this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
23 points (66.2% liked)
/0 Governance
357 readers
122 users here now
A community for discussion and democratic decision making in the Divisions by zero.
Anyone with voting rights can open a governance thread and initiate a vote or a discussion. There's no special keywords you must be aware of before you open a thread, but there are some. here's the governance thread manual.
Answers
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
23
Proposed instance defederation for multiverse.soulism.net - an instance administrated by Grail aka Dronerights aka Hardlightcereal aka Exocrinous aka Drag
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
This is a FAF defederation vote for !multiverse.soulism.net. Note that I have tried to summarize views both for and against this proposal, rather than pushing a particular view. Please feel free to comment if you want to contribute your own thoughts and experiences.
The reason for this vote is that admins have been getting a lot of reports about Grail and Their instance from our users lately, but tbh I am not sure whether the reports warrant a ban or not. While most cases are more clear-cut, I wanted some more admin & community feedback on this one.
For context, the soulism instance is (for all practical purposes) a personal instance run by infamous fediverse "personality", Grail. Grail is suspected to be a recent alt of DroneRights aka HardlightCereal aka Exocrinous aka Dragon Rider aka Drag.
Grail, the current incarnation, is (imo) a liberal progressive masquerading as a leftist (a self-described "Anarcho-Antireal theorist" whatever the fuck that is). And I really don't think this qualifies as a "No true Scotsman" situation where it's arguable either way - it's immediately obvious from reading Their comment history.
I don't really want to rehash the extensive history of this user and Their alts in detail here, however I'm pretty sure long-term Lemmy users will be aware of at least some of these previous alt accounts, which have been almost universally banned. I'll try my best to summarize the issues below.
The case for defederation
Here's some recent examples/summaries of why the user is so problematic:
- Concise summary of past trolling behavior:
. - Recent YPTB post: Banned for Nuttin'
- Recent example of Grail's electoralism and criticism of c/flipanarchy rules, including a claim that pugjesus isn't a turbolib 😂 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63720883
- More blue MAGA electoralism demonstrating that the user is about as "leftist" as Joe Biden
Recent examples of hating on / agitating against our instance:
The case against defederation
- Grail is neurodivergent (trans and NPD afaik), so we should be willing to make some accommodations for Their behaviour
- While some folks (including myself at the time, unfortunately) took the "DroneRights" account as an attempt to troll transgender folk with the "my gender is an attack helicopter" line, it could also have been a genuine attempt to advocate for xenogenders. There's no way to know 100% for sure what Their intentions truly were, but on reflection and with the benefit of time, I think it could be reasonably argued They should have been given the benefit of the doubt on that topic.
- Just because this user seems to have a grudge against our instance and bad-jackets anyone to their left as politically "right wing" doesn't mean we should ban them. They are still entitled to express their opinion.
- Given Grail's unique personality, is there anywhere else They would potentially fit in other than the Fediverse? Maybe we should cut Them some slack and just let users block Them individually.
Warning
Please do not attempt to re-litigate the topic of xenogenders in this post. Such comments will be removed as off-topic. As an instance, our policy is to respect personal pronouns, whatever they are. This is not a referendum on the validity of xenogenders. The topic of the post is clear - whether or not we should defederate from the multiverse.soulism.net instance. If you want to bring your own experiences into the comments that is fine, but please keep them pertinent to whether or not we should defederate from this instance / user on the basis of Their problematic behaviours, not on the basis of Their identity or pronouns.
Instructions
The proposal is:
We should defederate from the multiverse.soulism.net instance due to an extensive history of trolling by the main admin's alts, and due to the admin being openly hostile to our instance.
Please upvote this post to vote for defederation. Downvote to remain federated. This proposal will require a 2/3 majority to pass.
P.S., Please be sure to use Grail's preferred pronouns of "capitalised They/Them", so we don't have to remove comments for misgendering.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If a person is violating instance rules they get banned, if that person hosts their own server they get banned and their server gets blocked. No one would be having these reservations if it was any other old troll. Electoralism isn't annoying, it is against our community rules, bad-jacketing isn't annoying, it is against our community rules. These are things other people get banned from dbzer0 for, and server owners aren't any different except that they have the ability to spawn infinite accounts or clear their bans (when someone gets instance banned on their home instance, and then unbanned from their home instance it deletes all remote bans).
That's why defederation is on the table.
Have They actually done that though, spawned new accounts in order to ban evade? To me this stuff seems like it would make it appropriate to prevent Them posting on communities where it is a violation of the instance rules, but going too far to prevent everyone on the instance from seeing or interacting with Their posts elsewhere, especially since it removes the opportunity for argument. If the latter is the only way to enforce the former, fine, but that would depend on whether They are unwilling to respect Their ban.
The evidence presented in this post (written for the uninitiated, thus presumably the best evidence) does not include Them doing electoralism in communities that ban electoralism. I also dislike the use here of the term "bad-jacketing" when our instance ban defines it as saying someone's a cop while here it's just saying someone's a fascist, which our instance rules does not ban, and so the same thing I mentioned about electoralism applies.
