Hello World,
Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.
Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.
At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.
As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one’s stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.
We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.
Thank you,
The Lemmy.World Team
Lemmmygrad supposedly is for people who support communism, but when talking to them, they really are supporting totalitarian countries which have nothing to do with communism.
It’s amazing what some state-sponsored troll farms can convince people of. Some people can’t evaluate content they see online critically and gobble up the propaganda
The tactics and attitudes definitely make me think of that. It seems like the same people who showed up and fucked up a bunch of subs on reddit 6-7 years ago, like how conspiracy went from discussing things like UFOs and MK ULTRA to conservative political conspiracy theories and opposing the Democratic Party and politicians.
Are you saying MK ULTRA is just a conspiracy theory and never happened? I’ve watched documentaries on PBS, BBC and the History Channel. Clearly the program existed, as for what clandestine operations it ran, that’s certainly loaded with conspiracy theories.
If everything is a conspiracy theory, nothing is a conspiracy theory.
https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/history-of-mk-ultra
No, I didn’t intend any meaning like that. I just said it was the sort of thing discussed on the sub prior to a bunch of bullshit.
Whenever communists or socialists gather, the tankies take over.
It’s been like that since the past 100 years.
I’m not even sure they’re really tankies anymore (or the meaning of the word is changing). Actual tankies still ostensibly support communism, but all too often, it’s blatantly apparent that they’re actually right-wing totalitarians cosplaying.
Yep, it’s easy to bait them too. You make a post or comment calling out tankies for supporting authoritarianism, and out of the woodwork scurry all the “socialists and communists” to downvote you.
Thing is, a real socialist or communist hates authoritarianism too.
They’re tankies in the original sense. The word came from an incident where there was an actual honest to god socialist movement when workers were seizing the means of production, and “communist” Russia sent literal tanks to shut it down. A reporter happened to observe the whole thing in person and tried to write up the story, but his editors would only print the official U.N. statement that the tanks were stopping a fascist movement.
Tankies support russian or Chinese versions of communism, which really isn’t communism at all.
[Looks around nervously]
Aren’t we gathering here too? This defederation seems like tankies not taking over.
Anecdotally I was in a bunch of actual leftist subreddits; I only departed because capitalists enshittified the whole website.
Maybe you just didn’t recognize it. Reddit leftist spaces were famously led by tankie mods.
Yup, you would call out their BS and you get banned. The system was perfect and no one is allowed to fully criticize it.
Notably - this applies to any governing bodies.
Fuck communism, it will never work you dumbasses.
The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.
Defederation is the best response imo.
That’s my problem with it. For some reason they support countries which have nothing to do with being socialist or communist. It makes their philosophies and claims seem really inconsistent and not based on any real ideology. It seems like at most an anti-US, anti-EU ideology, and for some reason they scorn the same US politicians that conservatives here do, while never mentioning any problems with the people in the US who are even more against workers rights and in favor of unbridled capitalism. Also, the tactics of groups of people mocking people and comments reminds me of the shilled-out shit that showed up on reddit several years ago.
As tankies often do. They are just a different colors of fascist, but damage the reputation of all lefties
Good riddance
They can have their little hate fest in private now! I think they wanted that anyways.
They do it to so many smaller forums too. I saw an old board I used to frequent for game faqs and questions turned into one, under the guise of being mostly transgender positive.
It’s crazy to watch one user create a wannabe cult, user shame everyone and constantly move goalposts with straw men bs. Meanwhile, they had moderators discussing in Discord chats who to drive insane next and pick on. Not to mention using a serious issue as means to divide people that frequent the site by having over 30+ accounts to pad the numbers that agree with their views in topics.
It’s scary how far they go these days, especially considering the site was relatively respected around Y2K era, and now it’s full of republicans pretending to be trans and liberal for a psychotic gimmick.
Removed by mod
Yeah glad to see those fucks go. There’s been an awful lot of bad takes filling up content sections on certain topics, every time I checked who had posted it it was almost always a lemmygrad user.
Their responses and comments have legitimately prevented me from coming here. Maybe I’ll actually visit and comment again with them defederated, I was so sick of their bullshit and posts clogging my feed.
I need to start checking the instance when someone posts something stinky.
I’d honestly noticed it a lot over the last few weeks and thought oh well, eternal September.
There was a nice little period there where’s there wasn’t much discussion around and those actually poking their heads out were really kind of wholesome. Now I see so many people still coming across in that friendly, inclusive way and I realise it’s just a vocal minority ruining it.
