I used to think that there would be 1, main 'Fediverse' with all of the 'big instances' connected to each other. The recent Threads debacle has shown me otherwise.

The point of the Fediverse is that there is no one single entity, or group of entities, dominating it all.

Right now it feels like whatever the big instances do, we kind of have to go along with to be a part of anything. As the Fediverse grows, there will be more options to suit different types of users.

I think it's fine if big instances federate with Threads and it's fine if they don't. People can just join instances that align with what they want. It's not like defederating means being cut out of the Fediverse, that's not possible.

Great design. I'm eager to see how it plays out.

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[–] kplaceholder 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The controversy you are referring to is regarding specifically .world defederating Hexbear "preemptively" before the latter could federate with anyone, out of fear that the "annoying tankies" may overrun everyone else. Since Hexbear is a relatively small platform run by volunteers like .world is, and the basis on which the defederation was justified was shaky at best, a lot of users raised an eyebrow. There was a similar move by .world later on where they defederated from Lemmygrad, another "tankie" instance, due to alleged hate speech of which the admins failed to provide a single example, and it was clear as day that .world admins just wanted some excuse to defederate away "the evil communists".

In this case, the situation is different, because it involves a lot more than just .world. A large, for-profit instance Threads, run by Meta, is opening up to ActivityPub, and people are afraid of the reasonable possibility that Meta is attempting to either destroy or absorb the Fediverse as a whole. Besides the shitty corporate attempts in the past, Threads is also overrun by a lot of algorithm induced hate speech and far-right extremism, and there is a legitimate concern that this will spread to instances that federate with Threads.

Hexbear (and others like Lemmygrad) are different in that they are still part of the Fediverse, they are run by volunteers like most instances, and remain federated with other large instances such as lemm.ee. But the fact that hate speech is rampant in Threads yet .world admins want to "wait and see" make the Lemmygrad defederation even clearer and funnier in retrospect, lol. I complained back in the day when Hexbear was defederated that I'd rather let users choose for themselves whether they wanted that or not, and I got told to go to another instance. Now that we are federating with Threads anyway, might as well do that.

Edit: Typos

[–] NOT_RICK 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You don’t have to look far on hexbear or lemmygrad to find people cheering on the murder of Israelis on October 7th or denying genocides like the Holodomor so I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you say neither instance is hateful. Meanwhileongrad is full of screenshots of ridiculous hateful bullshit.

Edit: I might add that they’re extremely ban happy and yet would cry when their rants were deleted or when they received bans for spamming on other instances. Blatant double standard. Shit, I’ve had comments deleted for “hate speech” from Lemmy.ml for saying that Hamas and Iran are a big part of the problem in the Middle East.

[–] kplaceholder 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just to clarify- I didn't claim that they aren't hateful instances, deliberately so to avoid starting an argument. I mean, I will say that they aren't if you want, but the point I was making was that .world admins did not provide any example in the thread where they announced this. You could be the worst criminal on Earth, and the judge sentencing you must still be expected to provide proof before taking further action. Likewise, no matter how "obvious" it seems that Hexbear etc are "hateful" instances, responsible admins are still expected to provide concrete reasons for defederation.

This isn't just semantics. This is important because when you get into the specifics, when you force people to provide examples of Lemmygraders or Hexbears supposedly cheering on the murder of Israelis or denying genocides like Holodomor, no one is able to quote anything that can be remotely interpreted as that without engaging in really bad faith, other than maybe using sources such as circlejerk communities making fun of them (such as Meanwhileongrad).

Anyway, it's honestly not that easy to find, because Hexbear and Lemmygrad themselves are circlejerks most of the time, so I'm not bothered by regular users not having proof or anything when stating that they dislike these instances. But when it's the whole admin of a large instance, I expect more seriousness.

[–] NOT_RICK -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You had me go back and check and the .world admins did provide evidence of users planning to break .world rules in each defederation announcement post. You’re free to disagree with their conclusions but you’re wrong when you say they provided no evidence. Besides that, you sound like you’re sitting on the fence on whether or not they are hateful, I have receipts of the admins cheering on the Tiananmen Square massacre because it was a western plot or painting the CCP’s treatment of Uighur’s as a simple necessary anti-terrorism action rather than ethnic cleansing. Please don’t willfully look the other way because they don’t outright yell “gas the Jews”.

I also question why a “circlejerk” community pointing out the ridiculous shit said by leadership and regular posters on the instances isn’t valid. It’s a community dedicated to pointing out the glorification of authoritarianism found on these instances with direct screenshots and links to said bad behavior. The source should be irrelevant provided the information they’re sharing isn’t presented misleadingly. Some of the stuff on meanwhileongrad is definitely misleading or a screenshot of a post that ended up removed but there is a clear pattern from the top down.

