The Lemmy Club is currently suffering from “The Nazi Bar” problem. All of their top communities are run by three right-wingers as illustrated below.
The Lemmy Club instance admin doesn’t seem to want to ban them, for the reasons mentioned below:
This vote is on whether or not we should defederate from this instance until they address their Nazi Bar problem.
Upvote = for defederation. Downvote = against defederation.
Edit: As others have mentioned, happy to treat this a only a temporary measure until the problem is resolved.
Edit 2: The Lemmy Club admin has said they will implement a rule against right wing communities, and has taken action on some problematic posts and users (see original comments below).
I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the admin here, as they have responded in good faith:
If you implement those changes then I’d be willing to withdraw the defederation proposal and consider the problem resolved.
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:
- For: (4),
(3), 
(1), 
(7) - Against:
- Local Community: +0.9
- Outsider sentiment: Supportive
- Total: +15.9
- Percentage: 100.00%
This vote will complete in 3 days
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
These images are insane on my mobile Connect app. it’s eight screen lengths of scrolling to get to the reply button just for this one comment.
yo need to contact the developer of you app and ask them to handle and resize lemmy emojis properly. They can be identified by their markdown code as they all have a special emoji string assigned like so
"emoji vouched"This is how they look on tesseract:
This is how it looks like on the web-UI via Tor Browser (Android)
Alexandrite (zoomed out to 0.25%):
Ye, alexandrite also needs to fix this
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com what are all these symbols? 🤔
The most significant flair of the counted people who voted. Also see this link from the sidebar
maybe the vote message needs that link and a CTA otherwise you’ll forever be answering these questions =)
I’m confused on how to vote. The vote tally shows for/against, and then “outsider sentiment support”, and I’m not sure what that is, and also who and how gets to vote.
Also, I’d like to vote and that’s what I really care about.
Defederate that shit quick.
I’m not sure if it’s possible, but ban/block those accounts as well. Too bad we can’t do more about preventing those cancerous people from doing more damage.
MathGr
Edit: I take back my unofficial vote to defederate. We should wait and see.
Also, lots of love out to our Admins here for (1) noticing this, (2) attempting to rectify and and (3) being reasonable (i.e. not using a sledgehammer) when it seems that appropriate steps have been taken at this time.
However, having seen this right-wing cancer destroy other social media platforms, I want to stress that we should be as proactive and ban-happy as we feel appropriate, because this shit is not going away.
You vote by simply up/down voting as usual. Check the sidebar of this comm.
Thank you! I appreciate you and everything that you do!
- For:
I don’t let Nazis/Fascists into anywhere that I frequent. Defederate.
I read the comments here, starting from the perspective that merely being a “conservative” was no reason for defederation (I have a 1990s idea of what the word “conservative” means), then it turns out we’re talking about people posting Nazi shit at will and it staying up, which definitelly justifies defederation and the “Nazi bar” label, but apparently (from his own participation here) the Admin of the instance is willing to ban the Nazi types and possibly the groups in that instance which were ok with Nazi posts.
If the admin does this, then I’m against defederation, if not then I’m in favour of defederation. Sadly I can’t encode such a view in just a Yay or Nay metric (i.e. upvote/downvote), hence I will neither upvote nor downvote and instead am leaving my rationale here as a post.
Defederate.
Tolerance of intolerance isn’t good.
I’m in vote of a temporary defederation, until they address the problem. This shit is not okay, and is not a matter of just “different opinions”.
These users were not pointed out in this or the prior post and have now been banned. I don’t tolerate that kind of stuff but these were basically zero point, zero interaction posts that had not been reported to me.
i’d rather just ban the users and use the comms are a honeypot. though I guess there is nothing that stops us from doing both.
I think my problem is more with the admin. We shouldn’t need to moderate his own communities for him, and if this stuff is allowed by him, it’ll create a culture for this stuff on his instance.
can’t fix people. I was recently doing work marketing tooling via ML, and had to point out to people that we may get companies that are fascists and what we wanted to do when it occurs.
My personal stance was to charge them significantly more in order to drain coffers. harder to do with communication systems besides blocking them. but part of my argument was those companies would provide good training data for building tools that identify their content for automatic removal/prevention.
So if this admin allows it on his instance, let him. thats his problem. imo best they self congregate so we can track/manage them via tooling than constantly having to find were they went to next.
eventually I’ll get around to building tooling and having a instance with a history of data and an activate fascist user base will be a useful dataset.