Let’s hold each other to a higher standard.
One love.
I hardly ever even look at the username - I’m not sure I’ll get to looking at instance names.
What kind of chocolate are we talking about?
My preference is a good quality dark chocolate, but I don’t turn my nose up at pretty much any chocolate. Hell, I’ll dig into one of those waxy chocolate Easter bunnies if that’s what I’ve got.
Most recent (a couple hours ago) was a very chocolate brownie from a pan I made last night.
One knock-on effect for me is that encountering those folks on here made me want to triple check my tone and emotionality when I post or comment. I absolutely want this to be a better place than reddit, and I constantly find myself going back through my comments, editing to add corrections, or outright deleting them if I realize in hindsight I was being a cranky asshole. I’ve got to admit, I’ve even appreciated the notification-free moderation here - if I got into a fight with someone and our lack of civility broke the rules, I’m happy when a mod wipes out both of our offending comments. Nine times out of ten it takes out the comment that caused me to fight in the first place. And as heated as I can get, after going on an online tear, afterwards I usually feel terrible for being driven by anger. And angry posts almost never do anything except stroke my ego.
Yea, see you sound like a good egg.
Thanks for posting. I’m going to start measuring how emotional I get too. The good of the community is more important than a momentary annoyance. Thanks for describing a higher standard let’s all encourage each other to aspire to it.
One love.
What kind of bad takes?
We just blocked an instance full of them, go there for an example.
Agree
The lemmygrad users think the same
Good for all 19 of them
Big assumption with the thinking
You mean they’re sharing the same brain cell?
I honestly don’t get the big deal about defederation.
Free speech doesn’t really seem achievable on social media because bad actors will always manipulate votes to ensure that some opinions are promoted more than others.
For example, the opinions of lemmygrad should probably consume ~1% of the total informed opinion “pie chart” if you will. They can be adequately represented by some idiot posting their opinion in a thread once in a while - yet here we are. Their bizarre takes are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
Surely there’s a better way to ensure that all opinions on a given matter can be considered rather than just saying we must allow our streets to be overrun with zombies lest we forget they exist.
Thank fucking god. It’s exhausting being around people for whom any meme, any post, any comment, has to spin into how good communism is, how bad the libs are, how good China is, and how bad The West TM is. It is exhausting.
Nothing of value has been lost
Value was gained instead.
Stonks📈📈📈
Addition by subtraction
I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.
There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.
I just gotta say, the moderation here makes me so happy I joined this instance.
Thank goodness.
I’m reminded of a story I read a while back - not sure where - about how if you let a Nazi into your bar, you eventually end up running a Nazi bar. I think the same applies to online forums. You let Nazis overrun a forum, everyone else leaves, and eventually you might as well just be running Stormfront.
I think this is for the best, there are some seriously disturbed people posting on Lemmygrad. I saw comments cheering on and celebrating the Hamas attack and talking about how they hoped the people who were kidnapped get tortured. Whatever your politics, that is super fucked up and not “legitimate discourse”.
Lost all respect for lemmygrad when they deleted a comment i made about voting for the lesser of 2 evils being the correct course of action to advance the interests of the Prolitariat in the United States. They care more about larping as revolutionaries than enacting change that actually helps the Working Class.
Tankies mad
“Cowards” lol
They literally just ban you if you start to pick apart their bullshit opinions.
Proudly banned from !GenZedong@lemmygrad.ml
Oh hey me too! High five!
we should make t-shirts
“You chose to not have to listen to our bullshit? Cowards!”
We don’t fear you, we pity you, so we put you in the pity party corner. Come back when you develop emotional regulation. Bye Lemmygrad!
Lmao posted to the Communism community. How is this about communism? It isn’t. It’s just that to them, everything is about communism.
When you’re called a coward you know it’s a W because it just means you don’t want to be dragged down to their level
beautiful
🍿
tankies gonna tank
Good Job! You make my experience of Lemmy continuously better! You cleaned that CSAM up with the speed of light (I’ve never even noticed it), you managed the Piracy Community Troubles very well and now you made an well thought through decision about Lemmygrad. Well done Mods! And thank you all very much!
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Most of their communities were blocked since months, that’s why you didn’t see much of them.
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The administration of this Instance has a moderate lean towards not defederating in general, they have to be pushed in general. I would describe LW as a free speech leaning Instance, within the Lemmy environment.
