/0 Governance

Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591

This is a simple majority vote. The final tally is as follows:

• For:
• Against: (5), (2), (4), (3), (1), (1)
• Local Community: -0.6
• Outsider sentiment: Positive
• Total: -10.6
• Percentage: 25.00%

This vote has concluded on 2025-07-23 03:17:20 UTC

Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.

I just spent my lunch break checking out the instance and scrolling through the top weeks posts and checking out the comments.

Hard no.

1. Basically all their posts are political, except very pro-china, pro-marxist, anti-ukraine. Theres not a single post i consider a value add if it appeared in my scroll. Even if I gave the users and their viewpoints the benefit of the doubt, this would be like adding /r/china, /r/russia, /r/communism to my subs. I can't think of a single reason i want this.

2. I'm not giving the users the benefit of the doubt. Their comments are indistinguishable from what a ccp or Russian employee would post.

All we would be doing is opening a potential vector for propagandists to attack. They post nothing of interest.

Nah. No thanks.

One of the lines in the sand for me is when people are unironically pro North Korea. I don't want that on my feed.

And to a lesser extent I don't want to see weird tankie bootlicking of China either. And I'm not talking about legit good things China has done when compared to other superpowers, I'm talking weird posts that read like full propaganda state sponsored bs, and if you disagree with them in any way they will dig through your intire account history to try and find something they can use instead of actually having a discussion about the topic you originally disagreed with.

Authoritarians don't want open discussion they will just link you half a shitty book explaining how there's actually no such thing as authoritarianism.

Edit: I'd like to add that searching lemmygrad for Ukraine will show some really awful takes. I want freedom for Ukraine same as Palestine, Tebet, Hong kong, el Salvador, ect just because the main empire in the west is on the fascism side of authoritarianism doesn't mean I will cozy up to other authoritarians.

No thank you. I have zero interest in dealing with genocide apologists, regardless of their purported idealogical leanings.

Big no.

Echoing from what some others have said, I went back 3 days worth of content from them and found ZERO worthwhile posts.

At least hexbear is somewhat funny in their shit posts, and it's easy enough to block or filter users who constantly post in their begging for money community.

Meanwhileongrad exists for a reason. I'm content enough to see the smoke from the self immolation that happens from afar.

while hexbear, .ml, and similar communities do engage in genuine praxis in the form of mutual aid and other such assistance forums, their rhetoric and dogma is enough to absolutely destroy any amicable sentiment that might build up imo.

everyone in the comments talking about leftist unity and historical awareness is an idiot and a hypocrite. historically whenever anarchism collaborate with the red fash, we get crushed on all sides. there isn’t an instance that has gone differently. we can be that instance.

the lack of genuine rhetoric, absolute widespread acceptance of bad faith argumentative tactics, and general behavior of .ml and hexbear’s communities are both so egregious as to warrant not federating with either community, honestly. i agree with the sentiment found elsewhere in these comments that i have nothing to be gained watching western incels post about how much they love north korea and daddy putin in my feed.

i can’t and won’t be friendly with people who espouse those views and honestly, if db0 were to start federating more of these communities it would denigrate the space enough to make me want to leave. part of what i like about here is that there is no weird snakey people trying to convince people of crazy fucking conspiracy theories. just anarchist nerds doing tech shit. if we invite these people in, we’ll lose ourselves. i don’t think i’d want to use a forum that will leave me associated, no matter how loosely, with literal fascists. it’s a big part of what drives me away from mainstream social media to here and if need be it will drive me away from here, too.

No. Does not sound appealing. Refed with them so a huge chunk of us get fed up and have to manually block, knowing they're still nominally connected to the instance? I really don't want to be surrounded by that stuff nor by people being influenced by it.

Edit: Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I dislike it. If you hop over there and read many of their posts, they don't just lean hard left/right, they are in a genuinely alternate reality. Like, you could move some of their posts to an alt-history roleplay and they'd make more sense. I'm down to hear different views, but I want them stemming from this reality. Harder no than before.

I tried to make Hexbear work for a while. I ended up blocking them because they kept wasting my time, having to check any source, and statement I ever saw from them, with basically all then falling apart.
I thought maybe blocking some offending hexbear communities would be enough, but then kept seeing the same pattern on anything hexbear associated. In the end I burned out on it.

I suspect that most others will equally come to the conclusion of instance blocking, which I think makes the pivotal problem here. Can we allow federation with an instance that the vast majority of our userbase has blocked?

On an individual level I agree, that you can "just block lemmygrad/hexbear/ml/world/startrek" if you don't like them for any reason. But that basically leaves interaction with that instance to all the others. It's fine if a few do it, but if most do it, it resigns the platform to uncontested bullshitting from lemmygrads side.

