lemmy.fmhy.ml's stance on defederation
lemmy.fmhy.ml's stance on defederation
Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don't find appealing (there's even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don't want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
A little bit late to the party here. What is the reason why lemmygrad.ml is blocked?
1Very tanky ultra left pro Russia, pro China, anti everyone else part of Fediverse.
Check them out if you like but they only talk shit about the West and NATO. Put another way, you are not missing much by avoiding them.
1They also support North Korea!
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I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don't like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It's annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don't want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.
I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.
I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol
1Are we not capable of hiding things we don't want to see on Lemmy ourselves? Why would I want to be babysat by anyone when I can make adult choices on what I want to see my own damn self? Censorship was what ruined Reddit years ago. Leave it entirely up to the users.
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I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances
I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That's the beauty of the model and that's why kbin and lemmy with thrive.
1I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don't want other people to control what I see.
That's it. That's my entire position on the matter.
1In my point of view it's a kind of censorship. Just let the user himself decide what he wants to see.
0I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a second language speaker where "user" is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use "themselves" instead.
-3Akchually, since we're being annoyingly corrective, shouldn't it be "themself"?
OR is it able-ist to assume the commentor does not express multiple personalities?
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I honestly don't see anything of value being lost. They can wall off into their own echochamber and the rest of us can communicate freely.
0This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.
I don't think they did it happily
But we're not concerned since this instance is smaller and probably not as much targeted
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as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it's important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we're still federated with them and things seem fine?
0Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.
It's nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don't defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don't like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.
Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else's, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so... basically, they're human, just like the rest of us.
Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they'll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they've got to say, they're just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.
If you don't like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them... at least I can't see a reason.
0Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you're probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.
If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they've read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren't authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don't exist and are "western propaganda" while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don't think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after "years of propaganda pushed by western countries" to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.
1I don't know why you're insisting people who don't like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.
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So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
Why is lemmygrad blocked, but not exploding heads?
0Is there a place to see what's blocked, and why?
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Why did lemmygrad get blocked?
0It's full of tankies (fascists who like the color red).
1You really have bo idea what you're talking about, do you... have you even visited the communities in lemmygrad?
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Fuck beehaw!
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