this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Yes, but what we're talking about here is how to effectively target and limit violence, bigotry, hate speech, etc., and that happens best at the community level not the instance level. Let's say you have something like this:
How do we limit harm to YourInstance.com?
The Users: Most of the MixedBag users are harmless and contribute to the growth and diversity of the fediverse (including YourInstance), so defederating them is a last resort. But what about the BigotsRUs subscribers? On Reddit, some mods use bots to ban or mute people subscribed to problematic subreddits. We could try something similar here, but that's not the only option. After all, I live over here, not in the community where they're trash-talking. It's when they bring their shit into my house that I get pissed. If they put on their Sunday Best over here and want to have actual conversations, I'm fine with that. That more tolerant approach has the benefit of not ostracising and radicalizing users who are on the fence and just hang out there on occasion for the memes. So basically, ban the bad actors when they cross the line while on your turf, but leave the rest alone.
The Community: If BigotsRUs is poorly moderated, frequently spews hate, and its inclusion in All harms YourInstance's users, that's what Remove is for. As an admin, you can remove communities from the feed without affecting users or the instance, which feels like the first and best step to handling most issues.
The Instance: Like I said, defederation is the nuclear option that impacts all communities and all users on MixedBag.social, so I'd rather limit that to a last resort. However, sometimes the instance itself if the problem by either encouraging bad actors or centering around a topic that has no place in your instance's vision. For example, what if you're running an orthodox religious instance for your friends and want to defederate from the porn-only lemmyNSFW.com? Or what if your instance is being overrun by bots from LaxSignUps.social and you don't have a big enough mod team to separate out the trash? For me, that's the ideal use case for instance-wide defederation, and it's the main reason Beehaw is defederating from others. Yes, they're protective of their culture, but right now it's mostly about the small mod team's inability to filter out spam from instances with lax signups.
It's an absolute lie that they are just concerned about hatespeech -- albeit one that the admins themselves very actively promote. They pretend to be ideologically neutral, even going as far as saying "beehaw is just a collection of individuals", an ironically Thatcherite statement that suits them quite well.
That's a pretty big accusation. I don't have enough information to say one way or the other and have just read a handful of posts from the Beehaw mods, so I'd appreciate some context and direct evidence if there is any. From what I can tell, they've never pretended to be ideologically neutral, and seek to actively defend minority rights and push back against what they view as fascist movements.
Thankfully they had the evidence pinned for some time:
Later:
And there's more but you can just read it yourself:
https://beehaw.org/post/524300?scrollToComments=true
Obviously I support cracking down on hate speech, you can see my activity throughout this thread, which consists entirely of me doing that while taking maybe two or three asides to knock beehaw when someone else mentioned it. What I don't support is taking the absurd position that it's not a political stance.
Of course, this all works as an excellent bit of smoke and mirrors for an audience of credulous radlibs to whom you don't want to confess you are splitting with instances that are decidedly to your left -- such as Hexbear.net , the only instance which actually has site-mandated use of self-identified pronouns, which was put on the blacklist pre-emptively before it had federated with anyone (and it still hasn't) for reasons that the userbase are left to conclude are "hate speech" or its "endorsement".
What does it about the other users in MixedBag that they are ok on the same instance as BigotsRUs?
If BigotsRUs was formed on the instance I was on, I would be talking to the admins on banning BigotsRUs before looking for a different instance.