No decisions have been made and will not unilaterally make one. I am assuming discussion in good faith. If you are not vegan do not add your comments or vote.
Hello,
When we defederated lemmy.world I was not familiar with how to administrate or moderate a lemmy server. Since the defederation this instance has changed a lot. We now have an appointed leader in @Arcanepotato@vegantheoryclub.org to serve as a level head and counterbalance to any unilateral decision making, we have more users, more community with our weekly threads and we have a better sense of an identity for Vegan Theory Club.
The original reason that I blocked lemmy.world is because I do not want to retransmit American fascist propaganda on a server that I host, this will not change. Any communities there that are in violation with our ethos will be blocked from the admin side to prevent caching, so this problem is solved for me. Additionally, we were being heavily downvoted on every thread so when people posted the votes started at -2 making the experience miserable in my opinion. We have since disabled downvotes and will not ever be re-enabling them.
While I do not agree with the politics of the admins and general community there, I also recognize that it is by far the largest lemmy instance with the most users regardless of their political leanings. There are likely many vegans and leftists who use the site who are unaware of other alternatives in the fediverse and I do want to reach them. Ideally to create an account on this instance and join our community here. Also the way defederation works is it creates a situation where we can’t see or respond to the activity on threads that we post due to the split. They can still see our posts when they are on other instances communities but we can’t see the users replies. Experience wise I think this is poor.
My same hesitations as sh.itjust.works (who revoked their “endorsement” of this instance that I never asked for lol) apply here, they host drama communities with the intent to harass users (tankiejerk), though honestly what really put me off from sh.itjust.works was a thread in NoCredibleDefense where people were supporting the use of chemical weapons against conscripts which is a hard pass from me and I can’t believe people support this cruel and inhuman tactic for any reason. To be honest what I have seen from lemmy.world is less extreme in nature so I thought I would gauge the community and what they thought here.
Even though the last thread of this kind went poorly, I am hoping this time no one immediately posts it to a meta community and starts using alts to manipulate the thread. If I detect any of this behavior I will lock this thread immediately.
Please note: My thoughts and my opinions are my own and not representative of a community of friends.
It’s easy enough to defed and/or remove content.
What’s harder to guage is if damage is done to communities in the medium term.
E.g. suppose there is federation for a few months, then it is undone due to say an increase in combative atmosphere. Nice people may have moved on, or blocked comms from feeds to avoid toxicity. Comms might have shifted to a more inflammatory dunk-centered culture and so on.
That’s a really good point I hadn’t considered.
I hate the idea that growth should be the goal for an instance. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that, but it is a nice idea to be able to meet other new buds. It would suck to lose the chill vibes that have been cultivated here trying to do that tho.