Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.
Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.
At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.
As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one's stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.
We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.
Lemmmygrad supposedly is for people who support communism, but when talking to them, they really are supporting totalitarian countries which have nothing to do with communism.
It’s amazing what some state-sponsored troll farms can convince people of. Some people can’t evaluate content they see online critically and gobble up the propaganda
The tactics and attitudes definitely make me think of that. It seems like the same people who showed up and fucked up a bunch of subs on reddit 6-7 years ago, like how conspiracy went from discussing things like UFOs and MK ULTRA to conservative political conspiracy theories and opposing the Democratic Party and politicians.
I'm not even sure they're really tankies anymore (or the meaning of the word is changing). Actual tankies still ostensibly support communism, but all too often, it's blatantly apparent that they're actually right-wing totalitarians cosplaying.
The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.
It is funny to mention Trump around tankies and watch their heads explode. They can't pretend Trump is a communist, but their propaganda masters don't want them to turn against the Republicans, so they're just in this weird space where the only thing they can do is aggressively avoid the topic at all.
I’ve actually once seen a tankie scream something about how the “imperial coreTM” (America) allows gay marriage, codifying Obergefell into law last year just in case SCOTUS and some red-state AG decide it needs to go and make a serious attempt at it. Some of them actually do think it’s “capitalistic degeneracy”
That's my problem with it. For some reason they support countries which have nothing to do with being socialist or communist. It makes their philosophies and claims seem really inconsistent and not based on any real ideology. It seems like at most an anti-US, anti-EU ideology, and for some reason they scorn the same US politicians that conservatives here do, while never mentioning any problems with the people in the US who are even more against workers rights and in favor of unbridled capitalism. Also, the tactics of groups of people mocking people and comments reminds me of the shilled-out shit that showed up on reddit several years ago.
You can't understand why or how communists and socialists would be anti-US and anti-EU? Really? Seems fairly self evident to me that that'd be the case. Why would you expect anything but hostility towards the ultra capitalist systems in the US or EU from communists and socialists? Seems like an odd complaint, anti-capitalist sentiment is part of the core of the ideology as I see it.
For some reason they support countries which have nothing to do with being socialist or communist.
It's all they've got. There are no real Socialist or Communist nations as those ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with groups of people larger than about 150, at least in a world that isn't truly post scarcity.
It's a shame really but that's just how people are.
The biggest problem with communism is not the socialism, it is the totalitarism that is required for it to function. And that's the part that kills people.
Now that Russia and China aren't even communist, it clearly shows what they are truly after.
They do it to so many smaller forums too. I saw an old board I used to frequent for game faqs and questions turned into one, under the guise of being mostly transgender positive.
It’s crazy to watch one user create a wannabe cult, user shame everyone and constantly move goalposts with straw men bs. Meanwhile, they had moderators discussing in Discord chats who to drive insane next and pick on. Not to mention using a serious issue as means to divide people that frequent the site by having over 30+ accounts to pad the numbers that agree with their views in topics.
It’s scary how far they go these days, especially considering the site was relatively respected around Y2K era, and now it’s full of republicans pretending to be trans and liberal for a psychotic gimmick.
Yeah glad to see those fucks go. There's been an awful lot of bad takes filling up content sections on certain topics, every time I checked who had posted it it was almost always a lemmygrad user.
I need to start checking the instance when someone posts something stinky.
I’d honestly noticed it a lot over the last few weeks and thought oh well, eternal September.
There was a nice little period there where’s there wasn’t much discussion around and those actually poking their heads out were really kind of wholesome. Now I see so many people still coming across in that friendly, inclusive way and I realise it’s just a vocal minority ruining it.
I honestly don't get the big deal about defederation.
Free speech doesn't really seem achievable on social media because bad actors will always manipulate votes to ensure that some opinions are promoted more than others.
For example, the opinions of lemmygrad should probably consume ~1% of the total informed opinion "pie chart" if you will. They can be adequately represented by some idiot posting their opinion in a thread once in a while - yet here we are. Their bizarre takes are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
Surely there's a better way to ensure that all opinions on a given matter can be considered rather than just saying we must allow our streets to be overrun with zombies lest we forget they exist.
