A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
You're probably aware that most instances default to open federation and only block an instance reactively when problems come up. Open federation means that as soon as a single user here requests a community off of an instance X, that instance will show up in this instance's federation list; unless that instance is later specifically blocked.
But wow, those are some pretty crappy people over there.
Interestingly, it says there are 19 comments but I can only see 10 (will be 11 after I send this). I logged out (thinking it was just defederated users or something) and still only saw the same ones. Is there another mechanic that I am missing?
Sometimes comments take a little while to federate! Could be why you'd see discrepancies.
Oh, you might be interested to know that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are also federating with the lolicon one, which appears to be a Mastodon instance. Both of those have blocked the exploding-heads one, though. This is probably also due to the default open federation policy. You could talk with the instance admins about it.
It's pretty cool that federation (& blocking) information is public! In any event, there's no point in "repeating what you heard about", which is to say "playing Telephone with speculations", when we can all just see the facts:
https://lemmy.world/instances
https://lemmy.ml/instances
https://lemmygrad.ml/instances
Like I said, I didn't know how to actually check, which is why I asked as I did. Thanks for letting me know that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad don't have the other one blocked, I will dm their admins about that. If you're a user in good standing, I'd suggest asking your own instance admins about not blocking these two.
I DM'd a lemmygrad admin, next I'll do so for lemmy.ml now that I can access the site again.
Isn't there a way for individual users to completely hide an instance from their feed? Because I would just do that if it bothers you.
I'm not saying that some posts/instances aren't unethical, objectively incorrect, and/or dangerous, but widespread censorship is a slippery slope. If you want what you're able to see to be heavily controlled, there are probably other instances with that purpose. An instance that describes itself as general-purpose and for everyone probably isn't the place for that, though.
Edit: To be clear, I don't have a problem with an instance blocking another instance. My problem is with an instance blocking another instance while implying that they aren't.
widespread censorship is a slippery slope
I wouldn’t call blocking gore, nazis, and pedos “widespread”. For anyone who hasn’t heard the nazi bar story (source @IamRageSparkle on Twitter):
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
I think that’s a somewhat reasonable argument when such people are actually congregating in your space, and their presence necessarily impacts everyone else in that space.
In your example, by telling those people to leave you would necessarily be taking away what they believe to be their space and hindering the ability for group members to talk with each other. In the context of federated communities, it doesn’t matter when you block an instance (if and when such actions become necessary) because they’ll still have both of those things.
In your example, all interactions would constantly be influenced by the presence of that group and non-group-members would understandably associate that group with that space. In the context of a federated community, anyone can easily and instantly remove all influence on them by that group. Non-group-members wouldn't make such associations because that group's influence on non-group-members would by default be minimal.
That’s not how Nazis and other disgusting groups operate, though. Once they’re part of a community, they’ll start trying to get any other unknowing people interested in their content, so they start creating communities in disguise, trying to gain any new members, and make sure anyone who feels like an outsider, like they don’t belong, will feel welcome there, which in turn only strengthens those types of communities.
4chan used to be a pretty diverse community, which while it was definitely always pretty intense and insensitive, had a bit of everything, but after the American 2016 elections, /Pol/ started spreading to other boards until the /Pol/ folk became a very sizeable group everywhere else.
Censoring literal, open Nazis and pedos is perfectly fine by me, thank you very much. I don't think there's any "slippery slope" involved other than the risks of allowing such people free rein in open spaces.
Keyword literal.
But nowadays people like to call Nazis other people that don't agree with me and pedos weebs that like hs anime characters
So I agree with you if anything illegal is going on.
Are the Nazis advocating for violence and genocide and pedos distributing CP? sure block them and report them to the authorities.
But I don't care for fictional characters that doesn't even resemble real life humans.
Hot take I know.
Nazism, by its very nature, advocates for violence and bigotry. There are a lot of abhorrent viewpoints that are despicable before they become illegal.
Fuck them and fuck their claims and wanting free speech. That’s not even something they actually believe in.
To be clear, the "jailbait" forums that Reddit tolerated for years were not officially tolerating material that would be clearly illegal by US standards. If they had been, Reddit would have shut them down out of self-protection. Possessing outright child pornography is a strict-liability offense.
They were, however, posting "upskirt" photos showing children's underwear. They were posting pictures of children at the beach in swimsuits. They were, in short, posting photos of actual children, where the photos had been selected for being sexually appealing to pedophiles.
Not drawings of fictional characters; real kids, selected for hotness to pedophiles.
I think that's something about which site owners can very reasonably say, "Even if it is not a criminal offense, we think it's wrong and we don't want it on our site" without anyone needing to be concerned about censorship of ideas.