[–] kplaceholder 4 points 1 year ago

I kinda don't want to engage further in this conversation, but I don't want to leave you on read so to speak.

You had me go back and check and the .world admins did provide evidence of users planning to break .world rules in each defederation announcement post. You’re free to disagree with their conclusions but you’re wrong when you say they provided no evidence

In the post about defederating Hexbear, the entire thread was in response to a post by a Hexbear admin calling for good behavior, and .world admin was rather deliberately misinterpreting and quoting them in bad faith. I read both of them, and while the Hexbear post was like "I know you all want to troll the libs, but please don't do that, it will suck for everyone and it'll get us defederated", all that the .world admin seemed to understand was "hey, time to troll the libs!". I know it was a deliberate misinterpretation rather than an honest misunderstanding because the .world post was leaving out the many parts of the Hexbear post where the admin was explicitly calling for civility.

The Hexbear post went off in a tangent I didn't really understand where they talked about a few of their political views, and .world took that as a weird example of extremism that I also didn't quite get, claiming that stuff such as opposing NATO is extremist. Admitedly, I haven't gone back to that post, so I'm saying this from memory. Feel free to correct me. But sure, in that case, they did at least point to something as an excuse for defederation, even if wildly misinterpreted.

But when I said that they weren't providing evidence for hate speech I was talking about the Lemmygrad defederation announcement specifically, where they claimed that the reason for defederation was hate speech rather than trolling, bad behavior etc. In there, they did claim hate speech multiple times, but not once did they provide an example of that. Which is what I was talking about.

Besides that, you sound like you’re sitting on the fence on whether or not they are hateful

I'm not. They're not hateful. Calling for direct action in the form of violence towards the wealthy and towards genocidal governments such as Israel does not qualify as hate speech, because they are not considered protected groups. You are free to argue that they are misguided, or even dangerous, and it would be a legitimate disagreement, but hate speech is a concept with a rather strict legal definition. You cannot just consider stuff such as "eat the rich" or "death to israel" as hate speech.

I have receipts of the admins cheering on the Tiananmen Square massacre because it was a western plot or painting the CCP’s treatment of Uighur’s as a simple necessary anti-terrorism action rather than ethnic cleansing. Please don’t willfully look the other way because they don’t outright yell “gas the Jews”.

Irrelevant. My point in this argument isn't that they don't do this, it's that the .world admins should have cited specific instances of this happening in the sticky post they made about defeding Lemmygrad. That said, a lot of the time people claim to have seen this, either the context is a lot more nuanced than that, or they are circlejerking and roleplaying the "tankie" stereotype. Specifically with the Tiananmen Square thing, it's more likely the latter. My own experience lurking Lemmygrad is that people in there actually don't like China much either, so I'm a bit surprised that .worlders keep saying that they do.

I also question why a “circlejerk” community pointing out the ridiculous shit said by leadership and regular posters on the instances isn’t valid

Circlejerk communities are by design unfair. They crop stuff out of context to laugh at it. It's funny, but it's not at all rigorous and may not be cited setiously. A lot of the time it's screenshots of posts that have either been removed, downvoted, or there is a reply calling bullshit that has been cropped out of the image, and these are outliers to the community that are treated as the average opinion. Other times, the context is all there and the funny bit is just the disagreement between the circlejerk community and the source material, but circlejerk posts are ALWAYS presented misleadingly. The point is to laugh at it, not to do some rigorous examination of the line of reasoning.

Anecdotal, but a few days ago I saw a .world user claimed they had met someone on Lemmygrad that stated that being gay was imperialistic, and they actually did link to it. The link was pointing to a c/tankiejerk thread with a screenshot about a post that did actually say that. Granted, the post itself was bullshit. However, as shown in the screenshot itself, the post was downvoted, and the submitter was... someone with the @lemmy.world suffix. It's okay that this post was screenshot and uploaded to c/tankiejerk to laugh at it, but it's not valid to extrapolate that post's content to the entirety of Lemmygrad when it was already downvoted and posted by a .world user in the first place. This is the kind of bad faith I'm referring to that revolves around these defederations IMO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Threads is also overrun by a lot of algorithm induced hate speech and far-right extremism

Pretty sure you’re confusing Threads for Twitter. Threads doesn’t contain any more of that than lemmy or mastodon already does, and it’s probably less, so such handwringing is overstated. They’ve already implemented a “Restrict” setting in addition to blocks and mutes, and frankly their handling of blocking and how people can interact with your account after being restricted or blocked is already more effective than what’s here or on mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you. People on the Fedi fail to realise how similar they are to the places they call out. This disinformation and misinformation is insane. People don’t care to be accurate nor honest. I don’t get how anyone can attempt to claim any moral superiority