Thank fucking god. It's exhausting being around people for whom any meme, any post, any comment, has to spin into how good communism is, how bad the libs are, how good China is, and how bad The West TM is. It is exhausting.
Most of them have never spent time living under China / USSR as well lol. I'd like communism in theory, and I still think there's a possibility of it, but even just in Hong Kong the flaws of the CCP system of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" are very evident — and that's barely with any of the actual communism in Hong Kong.
I'm reminded of a story I read a while back - not sure where - about how if you let a Nazi into your bar, you eventually end up running a Nazi bar. I think the same applies to online forums. You let Nazis overrun a forum, everyone else leaves, and eventually you might as well just be running Stormfront.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
Wiktionary has a fairly relevant definition for "Nazi Bar":
(Internet slang) A space in which bigots or extremists have come to dominate due to a lack of moderation or by moderators wishing to remain neutral or avoid conflict.
Yep. In welcoming back the Nazis, Elon made it clear he intended to make it a Nazi forum. Oh, he said a few things about "free speech zones" or something, but when you peel back the veneer of idealism, you just find a bunch of Nazis.
They love "free speech zones," because no one wants to share a forum with Nazis and leave when the Nazis take over.
In my other (non-Lemmy) life, I've written extensively about the paradox of tolerance, and how recognizing it de-fangs the arguments of wanna-be totalitarians.
For people not in the know, Popper proposed that infinite, unrestricted "tolerance" is paradoxically self-destroying, because it necessarily means tolerating attempts to destroy tolerance.
The solution is simple and obvious in retrospect, but so many people have trouble finding it and worry about whether they're hypocrites or not for refusing to tolerate Nazis and the like. The solution is this:
Recognize the fact that you never promised to tolerate Nazis.
No one ever promised to tolerate everything without caveats or restrictions. Instead, we promised to tolerate each other, to respect one another's right to exist. In other words, tolerance is a peace treaty.
As soon as you realize that, it becomes obvious that you needn't tolerate Nazis, because they have broken the treaty. You are not bound by it when it comes to them. In fact, given the nature of people like that, they were never really signatories to the treaty in the first place, because they start from a basis of intending to destroy it.
Oh, how they hate it when people realize this and refuse to put up with Nazi bullshit or apologize for that refusal. Well, sorry, Nazi turd burglars, we never promised to put up with your shit in the first place, so y'all can fuck right off.
This whole thread is just a demonstration of "enlightened centrism". Someone above is even arguing that hating landlords makes you a fascist! Just chef's kiss.
I think this is for the best, there are some seriously disturbed people posting on Lemmygrad. I saw comments cheering on and celebrating the Hamas attack and talking about how they hoped the people who were kidnapped get tortured. Whatever your politics, that is super fucked up and not "legitimate discourse".
Lost all respect for lemmygrad when they deleted a comment i made about voting for the lesser of 2 evils being the correct course of action to advance the interests of the Prolitariat in the United States. They care more about larping as revolutionaries than enacting change that actually helps the Working Class.
Good Job! You make my experience of Lemmy continuously better! You cleaned that CSAM up with the speed of light (I've never even noticed it), you managed the Piracy Community Troubles very well and now you made an well thought through decision about Lemmygrad.
Well done Mods! And thank you all very much!
You are 100% free to leave Lemmy.world and join Lemmygrad. There is nothing stopping you. And from the Ratio of the Post the most People agree with the decision of defederating.
I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.
There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.
I'm just surprised overall because most other major instances defederated from them weeks or months ago, along with Hexbear and/or Exploding Heads. .ca has been defederated with those probably for at least two months now.
A tolerable level we can handle by moderation. And when even the admins join in it becomes clear there is a big incompatibility and cultural difference.
I'm pro voilence against people who block grocery store entrances because they figured that was the best place to chat with someone they ran into... so yes.
Well there are going to be assholes everywhere but I guess if that instance's admins/mods aren't doing their jobs of moderating their users then it makes sense to defederate so the burden doesn't fall on all other instance's mods.
The world isn't black and white like your comment is suggesting.
I'm wondering if you're trolling or just ignorant. I'll do you the respect of assuming ignorance.
