Hello World,
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.
Thank you,
The Lemmy.World Team
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.
Hexbear and Grad users defend genocidal regimes like Ruzzia and China. They excuse their crimes and argue in bad faith. I had so many insane discussions before I decided to block both of these instances entirely.
They are, by every single sense of the word, tankies.
Tankie is not just an oblivious term that has no meaning. It signifies a red fascist. It's like arguing that it's bad that we don't let neonazis in discussions. They do not care about discussing. All they want is to spread their disgusting ideas while hiding them behind leftism.
By defederating from these instances, we don't become less leftists. These people are not leftist.
This is not a slippery slope. It is a necessary step to ensure the growth of this website and actually worthwhile discussions.
Well spoken.
interacting with them does nothing but benefit them and the spread of their lies and propaganda. It brings nothing of value for anyone else.
It can be worth to set a counter-point. But I wouldn't do so in hopes of changing the tankie's mind. Rather to help the audience.
Elevating propaganda and lies to the level of proper discourse services no purpose but giving them false legitimacy and wider spread.
I guess we summed up two main arguments for both sides in neat one-liners.
I mostly agree, except:
They are leftists, on top of the genocide they support they're also all for workers owning the means of production. Leftism isn't "when good," right isn't "when bad," left and right are economic distinctions symbolizing the people on one side and the aristocracy on the other. There can in fact be "bad leftists" just as there can be "bad rightoids." Bad people exist everywhere, not just at republican conventions.
Why not?
If you support brutal totalian regimes, with your only excuse being "America bad," you only use leftist as a label, not a belief system.
constant use of :burn_us_flag: emoji
Probably the authoritarian fascist governments they support.
Authoritarianism isn't inherently non-left? After all, Robespierre was pretty authoritarian
I expect you need to look in the Lemmy.World moderation log to see to what degree lemmy.ml users were or were not problematic (I've no idea either way.)
Moderation logs are largely public, you can check it yourself.
I could but I'm not the person who cares enough to want to look into it. I'm telling the person who does that doing so is a good idea.
I mean, you also don't care enough to know the difference between Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml so...
You're not wrong!
Good idea, if anyone can point me to it or to specific examples, I would appreciate it. Also do not care enough to start an investigation by myself.
Fwiw, I wouldn’t judge an entire instance by a handful individual posts. Users will be users. But still, some evidence would be a lot better than no evidence. Plenty of evidence would be even better.
I was harassed by them and insulted for not agreeing with them (mistakenly commented in one of their instances posts) and elsewhere and they kept saying certain people deserve to die (which I’d classify as hate speech).
When there’s so many that can bombard or overwhelm the rest of the discussion they should stick to their own echo chamber. I don’t see the same problem you do with defederating from them and am more likely to use the site more without their presence.
Edit: We also don’t know what the mods or admins are seeing and removing from them. I couldn’t even have a conversation without being overwhelmed and shouted out/insulted
A link of any specific comment, please?
I am not sure how many it's "them", but I usually just make very liberal use of the block function. I had very bad experiences from people from multiple instances (sopuli, .ee, etc.) and I have always blocked the people. It's a click of a button, and soon you can ban whole instances...
Yes… agree with this take. I’m disappointed in the Lemmy World Admins for this move..
If Lemmy World is going to just defederate from instances where the opinions of users of one instance annoy the admins, then I will withdraw my monthly donation and go elsewhere.
Also, seems like there should be more of a process involved in defederation than a knee jerk post where the admins assure us it was a decision made with lots of deliberation. Despite that, it all feels very abrupt and top down and driven more by the admins’ personal geo-political opinions about recent events than other factors.
I discussed a lot with people at lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Because I really thought that these are people from a developing nation, which are fed russian and chinese propoganda all day and giving a second perspective benefits the discussion.
Ive never gotten death threats before. Now I got dozens. And not in private messages, but straight up as comment.
I am not sure that I would share your attitude in “benefiting” a developing nation with your perspectives, but yeah, death threats not cool in any case. As I said in my original comment, there may be more to this than meets the eye. Maybe these guys are being jerks and intolerant of other viewpoints more often than not, can’t tell. As far as I’m concerned it is ok for people to argue passionately, angrily even, so long as they do not seek to undermine discussion or, worse, hurt others just because they disagree with them.
Thats not what I said. I said that my perspective would benefit the discussion, comming from a western country. Compared to the perspective that was voiced in the discussion before, which was pretty one-sided. You know, to get a whole picture.
Sure, ok; it just read like that. Maybe I misunderstood.
I disagree with this defederation but it's how online political communities work unfortunately. Whatever views the most people generally agree with will become the most visible, that means milquetoast and agreeable "good" points of view will always dominate, ie centrist liberal stances. The communities also become over-paranoid of outside infiltrators, the idea that the space is in some way authentic and pure and needs to be protected.
Over time as things happen in the world and the acceptable view is established, more views become cleaved away until it just becomes an agreeable and boring comment section of people rewarding each other for also having the correct opinions on everything.
tl;dr of this ramble: ignore the paradox of tolerance!!!
give me a break. If you disagree with this, set up your own instance or find another, you're acting like you are now cut off from this instance and thus this entire instance will become an echo chamber because it doesn't tolerate intolerable content. If you actually cared, you'd look at the modlog, but instead you post an emotional reactionary response.
Very cool
Finally a voice of actual moderate reason. Thanks for the well said contribution.
So... Admin = Bad?
Thank you for saying this. I'd never visited until the ban and probably won't again it's just not my scene. I spent about an hour browsing and saw lots of critique of Israel but never saw hate speech.
I'm disappointed lemmy.world admins consider justifiable criticism hate speech. Maybe I'm missing something but if there was true hate speech it was certainly a small minority and not the majority.
"Hate speech" will be abused because it's a fluid opinion. An echo chamber will emerge.
We are very much seeing the powers that be flexing a ton of influence right now.
Now I firmly and staunchly do not believe in any kind of dumb new world order or any crazy beliefs about Jewish people, but we are definitely witnessing a lot of very powerful people influencing this story towards a very pro Israel stance.
This is an objective statement.
While I don't think your statement is false in general, it doesn't really apply to lemmy.world defederating. This isn't about support for Palestine, or even support for Hamas necessarily, but about calls to violence.
I could not agree more. Not only are comments removed, and users banned way too easily, is the nuclear option, defederation, used perhaps a bit lightly too.
In my personal experience I much more enjoy the comment sections of the more open instances. Feels much more like the thing I enjoyed most about reddit.
Neither would I, I'm a Libertarian, so I have beliefs on both sides, and more importantly, I think for myself. But let's be real, what we wind up with isn't honest questions, or people honestly questioning why either side has a belief out of honest curiosity, it's hatred and trolling, and I don't mean "hatred" in the 2023 version, where it's everything you disagree with, I mean the actual definition of the word.
I't sad because nobody should have to put themselves in a like minded echo chamber, people should be able to interact with each other like adults, but again, it's 2023, and I fear that's not coming back.