this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Is running your own Lemmy instance as difficult as an email server?
probably not, but you'd get the same amount of horrible stuff as you'd get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i'm making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn't block anyone, you're exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don't block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you'd see
Edit: apparently lemmygrad is much worse than I realized
The only caveat I have to this is that being communist shouldn't be an automatic block. Lemmy.ml doesn't block lemmygrad and I see no reason why it should, the posts I see are like "wow capitalism is fucking us up" not like "Tiananmen did nothing wrong and let's repeat it x1000" so it really doesn't seem comparable to proactively blocking Nazis. If you block "both sides" of a violent conflict like, say, the war in Ukraine, you've suddenly blocked everyone with a useful opinion.
I saw a lot of tianamen didn't happen, CCP worship, etc on there for the first few days after I registered, which is a bit problematic.
I wound up blocking them after a couple days, more because I don't care about a tiny fringe movement (in my country), and don't have any interest in their content.
lemmy.ml is also run by communists, as are quite a few other instances, I imagine. No one's really saying that communists should be blocked.
But lemmygrad is specifically a vanguard edgelord site. Even those of us who are communists don't necessarily want to deal witih /c/GenZedong.
Plus, I left the instance I host for me and my friends open to lemmygrad, and I had people from the server create accounts and just bulk subscribe to communities there.
It's not the communism people are blocking it for.
Lemmygrad isn't blocked because of their views, it's blocked because it's a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don't include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out
And that doesn't apply to liberals and every other ideology on this site? Every person has a political view which affects their opinions
if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they'd get mass-defederated too. like i said, it's not their views they got defederated for, it's their behavior
Behaviour like what though? Disagreeing? I don't even know what 'sealioning' means, it basically seems like just saying 'this person has different fundamental assumptions to me therefore they're acting in bad faith'.
Lemmygrad has a history of brigading communities, targeted harassment towards admins and prolific political posters, and as i mentioned before, sealioning (defined by Wikipedia as "a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ('I'm just trying to have a debate'), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter")
But how do you differentiate 'brigading' from just being outside the ideological orthodox of a given community? Shouldn't bad actors just be banned personally?
they mass-report and/or mass-downvote people they don't see as communist enough and drown out any good-faith discussion in the comments
How is that any different from what I've been saying? Liberals from beehaw also have 'mass downvoted' people for being communist or pro China etc, but does that mean everyone from that community should be blocked? As for good faith discussion you're just defining comments you don't agree with as being inherently bad faith. I mean I'm sure there's some comments just like 'kill yourself lol' that are completely without merit but like I said it just seems like an instinctual anti communist reaction.
Well I haven't been on this site for very long so maybe I'll see what you mean eventually. I still think it's best in general to not fracture this already-tiny community though.
To be fair it's not like I know what lemmygrad does, I only joined yesterday, but it just seems like typical 'tankiephobia', I don't exactly agree with MLs on everything either but some of what they get accused of is just beyond the pale. I mean generally if someone is a western liberal they don't get endlessly accused of being a mass war crime apologist even though that's basically what the 'war on terror' was.
Have you read Lemmygrad's sidebar at all? They describe themselves as Tienanmen Square truthers, are openly pro-DPRK, and fully support genocide in the name of Communism. They exemplify everything bad people say about tankies and they take great pride in it.
Wanting to cut out tankies and Nazis is NOT being a radical centrist who wants to "both sides" every issue, it's just being a normal human being who doesn't have bees in their head.
Ahh no I access Lemmy via the mobile app. Thanks for the information, I'll be blocking them.
Agreed that blocking is a security precaution... but this is not just an anti-spam feature, defederation in user communities can come from any motives, including political, religious, or whatever other views the instance owners find undesirable.
I think each user should be able to pick what kind of blocking experience they wish for themselves. There should be as a bare minimum a way to set either an instance, or a client app, that can interact with instances that are defederated among themselves (without acting as a bridge, obviously).
If instance 'A' has already blocked instance 'B', what does it matter to 'A' whether or not any other instances have also blocked 'B'? Would the admin have to go far out of their way to block the instances that don't block 'B' or is there a way to do it automatically?
they would have to go out of their way, but it's bad practice to block because of guilt by association. most instances have internal federation guidelines that are somewhat looser than their own rules, but still include a baseline level of decency. so an instance that doesn't allow nsfw content would federate with an instance that does (even if they wouldn't allow images to federate) as long as they don't go all freezepeach or harass everyone
It's a fraction of the work of an email server, if you're not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work