no problem debating the merits of communism and capitalism. But they don’t necessarily seem interested in debate, or really objectivity in general.
I’m gonna park my car here for this.
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
Bear in mind, that lemmygrad.ml is not lemmy.ml. The latter instance is run by the devs.
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Lemmy.ml has a few people that post hundreds of things a day that skew pretty anti west and pro tanky to their worldnews community and a few others.
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Then I stand corrected, thak you for clarifying.
Ah, thank you. I did overlook that distinction in that comment.
That is quite the interesting thread. Especially that History of Lemmy link. Not sure what I expected but it wasn’t that.
To be fair I had the same feelings about it being defederated when I joined and went to check it out. The top post was pretty much talking about killing liberals. Tankies and fashys are pretty much the same rhetoric at the end of the day. They both have no place in civil liberal democratic society and poison everywhere given enough time.
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.
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They are supporters of authoritarian regimes who regularly raid comment sections and spam communities to push their views. The above comment said who decided, the instance owners. If you’d like to know who they are you can visit the instances that have them blocked and check who the owner is.
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.
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.
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 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”.
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.
Sounds like you would be happier swapping instances.
I am not so sure that you read my post. This was the new instance that I went to because it had less blocked instances.
I will tell you that the more of these comments I read the more I am starting to think that I never left reddit and that few people, if any, bothered to read anything besides the title.
…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.
Maybe I misunderstood but this is the section that I was referring to.
Turns out that I completely misunderstood the community structure here. There is a good chance that I was the one being confusing.
You can always make an account at lemmy.sdf.org. I was checking them out a few days ago and they have no servers blocked at all, and sdf is a really great organization to boot. This server will in time defederate other instances, of that there is no doubt. Discussions and voting on it have already happened, and may or may not be implemented, or invalidated. If you’re looking for an instance that haven’t defederated others, there are many options to choose from like the one I posted above, or you can choose to stay here and try to change minds, but you’ll likely be facing an uphill battle.
Thanks, I will have to check them out later. I am almost a bit surprised that I don’t recognize SDF. I spent some time using a few telnet sites some years ago.
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
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Seems like I would save myself sometime by creating a dozen different logins through the various instances. I am up to four now.
I guess using current number of blocked instances was not as useful of an indicator for finding an instance that was free-speech leaning, but not purists, as I thought it was.
lemm.ee has not blocked any instances for anything other than bot activity as far as i know, if youre interested
Thank you for the suggestion, but their blocked instances list is about the same length as the one from lemmy.world
I hadn’t really considered that whole instances would be banned for nothing more than having bots. I may need to look more into what lemmy.world was banning for.
Lemm.ee is only banning instances that have abnormal growth (i.e. They didn’t enable captcha, have maybe 7 active users, and suddenly go from 30 total registrations to 52000 in a couple of days). Other than that there is nothing banned for ideological reasons unlike sh.itjust.works and other instances.
I would argue that even lemmygrad isn’t an ideological ban, it’s an anti-brigading/trolling ban. There are plenty of marxist-leninist folk on lemmy.ml that share the same philosophy, but don’t go full “ATTACK THE HEATHEN” like lemmygrad does.
I would consider myself a socialist. Some of the points they make I’m very amenable to. I don’t like being told to kill myself.
You would save yourself time by making your own instance, and run it how you like. We did that, and thousands of other people have, too. It’s not hard.
I am not too worried about the technical difficulties of hosting an instance, but I really don’t want to deal with the social ones. I would rather sit back and appreciate @TheDave for the trouble he and the other admins go through.
There isn’t much to worry about. We made our instance at the same time as sh.itjust.works but didn’t get popular, and also had all the restrictions for account creation in place. So we barely have any users, run our own show and fly under all the radar.
I hope you find an instance that fits your needs. I honestly do.
What this place is hasn’t really been decided yet. The first few days were IT guys and generally techy people that liked the server setup. Then we had a big influx of users and the predictable chaos that follows. Then general ideas and frameworks started being put down by our admin and mods to try and steer that chaos.
You’ve walked in the door right as we’re trying to figure out what we want this place to be and how we want to run it.
Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment.
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.
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.
They’re asking a question without demanding anything in a very chill manner. It would seem you’re the only one getting twisted about it. Ease up and let people ask questions. You can get heated again if they won’t take “no” for an answer.
And you are repeating my own words back to me in a different order as if it will surprise me into keeping my questions to myself.
Pardon me for trying to find out if I just wandered into an environment that is as chill and welcoming as it seems from the outside or another reddit where many genuine questions will get shouted down.
Genuine apologies, as that’s not my intent.
We’ve had what has seemed (to me) an influx of just really bad faith and downright trolling type stuff going down recently and it’s perhaps colored my take on things more than I realized, and it probably has for others as well.
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like “yeah, this works for me.”
Other things may get added to that block list in the future, yes. I pointed you to the Agora because you may not, as a new user, be aware of it, as the Dude set it up as the place where these kinds of decisions will most likely be made in the future and where community discussions tend to be focused.
However, as a Canadian based instance, they have different laws on what does and doesn’t put them at risk, so there are times where those calls may be his and his to make alone (which is why there are two where there was only one on the list of defederated).
influx of just really bad faith
Is that so? On this instance or in general? So far, I did not perceive that. On the contrary, I enjoy the discussions around here so far.
It started with a discussion on sh.itjustworks, but due to the open nature of federation, anyone can wander in to the discussion, as you can see with input from users outside our instance.
There was some confusion, some trolling, but I think if as a user you weren’t really active in our Main or Agora communities it may not have been something you would have been aware of, if that makes sense.
Honestly in my experience, most (I’d say as close to all as you can get) of sh.itjustworks users are really just here to chill and make an awesome experience.
If you are of the opinion that I am not active Ilin the Agora, clearly you don’t follow it that well. I am sorry.
We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like “yeah, this works for me.”
That is why I am here too.
I am hoping that some of the more acerbic comments in this thread are just an expression of those frustrations and not the same old social media junk. Hopefully time will show this instance to be as chill as it seemed at first.
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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.
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.
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Youre in an instance hosted on stolen land, get over yourself.
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That’s okay. I appreciate the response anyways. It seems that I stepped in quite the pile today.
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thank you @blackconservative@sh.itjust.works, avid thedonald poster
im sure youve got an experienced opinion on getting defederated for repugnant behaviour
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-to Zombocom, obv.
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You can unsub from the Agora then. Discussing shit like that is kind of the point of it.
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What? We’re not currently on that community. Your reply does not make sense.
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I assumed your original comment was in reference to the posts on the Agora, as that’s where I’ve seen them. In that context my comment makes plenty of sense. I don’t really understand why you’re responding in this way.
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Your comment refers to posts asking if an instance can be blocked, and this post is asking why an instance was blocked. Those are not the same thing. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean.
I vote we ban ‘can we ban “can we block x” posts’ posts.
Kidding.
Or am I.
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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.
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
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?
Two thrusts to this: re: your community, haven’t followed it too closely, but from what I did see it’s mostly just shitting on tankies. That’s fine I guess, though my thought was more sifting through the garbage and sharing posts of decent quality/worth seeing despite defederation or the larger tenor of the instance.
Re: you specifically - also haven’t followed too closely (have reverted to lurking more in fewer communities - bad Cracks!), but maybe the binary I mentioned is a little too stark. From what I have seen, you’re opinionated, maybe contrarian for its own sake sometimes, but apply it evenly. I saw you getting in people’s faces over at EH too, and it looks like you don’t care which side of any given divide you piss off - gotta respect that.
And moderating FoxNews? Obvious but legitimately hilarious bait, and I have to tip my hat. Edit: Though you might not anymore?
sorry, but moderating fox news? I’m a lil confused at that one
Going off a vague memory at this point, but didn’t you moderate/create a community somewhere called FoxNews that was news about foxes?
Recall when people were going at you this was brought up (“This fuckin’ guy, he moderates FoxNews! Of course eye roll” kinda thing), though that may have been someone else. Apologies if misattributing.
nuhuh, wasnt me, that’s a clever idea tho!
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.
