The images were always placeholders while SJW started growing anyway.

Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?

To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?

Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.

What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.

This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.

If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)

On accusations of censorship in service to facilitating mis/disinformation in support of a sociopolitical agenda.

Previous Post

So I can load other communities on lemmit.online from this server but they all only have posts older than 8-9 months. BoRU only has posts 9 months and younger. So whatever caused the disconnect happened roughly 8-9 months ago.

EDIT: Yup! Just reread this comment that mentions lemmit online's outdated version and the the timeline matches right up. Mystery solved, but idk what to do about it other than messaging whoever runs that server.

I know it's a touchy subject all around but if I didn't have to go back to reddit regularly to read BoRU I probably wouldn't go on it at all. I keep trying to ditch reddit entirely and that one sub keeps sucking me back in.

If I try to access it directly from lemmit.online it's fine: https://lemmit.online/c/bestofredditorupdates

But from sh.itjust.works it won't load any posts: https://sh.itjust.works/c/bestofredditorupdates@lemmit.online

I also can't view it through the boost app. I don't have bots (or anything else or any user) blocked, we're federated with lemmit, what am I missing?

Another community with the name politics@sh.itjust.works that I mod is online but it has a different address: https://sh.itjust.works/c/sino

To me that's confusing to have the same name on the same instance. I realize that different instances have the same named communities, but it seems crazy that you can have the same one on the same instance. Has this been addressed before?

Edit: I should add that I'm not mad or anything about it, whatever you guys say goes. I forget how harsh it can sound in text. I do find it confusing, but in a "I had no idea" way.

Pretty Please? I'm trying to get some signups, but some federated users would be nice too!

I am in the opinion that some alternative UIs should be available on the instance (domain) – if possible, of course. Lemmy.world already has many alt. UIs, I think we should have something like that. So, here's a list:

• Alexandrite – a nice modern one
• MLMYM – a familiar old-reddit–style one
• Nemmy
• Photon – sleek af
• Slemmy – again, a modern one
• Lemmy Modern UI – web default UI, but better

… and more, check out https://lemmy.world/post/465785

What do you think?

Threads will be implementing federation in the near future and many instances have been discussing whether they should be pre-emptively defederated to protect the fediverse. See below for our local discussion thread, which will remain active until this vote is complete.

Given that this is a time-sensitive issue and it's the holiday season, we decided to initiate the vote a few days early to make sure everyone gets a chance to vote. The vote will be tallied on Friday, December 29th.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/11011288

Only sh.itjust.works accounts may cast a vote

Vote by commenting either yes/aye/oui or nay/no/non

Any further discussion should be posted in the thread linked above

Additional Context/Discussions

Curent lemmy.world discussion

41% of instances have blocked Threads

Extensive discussion at Fediverse@lemmy.world

This article has already been linked 10 trillion times in previous discussions, but in case you missed it

For the hard of hearing

IF YOU ARE NOT A SH.ITJUST.WORKS USER, YOU CANNOT VOTE IN THIS THREAD

***

VOTE RESULT

In favor (aye/oui/yes) : 200 votes

Against (nay/non/no) : 55 votes

Sh.itjust.works has voted in favor of preemptively defederating Threads.

Thank you for your participation, and happy holidays to everyone!

While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: "any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.")

Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?

Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.

Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.

What do you think should be done?

EDIT: correction

EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.

Fediverse instances' status on federation with Threads

English message:

As some of you may have noticed, there's an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.  

I expect there are multiple valid opinions on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone's opinion on the situation. 

You might also want to read lemmy.ca's discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.  

Things that I think need to be pointed out:  

• alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in. 
• together they've made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
• That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy. 
• They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona. 
• alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different instances with copies of different subreddits.

I don't have an exhaustive list of such communities,  I haven't found an official one.  I'll post a fewfrom my personal blocklist in a comment below. 

And a note on the upcoming 0.19 release: 

• the new user-level instance block feature will block all the communities of the blocked instances,  but will not block these users' posts or comments if they are done on another instance's community.  

My opinion isn't any more valid then anyone else's so I'll put it in a comment below.

Our users' input is welcomed.

What do you, dear users of sh.itjust.works, think about federation with them?

Thanks

---

Message français:

Comme certains d'entre vous l'ont peut-être remarqué, il y a une instance peuplée de 1,1M de bots qui copient ees posts et commentaires Reddit dans plein de communautés sur plusieurs autres instances.