There will always be hate speech in any forum. Period. This cannot be stopped short of closing the forum down entirely. If, however, the hate speech is low volume, it can be dealt with individually with post deletion, user bans, community deletions, etc. Standard "tactical" moderation techniques.
But...
Shitholes like lemmygrad.ml release a veritable flood of hate speech, as do their right-wing "Freeze Peach!" equivalents. Individual, tactical moderation does not scale to that level without a whole lot more money than a hobbyist-run instance can bring to bear. Thus if hate speech and calls for violence reach the point where tactical moderation can no longer keep up, you start with the strategic moderation. In older-style forums that might be an IP ban. In the Fediverse it's defederation.
See how that works?
Now please, prove to me you're not trolling and simply didn't understand how things work.
Free speech is important. Every opinion should be heard and considered. However, your freedom ends when it crosses over someone else’s. Good riddance, i had blocked most of lemmygrad’s communities anyways, since all they did was spread propaganda and hate.
Love the mod team (being ex-reddit, never thought I’d say that), the transparency and clarity of their communication with the community is great!
People have been celebrating when governments open their own Lemmy instance to put state services and support there and now we're defederating the very first of such Lemmy instances, that of the People's Republic Of China???!
They're not communists anymore than North Korea is a democracy...
Anyone that tries to claim the USSR or China are/were communist regimes aren't worth listening to. They're either lying or don't know what they're talking about
I do wonder why we didn't defederate from them long ago, it's not like they recently started showing signs of who and what they really are, they've been very transparent about their motives since day 1. Still though good it was done now before they started spamming things here (not sure if they do that or if it's just hexbear that spams).
I'm onboard with the post, and glad to see Lemmy working as intended. Making a post (instead of silently defederating) is wonderful. That said, I think its very important to say "because of comments like X[link] and Y[link]" instead of "due to severity".
Imagine if the roles were reversed and the CCP was saying they're "defederating from lemmy.world due to severity". Members should be given the 1st hand evidence, rather than 2nd hand opinions/summaries.
I know that's why it seemed so weird why they wouldn't moderate it.
But then I saw one of their moderators removed a video about how you can support Palestine for "fuck badempanada" (this badempanada) and just shrugged. Whatever it is is going on there i'm not going to get involved because it's one of those things that usually resolves itself over time.
It's why there needs to be tools for instance owners to remove comments for their users if they come from other instances. It's completely unreasonable to expect them to defederate the entire instance over a few problem users/comments.
Thank you so much, it’s like the Winter Solstice came early! They’re literally a bunch of sweaty, genocide-loving neckbeards who never outgrew the college commie phase crying about how hard and unfair their upper-class suburban lives are under (their idea of) capitalism and how North Korea is secretly a paradise because “something something healthcare that probably exists there”- all from the $3000 computer whose SSD made by abused children in Taiwan has 694.20 gigabytes of porn (shot by and starring filthy-rich adult content creators), in the comfort of their septuagenarian mothers’ basements on her personal, private property in Washington State- all made possible by capitalism. And they think they’d be better off under a system that would actually ship them off to die in Alaska on day one, instead of giving them a high rank and a state-issued bride. (But we Washingtonians don’t claim them)
I’m honestly surprised they had to cheer on the murder of innocent children in Israel for you guys to do this for us, when they’d spent months being all “ackchyually the Holodomor didn’t happen but I hope it happens again because daddy putin says all Ukrainians are nazis, therefore it must be true and they’d deserve it!!1”
Id rather not interact with or even see a community that refers to the "working class" as subhuman trash. The mods and devs of lemmy.world are probably seeing even worse posts than what we have seen. Good riddence
edit* removed post # 2338719 on the lemmygrad server for those who think im lying
Im sorry you're right the mod logs are public ehich is good for me because now I have proof that what ive seen happened. he post in question was removed 23 hours ago, post 2338719, i got reciepts.
Will it make a return once we gain the ability to block individual instances? I'm not fan of communism and I'm personally stoked to not have lemmygrad in my feed. And I think you made the right choice given the current state of Lemmy but I do think that a "free speech" forum requires that we don't silence hate speech en masse. I'm sure can agree to at least part of that statement. I just like to make the decision of what I wanted filtered out.