Maybe our definition of bad-jacketing needs to be reworked to include how broadly bad-jacketing actually is since it is well beyond accusing someone of being a cop. @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com maybe someone on the team could fix that.
See https://anarchist-archive.org/library/en/anonymous-not-liking-someone-doesnt-mean-theyre-a-cop-on-bad-jacketing for a more thorough description. That bad-jacketing rule has been linked as part of the golden rules for years.
It’s basically just a shitty thing to do. Having said that, the important part is the evidence. If there is evidence someone is being fascist then there’s no problem with making the claim. What is problematic is when there is no evidence, or the evidence is to the contrary.
are you saying that bad-jacketing someone of being a fascist (but not a cop) is also banned by our instance's rules?
Okay as someone who wasn't even familiar with the term until I saw you both discussing it... Do you mind explaining it more to me? Is it just labeling someone something out of distrust of their words/opinion? (Just a guess based off the context clues from this discussion, I may be way off)
yep, I also just learned it, but from what I understood on this thread it's bad-jacketing when someone calls you a tankie, but not when you call someone a liberal.
Bad-jacketing is when you make accusations of being a fascist, bootlicker, antisemite, or pedophile to people who are not to discredit them. It hinges on the accusation not having merit. Like if someone said db0 is a fascist.
Calling someone who is acting like a liberal, fascist, or tankie and is openly promoting those views is not bad-jacketing it is a statement of fact.
Would you mind telling me how that differs or why it would have to exist seperate if the code of conduct already states calling someone Tankie, Liberal, Fascist or otherwise would be considered unacceptable? Honestly we would have so many bans if it were followed, but disrespecting or insulting someone who agrees with MAGA, Democrats, the IDF, or such is already unallowed.
"What is Unacceptable Degrading, disrespecting, or insulting another person or group of people, because of their :
Acceptance of any unfavorable or disfavorable group, whether this group is political, economic, social, or cultural."
That's what this sounds like to me.
Yes
I am very concerned if the rules of this anarchist instance are changing without awareness, announcement, or other transparency.
Pretty sure it's been that way since before I was here. I think it's always been that way, I can't see why it would be okay to accuse others of being fascists, pedophiles, antisemites, or anything else disgusting like that without evidence just to discredit or shut them up. That's definitely against the spirit of this place.
@Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com Could you clarify? Was this a change to the rules or has it always been that bad-jacketing was something more than accusing people of being a cop?
See https://anarchist-archive.org/library/en/anonymous-not-liking-someone-doesnt-mean-theyre-a-cop-on-bad-jacketing for a more thorough description. That bad-jacketing rule has been linked as part of the golden rules for years.
It's basically just a shitty thing to do. Having said that, the important part is the evidence. If there is evidence someone is being fascist then there's no problem with making the claim. What is problematic is when there is no evidence, or the evidence is to the contrary.
I wish I saw this link years ago.
For a long time I've been noticing the exact same behaviour in social media, and I've been calling it "witch hunting". I'm glad others already noticed it, and gave it a name.
It is? I didn't see it on the rules list, but more importantly, is Grail doing that on THIS instance? The picture there was from lemmy.world - if the view of elections is something to be banned from here, I guess you are going to have to defederate from every single non-anarchist instance as well, because they are full of users that either like some political party or believe in lesser-evil.
Is this about calling someone here a tankie? Wait... you all really caring about that?
It's how it's used as a tactic, instead of a complaint. It's a way to discredit, not engage in discourse.
Grail literally came into our instance !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and started spouting Electoralist apologia in multiple threads. It's clearly visible in Their modlog and some comments are still up in YPTB.
Nice false dilemma, this is only a discussion because Grail is the admin of Their own server. If another server owner was doing this we'd be having the same discussion. If some idiot on Lemmy.world wad doing it we wouldn't, they'd just get site banned. Thanks for letting everyone know you never had any intention of participating in good faith discussion.
Sorry, I thought it was explicit on my first comment that I don't care about this voting and I find the whole thing risible - but my argument was about his "electoralism" being on other instance, the post didn't present it here.
ps: I still haven't found that rule about "electoralism" though, did I miss some link I should check? https://wiki.dbzer0.com/divisions-by-zero/the-golden-rules/ https://wiki.dbzer0.com/divisions-by-zero/the-anarchist-code-of-conduct/
We don't have an instance wide rule about it. But some communities have such rules, e.g., c/flippanarchy rule 7.
I thought it was instance wide, I've seen comments removed for it outside of those specific communities.
Yeah I've also removed a few comments in yptb where people were shaming our users for anti-electoralism. We are an anarchist instance, and thus a certain level of anti-electoralism is to be expected. I don't want our users to be lectured to by anyone about how we are somehow the problem that gave rise to far right dominance in the US, instead of the neoliberal, zionist, corporate-teat-addicted DNC who are widely disliked even by their own constituency.
It kind of should be an instance-wide policy. Electoralism very often only serves to degrade and blame anarchists for the harm caused by fascists. It's not like Electoralist views are fringe or marginalized, people can go elsewhere to talk about them, they don't need to come into leftist safe spaces.