Sure, like when imgur was changing it's policy recently, people were asking for alternatives, the first search result of a suggested hosting site (don't remember which) in duck duck go was an album of a child in swimsuit doing suggestive poses, pretty disturbing, that's a clear line I agree with.
There are some absurd people on this board with bad political analysis, but you can see that I edited the OP. Hopefully I didn't offend your identitarian tendencies or whatever that toe I stepped on was.
The name of the second instance, let me remind you, is "posting.lolicon.rocks". It seems to be run by an aggressively racist (loves to use the hard-r gamer word) pedo. Anyone who cheers what they even call lolicon is normally going to be some sort of 4chan-style sicko who probably pitched a fit at the Card Captor Sakura reboot having fewer upskirts.
Well I don't care for lolicon but you are right with this one, literal nazi pedo LMAO.
Blocking and unblocking should be normal, expected, easily discoverable, and openly discussed. There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.
The whole system we're on here is still new and in rapid flux. Expect change. This isn't Reddit with admins saying for years that hosting /r/jailbait is essential to free speech. It takes time to develop agreeable responses to kinds of trouble this system hasn't yet seen.
SMTP email has been around since 1983. When I was running mail servers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was still plenty of controversy over how to properly block spam & abuse from bad-actor mail servers. IRC has been around since 1988, and the history of IRC is the history of conflicts over federation; going back to the founding of EFNet by the exclusion of eris.berkeley.edu and any other server that peered with it.
That's what the long-term history of a federated service looks like. There is change. There is controversy. There are people goddamn sure that if you don't accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.
frothing assholes
smh this is just the kind of NSFL content we're talking about
The thread was already tagged :)
hah touché!
There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.
There are people goddamn sure that if you don’t accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.
Giant images don't really contribute to discussions. :(
The problem is not that some (or many) communities may block access to some (or many) other communities, but rather that such blocking is not immediately obvious and may give an appearance that those blocked communities don't exist (kind of like lying by omission). This is especially true if the description of your community implies a lack of enforced blocking. If someone manages a community where it's very clear that outside access is moderately to extremely controlled, I completely support that.
The point of blocking is to cause things to be invisible to the default view.
If the blocked material is put in users' face so they know it's blocked, that misses the point of blocking it.
Mod logs and published block lists are a great way of allowing users who are concerned about overblocking to investigate ... without failing at the whole endeavor by sending every user a copy of all the horse porn & Nazi spam that got blocked.
When I ran spam filtering for an institutional email server about 20 years ago, I made the "mod logs" (or rather, SMTP envelope data of blocked messages) available to users; but they had to go to a web page to see what messages had been blocked; and the content was not visible (since the mail server had never accepted it). I wrote that code so that my users could tell me if the spam blocking I'd configured was mistakenly blocking mail they wanted to receive.
(The users were scientists & engineers. They could read email headers. If they wanted to.)
But the point of blocking the horse porn spam and Nazi froth is lost if the users have to see it anyway so they know it's blocked.
Horse porn is not a made-up example, by the way. There was an email spammer named Jeremy Jaynes, who was in the habit of sending spam promoting bestiality porn. When he was arrested, suddenly the users on the email server I was running stopped complaining to me about horse porn.
Gonna just hammer this home: this slippery slope has literally never been true. Reddit getting rid of neo nazis, the fatpeoplehate lynch mob, and the pedophile subreddits only ever made the site better. This fear of censorship has ruined platforms far more than any so called censorship has. I would rather go back to Something Awful and their capricious mods than deal with another laissez faire administration
I don't know but I'm on lemmy.world and I scroll all>new, and have yet to come across nazis or pedo shit, but I also would probably scroll right past it tbh. F that.
Report it to admins if you see it
Will do for sure. Once I figure out how
Did you create an accounton exploding-heads.com and experienced nazism ?
It's interesting, because on the side bar it clearly states nazis are not allowed.
Did you take the initiative and read their rules to see what it is they allow and don't allow?
Did you proactively look for evidence of this, or are you just going on speculation?
You think Nazis care about what a sidebar says? Publicly denying their position is straight out of their playbook.
Publicly deny while dogwhistling like crazy. Hell, it’s hardly even dogwhistles.
My mistake, I was giving them too much credit in their radicalism when they are a much more generic kind of trans panic reactionary congregation. Some aspects were mildly interesting in their alignment but there was enough Dem/Rep partisanry that I don't really care to investigate further, and I think ultimately if I interrogated it further it would circle around to being difficult to distinguish from blue check shitheads with the crypto, talking about Musk defending the children from Biden, those darn RINOs, etc.
I did list caveats that I was basically going off of offhand testimony. I will edit it if the website cooperates with me (I needed to navigate invisible UI elements to reply here). I have no respect for them, but I do think accuracy is important.