I should probably add that I'm not advocating for any illegal content. That has no place here.
No, even when the option comes for users to block whole instances we will still defederate with instances we do not want to moderate the content from. But we also always reserve the right to re-federate with any instance if the concerns are resolved.
And as per https://lemmy.world/legal :
We are not a free speech zone. This Code of Conduct lays out the expected standards of conduct and behavior. Users may not say or post anything that violates these rules, and all participants are required to follow this code. If you disagree with this code, you are welcome to keep looking for other Lemmy instances. Here’s a list of all public instances.
Your modlog shows far more removed content from sh.itjust.works or lemm.ee users in comparison, so why don't you defederate from those instances as well?
Fair enough. I didn't really consider the moderation effort required. And you could stand to be a little less aggressive. I have no problem with the rules as they stand. It would be nice though if there were a way to still communicate with these users without being subjecting everyone to their community posts. But my concerns go further than LW.
I get why LW doesnt have an interest in being a free speech platform, but I still think it's better to be a good influence on people rather than shutting them out. Their bad ideas don't go away when we defederate and will probably even grow in momentum if left unchallenged. You shouldn't have to deal with them if you don't want to and their content need not be visible by default. I just think Lemmy needs options other than defederation. We risk recreating the siloed communities federation was meant to counter.
And it's not like these worst offenders don't deserve to be alienated, I just think it's inevitable that we will become used to defederation but and start doing it on a whim. Lemmy will become a sanitized environment devoid of anything coming close to contraversial. If this happens, it takes away the biggest advantage we have over Reddit, Twitter, etc. No important conversations will happen here, the population will fracture and dwindle, we will all return to Reddit.
I'm not really asking LW to change anything, I'm just saying there needs to be finer controls built into Lemmy that will prevent defederation becoming the default method of dealing with troublesome instances.
The fact you have people who genuinely think you guys are a free speech zone should be a very alarming sign you're becoming a bit of a nazi bar. You need to make these people feel unwelcome, and you need to do it fast.
And folks can have accounts with multiple instances! So if you don't feel like seeing certain content, you can use the .world account, if you'd like to see a larger array of content, switch to the lem.ee account.
I'm not really interested in seeing all of that. Id really just like an easy way to decide for myself what content I see and not relying on a server moderator to decide for me what is appropriate. Users being able to block certain instances isnt enough. We need to be able to add instances that are separate from what the rest of the server sees.
Thats not possible, I don't know how that would even work or if it could work. The home instance shouldn't have to host content they object with, but I also shouldn't have to set up my own instance just to find tune my feed.
This has made me to seriously consider leaving lemmy.world
Capitalism is a serious existantial threat to our ecosystem, rendering all our lives more meaningless with each passing day - all its enemies are my friends
But, however, just looking at the name... Lemmygrad, this rhetoric is just designed to hush everyone into the old trenches and that way keeping the capitalist death machine chugging along. To be the most effective, the truth of socialism has to rebranded and craftfully injected into new ideas. This is the only way forward.
I've said in the past and will say it again. Despite someone talking nonsense, being rude, having wrong opinions, silencing them is not ideal. If nothing else it's exactly the behaviour of Totalitarian regime that this action is aimed at.
Is it still fine to call for the eating of the rich and burning of their capital, or did dotWorld decide to be a rightwing pandering platform for "enlightened" fence-sitters?
I was banned from Lemmy.world for a week after criticizing Israel. The pinned post accuses this server of supporting the Zionist genocide of Palestinians. Should I go ahead and close my account now? Is this a Zionst platform?
Edit: I know that this server loves to mass downvote any post that questions authority, but it would be much more helpful if you would verbally confirm that you support genocide, or at least start abusing me personally to let me know you think I don't belong.
This type of censorship never stops. There's no doubt in my mind as this trend continues we're going to see other taboo communities like piracy, not mainstream accepted politics, etc. ones being banned and their servers defederated.
We've already seen admins of this server removing comments and banning people for posting stuff they don't agree with. I don't see how Lemmy can succeed when we're not even at like 2.5k users per day on the biggest server and the admins here are already going extreme on the censorship.