At first that might then load the mods. They can't really block lemmygrad if they have to moderate their communities from them. But then what about the lies, misleading statements, that got me burned out. The stuff not obviously problematic, and not a rule violation either. If noone bothers checking and contesting that, or those few that do argue then get overwhelmed by lemmygrad votes and downvoted into oblivion on those enclave threads, then the uncensored state of your instance posts will be hell and we will simply be closing our eyes to it with the blocking.

At that point, other instances will come to know us as the ones with lemmygrad brigading in our posts, and the easy solution there is not to figure out how to get rid of the lemmygrad stuff bleeding thru their own defederation, but to simply instance block us.

In summary, I don't think personal instance blocking helps with the nazibar problem. We can only federate if enough people will not block lemmygrad.

No.

I usually don't engage with gov-stuff because this instance is running smoothly and the users (& crew) here steer it very well.

But on this I have to vote. Because historically if a left movement came into power, the dogmatic Marxists have always sought to persecute the other, especially more progressive (eg. antiauthoritarian), leftists - even if they cooperated with them before and/or helped the movement to succeed. There is a fascist wave and it is getting worse - but (left) authoritarians are not allies, they're enemies (sooner or later).

Hexbear is insufferable a lot of the time, no thanks.

A hell no, how can I make sure my vote is tallied? I usually don't vote but in this case I'm heavily against. I'm not against opposing sides, but only if the opposing side of open to other opinions as well, lemmygrad is not really open with extreme views.

Better to stay defederated IMO.

They are ban heavy for daft reasons so ruins the experience for new users. It’d be different if they had daft ideas but engaged with debate; but they don’t - and it’s just feeding more people into an echo chamber that has some people just as far gone as MAGA.

Recent years have taught me the dangers of that and how little most people are able to critically think about things. Less of an issue on this instance I imagine, but even anti-authoritarian spaces are being increasingly captured by authoritarian interests.

Id support the top 5 worst offenders from the power tripping mods community to be defederated by default across as many instances as we can convince. Punish censorship.

Do not defederate from any instance unless they are actively malicious (eg flooding with illegal content, targeting users with harassment/doxxing, or exploiting something). Though the second one is tricky as what constitutes “harassment” is tricky.

A user has the option to block instances if they feel content on said instance is offensive or disagreeable to them.

Rather than deny autonomy to users, refederate, and allow users to practice their own autonomy. If they’re terrified of the spooky leftists they are free to block the instance

No. I don't see any benefit in giving a bunch of fash more chances to worm into people's brains.

No. One vehemently disagrees. The instance was built around far-left authoritarianism, while praising "communist" leaders as gods. Those who do not see the mistakes of the past, are doomed to repeat it.

One may have their personal gripes with Hexbear, but at least one doesn't think their world wraps around being purely Western contrarians.

They default to light mode even with my theming set to dark, and that appals me more than their politics ever could. The medium is the message, and the medium makes me physically recoil in pain.

They're more earnest than hexbear, so ill be more likely to find personal confict, but who cares.

Otherwise dont object to a trial; fucking can't with the shitlibs. Any counterweight.

Absent any compelling reason or evidence of this proposal arising organically from the community rather than springing to life fully-formed from the forehead of an admin, no. Unless something is broken, it need not be repaired.

I’m enthusiastic about opportunities for pan-leftist collaboration in the face of outright fascism across western states. I think a trial period is sensible. This may even benefit folks that are against federation with ml because this will generate more evidence to support defederation if they deserve it. I feel like this re-evaluation is warranted given the (i expect) influx of lemm.ee users to dbzer0

Absolutely not.

All I will ask is that you go have a look at lemmygrad.ml before you vote, and ask yourself if there is anything posted there you think warrants keeping them defederated?

This is the wrong question. The correct question is, "has something materially changed at lemmygrad.ml since we defederated from them, and has it changed sufficiently to warrant refederation?"

My issue with grad was never their local content. Yes they have shitty propagandized tankie takes and deepthroat Mao and the North Korean state all the time, but I always filtered and blocked those sorts of communities, which is any user's perogative. Hell, since we can blanket instance block on a user level these days, it's even easier.

The issue was always their users picking fights outside of their instance and actively spreading dangerous misinformation in every community they can get their fingers in; then their admins doing nothing, if not actively encouraging, this sort of bad faith engagement. Grad, hex and ml would all to varying degrees end up on many news comms and try to flood them with a certain viewpoints. And if you get into their space with an opposing view point (e.g urgyhur genocide) you will be banned more often than not.

Look back in history and see why we defedded. Db0 made the call early on because he also realized they do not make any arguements in good faith and are, for any purposes, just fascists with a different kind of red flag that were directly antithetical to this lemmy's principles. They were not worth the added moderation load to manage their users when they would get into our local comms then. And I doubt they're worth it now.

I opened their site, and right off the bat I see at least three usernames I recognize as bad faith actors that I previously blocked, I can only assume their administrative structure has not changed a bit. Refederating will be a net negative for db0.