Fair point. Let’s see how the vote goes :^)
agreed, im not too worried either way. defederating is easy can do it whenever. =)
The user in question has never faced moderation action from db0.
They are posting content on your instance, not ours. We have banned them but what is more concerning is how you have not banned/removed this. You are allowing conservatives and actual nazis to foster a hate group on your instance.
Checking !rightwingvideos@thelemmy.club i saw “bernard” literally post a link to europe: the last battle, a neo nazi documentary. And another video claiming “jews control the narrative”. You are letting spaces like these foster on your instance, dude.
Check out bernard’s mastodon https://friends.ravergram.club/explore
Why have you not taken action against this? Is it really that worth it? Just ban them, come on.
This sounds harsh but i do not mean to be so, and i apologize in advance.
I had not taken action against these posts because they had not been reported and had not garnered enough interest or interaction to have been seen by me organically until now. That is not one of my users but they have been banned.
After further consideration I’ve removed any explicitly conservative comms from my instance as I don’t feel I can effectively moderate them or leave them be.
Thank you. We can overturn the vote, depending on what the other mods think. I hope it does, and i appreciate you listening.
For a culture of tolerance to flourish then the intolerant must be purged. I love freedom of speech but Nazis should be given no quarter for their ideologies to metastasize into the rest of the fediverse.
Defederate.
I understand why the owner of the instance finds our reaction distasteful, but unfortunately, we have no choice but to defederate from an instance whose largest community is run by this individual.
This is a governance community, meant for decisions (such as, should we be federated with a specific instance), not a diplomacy community. We don’t vote on “should we ask the owner of this instance to actually moderate in ways we find tolerable”? The unfortunate truth here is that instance is currently mostly this kind of garbage, so until it isn’t, defederation.
(Also I spent an hour trawling this individual’s comments to make sure of my opinion because I have ADHD and can’t stop myself, and while my normal reaction is surgical, this is too conveniently a case where every individual involved could have been acting in bad faith. Better to be thorough here than not.)
Defederate. Zero tolerance for Nazis.
We don’t abide by no Nazis. Defederate. Take away their bullhorn.
I would have preferred a vote first to see if we should just ban those comms, or defederate. If we ban those comms and the right-wingers, we can take a more “surgical” approach. Personally I will vote against, in favour or B&B (block & ban). But I am open to be convinced otherwise if the problem is worse than I thought.
Edit: After the revelation that there’s literal neonazis posting neonazi videos in there already, I switch my vote to defed.
I thought about that, but tbh I also wanted to put pressure on the admin to take action against the right wing communities and community bans would not have achieved that.
I agree with your surgical approach in general, though I don’t want to vote one way or another in this case, because I’m torn between whether it’s a good idea, or too soon to act so broadly.
Despite Lemmy and the fediverse at large being an international community, I would predict a very American style community schism at some point based on political ideology. I think we’re going to end up with a conservative zone, a liberal/progressive zone, a tankie zone, and then… Instances like this one. They’re “neutral”, they will have to experience the Nazi bar problem before they either take action or put on an armband.
db0, you know the tech better than I do. Is this sort of thing possible? Fractured and semi exclusive fediverse zones that are connected very loosely by neutral parties?
I honestly don’t know if it’s a good thing, but I definitely understand the sentiment of not wanting to interact with whatever American conservatives have become.
Not really connected. If we defed a fash instance, we can’t see them in a “neutral” space either.
Gotcha, thanks.
I feel like we’re gonna head towards that community schism sooner rather than later. I’m glad for you that the decision doesn’t lie solely in your hands thanks to the governance system. Hang in there.
Thank you both for the great read.
My initial reaction was “defed”, but now that I’ve seen this back-and-forth, I’m going to remove it and stay
neutralin the b&b camp as well.Signed, Another (mostly) lurker
These were two posts by a non-user of my instance that had zero points or comments. They had not been reported to me until now and I have promptly banned them and removed their content. I do not now nor have ever tolerated such content.
Although this content has garnered near zero “community” or interaction on my instance I have decided that I cannot effectively moderate nor leave conservative communities be and have therefore removed them.
I hope that this addresses any concerns you or your userbase may have. Please report anything like that you see - it is possible otherwise that I may miss it.
But this is part of the problem, you have to see that, right? The fact that you have literal neonazi content and nobody is bothering to even report it to you, means that those comms are too far gone. Before fascists can thrive in a community, you need to have a large silent majority which are ok with fascist content.
We also can’t be responsible for moderating your instance. We can maybe point one or two examples, but eventually we’ll have to label the whole instance as unsalvageable.