Il y a plusieurs opinions sur le sujet et ce fil de discussion vise à prendre le pouls de l'opinion générale sur la situation.

Je vous suggères de lire la discussion chez lemmy.ca à ce sujet ici, discussion intéressante. 

Quelques points qui, selon moi, doivent être soulignés :

• alien.top compte actuellement 1,1 million de robots, dont seulement 6 sont des utilisateurs hebdomadaires qui se login.
• collectivement, ils ont déjà fait 1,59 million de commentaires dans une multitude de communautés dans différentes instances.
• Ce projet proclame essayer de convertir des utilisateurs de Reddit à passer à Lemmy.
• Il existe un portail pour permettre aux utilisateurs de Reddit de prendre contrôle de leur version bot.
• alien.top a une seule communauté locale, les bots publient tous sur différentes instances, des copies de différents subreddits.

Je n'ai pas de liste exhaustive de ces communautés, à première vue, je n'en trouve pas une liste officielle.  Je mettrai dans un commentaire ci-dessous quelques communautés que j'ai bloqué au niveau personnel. 

Pour finir,  une note sur la version 0.19 de lemmy qui s'en vient :

• La nouvelle fonctionnalité pour bloquer une instance au niveau d'un uutilisateur bloquera toutes les communautés d'une instance bloquée, mais ne bloquera pas les publications ou les commentaires de ces utilisateurs s'ils sont publiés dans une communauté d'une autre instance.

Mon opinion n'est pas meilleur qu'une autre et je mettrai plutôt dans un commentaire ci-bas.

Les commentaires de nos utilisateurs sont les bienvenus.

Que pensez-vous, cher utilisateurs de sh.itjust.works de la fédération avec eux?

Merci

before people criticize me I am not using my main account because I do not feel safe bringing up these issues there, as these people and issues still are not dealt with. I do not want to put myself in danger, I will not be engaging in or attempting to post polls or votes here.

I would like to start by saying that I've noticed a lot of bad faith or spammy communities pop-up recently. The user is dramaticcat many of the communities break rules 1 and 2, maybe even rule 3 (an example of one such community is !kiwifarms@sh.itjust.works) as they are purely dedicated to hatred, trolling, and possibly even spam.

Also a small handful of users have also been making threats or calls to violence and while these have been moderated nicely moderators and external instance admins the admins of this instance haven't done anything about this. This is worrying as admins are supposed to enforce the instance rules and remove disruptive users and communities who are in violation of said rules but the admins of Sh.itjust.works have not been doing that. This is a problem because it means that any malicious actor could join at any time and wreak havok on this instance just like Exploding-heads did on another unmoderated instance known as rammy.site way back when. We obviously know how that went.

It's important that we discuss this problem now while we might have a chance of contacting the admins rather than later when the damage has been done.

Hello everyone, I operate an instance previously defederated by this instance known as lemmy.comfysnug.space and we were defederated because many people didn't like our current rules.

Well we have since changed our rules and are no longer allowing the content that so many people complained about. So we were hoping to be able to get refederated with other instances including this one. What do people think, do we deserve a second chance to be federated again?

(I'm posting from a lemm.ee account because my main is on the Defederated Instance, there's no other real way for me to do this).

Say “aye” or yes" if you are in favour defederation.

Say “nay” or “no” if you are against defederation.

Only users who have a sh.itjust.works account can vote. Fresh accounts won't be counted.

Please share your thoughts, concerns and opinions. Try to keep it constructive.

Link to announcement

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new bot in town. But this time, its one of ours.

What should we name it?

Post your entry.

Rules.

• The 5 most upvoted entries will be brought to a vote.
• The winning entry will become the display name of the bot.

Welcome, this vote will determine which image we use for our banner image for sh.itjust.works. The discussion thread is in the Agora, and was also cross-posted to ImageAI

Fantastic work on the banners sh.itheads, I think we've got several excellent choices here. I've reposted the candidates below, with credits to the users who submitted them. I culled some submissions at my own discretion.

Each candidate is labeled with a number. In order to vote, simply comment on this post with the number of your preferred banner. You only get one vote. ***

Number 1 - @TendieMaster69@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 2 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 3 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 4 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 5 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 6 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 7 - @ComfortablyGlum@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 8 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 9 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 10 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 11 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 12 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

! ***

You may also specify a few honorable mentions in your comment if you so choose, as a way to acknowledge the artists' work.

The vote will run until next Friday. ***

VOTE RESULT

1. Banner 8 by @thelsim@sh.itjust.works: 91 votes

!