Naturally the topic is very divisive overall and tends to draw heated arguments no matter what position is taken. Free speech absolutists find it downright draconian. I imagine being on Beehaw for longer than five minutes might reduce them to ash, I’m not sure.
The administration of this Instance has a moderate lean towards not defederating in general, they have to be pushed in general. I would describe LW as a free speech leaning Instance, within the Lemmy environment.
lol not even close, lw is one of the most defederation trigger-happy instances out there, with only dbzer0, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and a few others having more. You just don’t see lw announcing them. Even lemmy.ml has less defederations than lw.
All you need to do to get banned from lw is to piss of an admin enough over the mildest shit to be a ban-on-sight.
You know, based on your username I think you might be just a little bit biased
We even know exactly who they are :) Well, were. This account got banned too!
We can take the bias out at the source, theres a few websites who list each public instance and how many other instances they are blocking and blocked by.
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LW has some communities which are quite non-freespeech, with rules like “we can remove and ban anything against the rules or not” (see !world), and some which use their rules arbitrarily as excuses for removing content that doesn’t match their ideology (see !politicalmemes).
So, how does it work if I’m on lemm.ee? Is this defederation global?
No its only for the instance. Lemmy.ee is still federated with lemmygrad.
Oh, bummer
Is the admin Armenian!?
The phrasing of “an increase in hate speech and calls to violence” suggests that there is a tolerable level of those.
A tolerable level we can handle by moderation. And when even the admins join in it becomes clear there is a big incompatibility and cultural difference.
But you probably meant something else, right?
No, that makes sense.
;)
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You folk do good work.
Not it doesn’t, it suggests there’s a finite amount of volunteer moderator time. Don’t be a troll.
I’m pro voilence against people who block grocery store entrances because they figured that was the best place to chat with someone they ran into… so yes.
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It’s my way or the crime way.
Can’t forget those whom text at the theater
*who
Use who when you would use he, use whom when you would use him. Who texts at the theater? He does.
What would I use for she or her?
Still who and whom, respectively. And for they and them.
My mother-in-law did a phone call and I chewed her out. I couldn’t believe it but then she complained about “kids these days” being on their phone at a restaurant and I pointed out that she was holding her phone and that we were at a restaurant. She shut up.
Escalefters 🤬
Yeah, there is: using your critical thinking skills, what number comes before 1?
long pause
That’s right! Zero! Good job! And what do we call it when 0 becomes 1?
long pause
And increase, yes! applause
Tune in next week with Dora the Internet Explorer! Bye for now!
This would be a lot more of a stinging response if they could read.
I took it to mean “it has increased to the point we can’t deal with it all”
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Well there are going to be assholes everywhere but I guess if that instance’s admins/mods aren’t doing their jobs of moderating their users then it makes sense to defederate so the burden doesn’t fall on all other instance’s mods.
The world isn’t black and white like your comment is suggesting.
if that instance’s admins/mods aren’t doing their jobs of moderating their users then it makes sense to defederate
I’m pretty sure the problem with Lemmygrad wasn’t that the admins there “[weren’t] doing their jobs”, but rather that they were doing their jobs and their jobs were to promote and encourage the hateful rhetoric instead of stopping it.
I’m wondering if you’re trolling or just ignorant. I’ll do you the respect of assuming ignorance.
There will always be hate speech in any forum. Period. This cannot be stopped short of closing the forum down entirely. If, however, the hate speech is low volume, it can be dealt with individually with post deletion, user bans, community deletions, etc. Standard “tactical” moderation techniques.
But…
Shitholes like lemmygrad.ml release a veritable flood of hate speech, as do their right-wing “Freeze Peach!” equivalents. Individual, tactical moderation does not scale to that level without a whole lot more money than a hobbyist-run instance can bring to bear. Thus if hate speech and calls for violence reach the point where tactical moderation can no longer keep up, you start with the strategic moderation. In older-style forums that might be an IP ban. In the Fediverse it’s defederation.
See how that works?
Now please, prove to me you’re not trolling and simply didn’t understand how things work.
Yes, there is.
Example:
“I hate fascists and they deserve to get punched in the face.”
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Free speech is important. Every opinion should be heard and considered. However, your freedom ends when it crosses over someone else’s. Good riddance, i had blocked most of lemmygrad’s communities anyways, since all they did was spread propaganda and hate.
Love the mod team (being ex-reddit, never thought I’d say that), the transparency and clarity of their communication with the community is great!
About time.
Tolerating intolerance will only lead to intolerance.