I saw in your other updates that you removed some of these comms and have added some rules and this is good, but this is also a time to be vigilant on your own, at least for a while.
The comms were essentially dead. It’s hard to say anything ‘thrived’ there. The posts in question had zero interaction. Of course it’s concerning it was there at all however these were not “communities” where any kind of discussion happened. 2 people would’ve made a large silent majority of people who were actually browsing in these comms on a weekly basis.
If this had been somewhere where people actually made comments or posted more than a handful of times a month (there were 12 posts and 6 comments in the entire history of the comm) - I’m sure I would have identified and taken action earlier. Additionally, they were both video posts. It’s entirely possible nobody ever clicked on them to watch them and I don’t know these videos by title and did not realize what they were, and without further action to prompt me I did not look further into them.
Of course I will be more vigilant going forward.
I mostly lurk but I’m with the B&B approach for now.
If it starts to spread to other comms on the instance, it’d be worth taking another look at defederation.
yeah, i don’t want our bar connected to a nazi bar
Defederate until the problem is solved.
I’m for temporary defederation if the admin does not react to an ultimatum to clean house. Being federated means increasing the reach of their message, and the message is hate. If Xitter was worth banning, then this is too.
The admin seems caught in the tolerance paradoxon, and doesn’t realize that his inaction is an indirect endorsement of the content he’s hosting. Seems to be too nice for his own good, maybe a warning cannon salvo is in order.
If I have to choose between this user and federation with db0 I would side with db0.
However I must comment frankly that moving immediately to defederation over a thread in which the subject - @realcaseyrollins@thelemmy.club - has never been the subject of db0 moderation action (with over 4k combined comments and posts over 6 months) in some attempt to strongarm me into action is, at minimum, distasteful.
Trust me, I’m a card carrying Communist party member. I do not care for conservative views at all. But I did not create The Lemmy Club to be a partisan instance - but a general instance to replace reddit. I do of course have limits, however in reviewing the posting history of @realcaseyrollins@thelemmy.club I do not find anything worthy of banning. I do not like some of the sources they post. But they also post non-conservative stories and sources as well and generally conduct themselves in a reasonable manner in all posts and comments. They do not appear to me to be some wild-MAGA idiot, although they do seem to be conservative. They post unfavorable things about Trump fairly often. The fact that it has come to this is to me, a bit bizarre.
Thanks for having this open to outside comments, though.
The problem is all your top communities are run by these right wing guys. I know you probably don’t want to have to trawl through every post, and neither do I. But shit attracts flies.
You should be made aware, for example, that the user who posted this https://thelemmy.club/post/23635160 and this https://thelemmy.club/post/23387257 in “Right Wing Videos” is a literal neo-nazi (see his Mastadon post profile here: https://friends.ravergram.club/@Bernard). I’m sure if we dig around some more there will be many more examples.
Unfortunately we can see where things are headed because we already had to deal with instances like exploding heads. I think that, while the mods themselves seem well behaved enough to not get reported, they are effectively acting as cover for the more unsavoury characters that right wing instances invariably attract.
Unless you want to spend all your time checking those communities, I just think you’re better off without them. You are right that jumping straight to a defed vote is a bit harsh maybe, but I think if we just blocked the communities then there would be no real pressure on you to take any further action, and personally I think it would be better for the fediverse to not have right wing content platformed.
Okay now see this stuff is actionable, Forgive me for not noticing this earlier, I did not know about these documentaries by name, and being that they were zero point, zero comment posts with no reports I had not seen it. The (non Lemmy Club) user that posted them has been banned with content removed. Additionally after some investigation site user Marathon started posting some stuff of that sort recently. Also banned them for apparently being a ban-evasion account and using their alts for vote manipulation. The communities that they moderated have been removed.
I would much prefer a report over a post like this one to fix these kind of issues. If they’re posts like these were - essentially zero interaction posts that go nowhere - it’s possible I may miss them.
I think I will have to make a new rule against “right wing” communities. I don’t think I have the capacity to moderate them due to my own viewpoint, and I can’t be hands off without risking them devolving. I won’t be banning the previously mentioned user, but I will remove their communities that are conservative-themed and not allow them to moderate in such a way to only allow such sources.
I think this will address the issue.
Honestly, that all sounds quite reasonable to me, and seems like a good faith response to my original complaint. Thank you for responding in the way you did.
If you implement those changes then I’d be willing to withdraw the defederation proposal and consider the problem resolved.
I’m from Buenos Aires, and I say defed them all!