The lemmy.world admins did that with hexbear and received some backlash for being "overzealous and trigger happy." This is one of those scenarios where the admins will always receive criticism for the timing of their actions. There will always be some who believe it's premature and/or an overstep and others who believe it's a long overdue action bordering on "negligence." They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Frankly, I believe that if the best time to do something was yesterday, then the next best time to do it will always be today. And that's what's happened here.
Hmm well I don't know much about this drama or what have you all I'm saying is if there having an affect on lemmy then it might been worth considering getting involved before all this hoolabloo one thing I noticed about lemmy from my short time here is there are tankies are everywhere tankies or any individuals similar to them in there mentality aren't good in any capacity doesn't matter what side of the political coin there on doesn't mean they should be deplatformed though instead prehaps challenge there belives
I don't see why you're being downvoted. I'd think it would be better for both world admins and world users if world users who disagreed with the federation policy left.
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material. That would allow both sides to debate how they judge such behavior.
Right now there are celebrating comments but I haven't seen bad behavior myself, even in heated debates. That let's me assume that many are thin skinned or unable to refute lemmygrad's political opinion.
If I understand lemmy correctly then banning lemmygrad will prevent its users from participating in any debate on a lemmy. world community. Does a lemmy instance exist that federated with everybody where important communities should be hosted?
That's besides the point and rises the suspicion that this is somewhat politically motivated. You have to judge them on how they behave in lemmy.world communities.
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material.
Duh. They already have. It's there all day every day. Peruse it as often as you like, at your own convenience. You can even filter by removed posts, removed comments, and banned users:
Modlog tells you all you need to know. Unless, of course, you don't actually want to know it and you're just JAQing us all off, lol.
Right now there are celebrating comments but I haven’t seen bad behavior myself, even in heated debates.
That's because the moderators here are very, VERY good at what they do -- which again, you'd know if you'd looked at the modlog.
Does a lemmy instance exist that federated with everybody where important communities should be hosted?
No one knows what "important communities" are to you. Stop looking for mind readers and start looking for instances that do not defederate for any reason, because they are out there.
You're not trapped here. You have options. Take them.
There is no way to filter modlog by user instance. After a few minutes pressing Next for removed comments and ctrl-f for lemmygrad.ml I didn't find anything, but it looks like sometimes the instance url isn't in the text anyway so maybe ctrl-f won't even work here. It isn't actually easy to find these examples.
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material. That would allow both sides to debate how they judge such behavior.
Are you paying the bills? No? Are you doing the moderation? No? Are you doing any work for this site in any meaningful capacity? No?
Then fuck off and shut the fuck up about how they run it. Go to lemmygrad.ml if you think there's no bad behaviour there.
That's a bummer. I'm a serious Capitalist but I kinda liked the Tankies and Pinks, they brought a fresh perspective and occasionally produced damn good memes.
The good news is that since I moved to another instance I'll still get their stuff, kinda stinks for those of you homed on lemmy.world though.
But everyone could sign up for other instances that are federated. They can even have multiple accounts across different instances. I don't see this as the beginning of the slide down a slippery slope.
Lemmy's "the onus on moderation is on the instance" was always going to result in this. You can have an instance with really good content, and a really strong community, but none of that means shit if the instance owners decide that a certain brand of hate speech is ok. Now you have two options as an instance owner: Either blanket ban the entire instance, or expose your users to shit even reddit would have acted on.
Mastodon for all its flaws has a way better system for this: The instance owner AND the federated instance both get reports and can act on them as such. That way even if the federated instance refuses to moderate a post which breaks your instance's rules, you can still deal with it. If an instance is consistently bad faith and the moderators are sick of dealing with them, that's when you defederate.
Honestly I sometimes wish the trigger finger was itchier. I think this should have happened back when hexbear was also defederated, but at least it's finally done with.
What’s the deal with lemmy.ml? I’ve noticed a more aggressive/4channy tone to it compared to lemmy.world but I can’t find any more information about it
Did you ever think to yourself, that you sound like a madman? Do you really think that a Lemmy instance, of all things, are ran by the US FBI? Especially when the instance is european...
Oh btw, remember to equip your tin foil hat! I heard it was all the rage at lemmygrad & hexbear ;)