Off topic: I forgot how the governance system works, can someone link the post where it was implemented because I'm on mobile and search is really hard here. I don't know how to see my vote tallied. ~___~

No, don't need to see more tankie shite.

Ahhh, how about no, please.

No fuck the tankies. Russia is worse than ever and allowing the russian bots and bootlickers back would he a huge mistake.

This is a tough one. I, and I'm sure many others joined db0 because of how open and anarchistingly free it is. My initial reaction is to say yes open it to everyone...but then I read through the responses here.

And then took an hour to browse through lemmygrad posts and user histories.

I have to agree with other comments here that the posters aren't honest in their discussions. Many of their comment histories read as if they have a script to follow. There isn't inner thought or self inflection when arguing, but vitriol and hate. There isn't a variety of thoughts, but single minded brigading. Not to say there aren't already voices like that here, but when the entire instance is composed of that, what benefit does that provide to db0? This whole thing feels grey as grey can be; but if I were forced to vote after what I saw, it would be a nay.

No.

Lemmy already has serious issues of political divisiveness driving off new users. We don't need to further that "to own the libs".

While I don't truly think that's why this is being suggested, we don't seem to have a good reason to refedrate other than "they appear to be behaving lately".

Also, the optics of the timing of this occurring right as Admiral Patrick is closing dubvee over (among many things) the general tone of discussion on Lemmy being abrasive as all hell in large part due to political division spurring disrespect? Not a good look guys.

Absolutely not. Cannot wait to be yelled at by the politically demented radicals that I'm a libtard under a cute puppy post.

I'm exaggerating of course, but not too much.

Not for me, no. IMO, a lot of the users over there are only interested in cosplaying authoritarianism, which I am not personally into.

I have slowly grown to appreciate having some hexbear users around to help balance out all the turbolibs.

Same. There's a difference between socialism, anarchism, communitarianism, communism, etc., and too many turbo libs chock all of that rich political tapestry up to "tankies".

While I do think there are dictator apologists out there, I don't see the down side to open communication so long as there's healthy debate. As soon as ad hominems are introduced, where people are attacked and not their ideas, I think that's when we draw the line.

I don't really have any experience with lemmygrad though. Hexbear I've started warming up to. As with Lemmy.ml

Edit: I'd say let's try the month period and see what happens. And if this doesn't work, I don't think that should be the last time we try to federate. We should elect to keep an open mind to see if things change. I do think that dbzer0 should allow users to block entire instances though. One of the reasons I came to dbzer0 is because lemmy.world banned too many instances that I was interested in.

So yeah, count me in. Aye

How about waiting until after instance blocking is working nicely rather, rather than rely on the hope that it will be sorted out during that time?

I personally have zero interest in lemmygrad content, and would just block. I haven't had any real issues with hexbears at all, though some I've just tagged to never bother interacting with (FWIW, I've tagged users of other instances this way as well). So as long as they aren't randomly bringing in auth apologia to me, I generally don't care.

That said - I still vote no precisely because instance blocking is not as good as it should be yet. Until then I think its just inviting problems.

I'd vote yes after the tools are in place, not for when I expect them to be ready.

Edit: mobile kb typos.

Nooooooooooooo.

No. I'm not interested in being buddy-buddy with authoritarian memelords who praise North Korea with a straight face.

No. The world is slipping into authoritarianism of various flavors. I'd rather not filter out the shit on my end, but i will if i must.

I was not here for the original drama, but more potential leftist intersectionalism is never bad, esspecially when there is a flare-up of Fascism.

so Aye, let's refederate them.

No way in hell. The reason I'm here is because we don't federate (and I like anarchism and piracy but that's beside the point), I left .ml the second I could when db0 popped up during the exodus. If we federate with them I'll have to switch again.

I vote no.

KEEP OUT THE TANKIES :p

No.

Even in here you can find the tankie triad starting shit.

It sometimes is nice to have an overview of what the tankies propaganda is, but really, as an anarchist their discourse is disgusting... and I feel we already have enough of the propaganda with hexbear and co, so this will be a soft no for me.

I'd be in favour of this. I came over from lemm.ee, I'm pretty sure they were federated with lemmygrad and TBH I hardly ever saw any posts or comments from them. They seem to keep most of their insane views to their own communities (although that may just be because so many other instances have blocked them)

Personally I think defederation is mostly pointless now that users can block instances themselves, and one of the main reason I picked this instance is that not many other instances are defederated. I'd rather defederation was only used when absolutely necessary. To me the whole point of Lemmy is that it shouldn't matter where anyone created their account.

Nay.

I can think of every time a commenter said something obviously false and crazy sounding, and lo and behold, they’re from one of the triad servers. .ml, hexbear, and grad are full of non genuine people/bots.

Hardest of passes.