2. Banner 11 by @thelsim@sh.itjust.works: 49 votes

!

3. Banner 6 by @scumola@sh.itjust.works: 24 votes

!

4. Banner 7 by @ComfortablyGlum@sh.itjust.works: 20 votes

!

5. Banner 3 by @scumola@sh.itjust.works: 19 votes

!

The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.

As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.

You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.

I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.

Lemmy.world looks like this

!

This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.

Like the title says. How do we create a new community on sh.itjust.works?

I want to start a new community for a specific topic. How do I do that?

I've seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here's a recent one).

I didn't see an Agora discussion post, so I'm making one.

Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I'd appreciate it!

Hello,

I'm the mod of Japanese Metal. For a few days now, the community appears empty to me, both on Liftoff and my browser on my desktop. Edit: it's fine if I view it on my lemm.ee account, but that's not optimal.

What might be the cause, and how do I fix it? Anyone with a similar problem?

Thanks in advance.

I'd like to ask for @TheDude to make a server-wide announcement, visible to all members of this instance, that a binding vote about defederation is currently taking place.

Without knowing what the Lemmy UI allows, I was hoping for a text similar to the one informing new users that email verification is currently enabled. Here is what I would like the announcement to entail:

"A binding vote to defederate from another instance is currently taking place in /c/TheAgora. Should the vote be accepted, no users of sh.itjust.works will be able to access the defederated instance or interact with users of that defederated instance anywhere on Lemmy. Should the vote fail, the instance to be defederated remains federated, its content may still be shown on the home feed of sh.itjust.works and the users of that instance may still participate in discussion on this instance."

I am of the very strong opinion, that no vote should be binding, unless it was announced early enough to all members of this instance! This vote will have instance-wide consequences, the fact that it is taking place needs to be broadcasted beyond this community!

Edit: fix typos (again)

So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It's been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It's now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.

For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It's very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I'm open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it's actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it's fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.

Edit: since my thread was locked and I can't reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I'm not "a beehaw user", I've barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I'll be closing that now.

I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That's enough of that for me.

Please consider using my theme on this instance, so that everyone could enjoy a more more modern, efficient UI when browsing sh.itjust.works. It works with Lemmy 0.17, 0.18 and 0.18.1rc. It has a light theme variant, dark theme or both (auto).

!screenshot 1

!screenshot 2

!screenshot 3

Repository with more screenshots: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon

Theme files for download: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon/releases

It's also a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme

The only downside would be maintenance. Whenever a new version of Lemmy breaks the theme, someone will have to fix it. But I believe that together as a community we can easily maintain our own theme.

Final vote: NO

!

Should probably use something that only allows 1 vote per IP address. I think strawpoll.com and livepoll.io can do that.

VPN voting is also not allowed with this poll. I personally use a VPN and will have to turn mine off to vote on this.

https://strawpoll.com/6QnMO6m53Ze

Say "aye" or yes" if you are in favor of defederation.

Say "nay" or "no" if you are against defederation.

All of the relevant information can be found in the link below. Thank you all for your input.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/564252

I can only hope for this level of engagement in all discussions going forward 😅

I apologize for the lack of clarity and structure surrounding the process and just know that we are working to streamline the process ASAP.

EDIT: If you post anything in addition to aye/yes/nay/no, it will be removed and I will reply to the comment with your vote.

I am not voting, I am simply cleaning up comments that try to continue the discussion. Just vote and get off the pot people.

If you're from another server, you don't get to vote

VOTE RESULT

In favor of defederation

We are now defederated from EH.

The mod team is currently examining the data in greater detail to arrive at a final count of legitimate votes. Nonetheless, whichever voting system/restrictions we arrive at, the result of the vote is not in question. I will update this post with the final count ASAP. Thank you for your participation, it was a largely successful debate and vote.

[SOLVED] I had to enter my email and not username to make reset password work 🤦

So I've been browsing lemmy and this instance for a couple weeks using the jerboa app for Android and thought I'd try another app to see if I liked it better. However I can't find lemmy or sh.itjust.works in my password manager, or anything in my email. So I using my Brower I went to reset my password and the password reset button is greyed out. What do?

edit This might (probably?) be the wrong place to post this. My apologies if so, I'm still fairly unfamiliar with how lemmy works.

Xo

We should try to keep this instance as a Free Speech destination, rather than yet another island controlled by the thought police.

Could we please set some rules for defederation? I'd like to suggest these two:

1. Is it spam?
2. Is it illegal?

If either is yes, then go ahead and ban it, otherwise allow free discussion and don't get upset that some people think differently than yourself.

Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).

!

It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.

My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you're not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.

I've linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325

Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.

https://lemmy.world/post/747912

https://lemmy.world/post/577526

Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.

Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.

TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.

EDIT: To clarify, this isn't the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.

EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

!

I don’t think bot link posts are good for this platform. I think original content is useful, but links back to Reddit just makes this the shittiest possible Reddit client. Best case scenario it clogs the feed, worst case it actively pushes people back towards Reddit. If anyone disagrees, please let me know why.

First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We're all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We're look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!

Ok, on to the announcement:

Today, I'm excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.

The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.

Next, let's discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.

Regarding the [Vote] tags, we're introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week's [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.

For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.

This is by no means the final process and we're depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.

We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.

As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn't work so well.

We should do our absolute best to not become a siloed instance. I predict we will start seeing certain instances be almost inaccessible which will lead to their users migrating to more open instances. It's already becoming clear to me that certain instances will lose users over time if they continue actively segregating their instance from others.

Individual bad actors on other instances is not a good enough reason to defederate. If a troll is bothing someone they can be blocked/banned on sh.itjust.works. I don't expect instance creators to ban all trolls, it's not possible.

Defederation should be reserved for severe cases when another instance shows no interest in moderating. The two instances defederated right now are justified: one condones the denial historical events and actively censors opposition, and the other was condoning heinous illegal activies regarding underage individuals. These are two clear examples of where defederation makes sense.

Defederation should only be used as a last resort.

My previous post continues this sentiment from a couple days ago here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126

As a more casual user that has chosen ShitJustWorks as his new home instance, I don't feel inclined to participate daily in the internal politics of this instance. Yet (semi) daily, the Agora seems to vote on issues that will affect me directly, such as defederating from instances the thread-starters deem to be harmful, something I am fundamentally opposed to as long as the block functionailty is sufficient to filter content you really don't want to see.

I suspect that many more people on this instance feel the same way, not wanting to participate daily in internal politics that is, or aren't even aware of the voting power the Agora holds. After all, the fediverse explorer currently shows over 6000 users belonging to this instance, with over 2000 active monthly. Yet the most commented-on voting thread in here has merely 200 votes, so only 10% of users will change the rules for all users in this instance.

I fear a 'tyranny of the active few', to put it in hyperbolic terms, that has the potential to drive away the majority of people.

But I also recognize the usefulness of the Agora and as such, I would like to suggest some voting rules:

• At any point in time, there will be just one voting thread open on the Agora where people get to decide on issues that will affect how the instance is run in the future, pinned at the very top.
• In this thread, up to X number of top-level comments will represent the actual issues to vote on. I suggest 10 as the maximum number of different votes in such a voting thread.
• Voting will run for a full month, to allow maximum participation.
• Over the month, people can create discussion threads for issues and preliminary voting threads to include those issues in the main voting thread. The X most popular issues will be voted on in the next month's main voting thread.

By limiting the number of issues to vote on, bringing them together in one thread and giving ample time for users to participate in the voting, it will be easier for casual users to keep track on what is being voted on and foster a voting culture that is backed by the majoriry of this instance's users.

@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works seems up for the task

Edit: thedonald@sh.itjust.works has been terminated

If that instance is too much for even exploding heads https://exploding-heads.com/post/139643 then it should also be too much for us. Almost all other instances also block these types of instances. Especially since this instance is Canadian and I bet a lot of us are Canadians and I think the laws relating to this type of content are far more strict here. I would prefer to be completely unrelated to these types of communities and instances.

I am generally against defederation but to me this is even worse than the botted instances.

Edit: I hope that as people find new instances or new instances like this open up we can proactively also defederate from them.

My eye sight is getting worse everyday people.

This is mostly a light hearted post to give the community something low stakes to discuss and decide on.

Maybe there won't be any interest, or maybe we have a lot of ideas for icons and even banners?

See the tool here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

And some discussion of the issue here: https://lemm.ee/post/177673

This tool produces a list of instances which have a very high number of users compared to the number of comments and posts. These instances are assumed to have high number of bot accounts on them.

Some other instances have started blocking them, should sh.itjust.works follow suit?

Of course, this need not be permanent, and will be reversed when those instances resolve the issue.

For reference, this is a list of instances suspected of being botted by the tool's default settings: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/v1/instances?activity_suspicion=20&domains=true

Ayes and nays please!