/0 Governance

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

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

• For: (5), (1), (1), (7), (1)
• Against:
• Local Community: +0.4
• Outsider sentiment: Supportive
• Total: +10.4
• Percentage: 75.00%

This vote will complete in 1 days

"you should be lined up against a wall and shot"

"Kill yourself"

It blows my mind how this type of speech is being used by the op as proof that they're on the right side of things. This is so wack that some part of me wants to believe this is some kind of social experiment to find out how far you can push people on social media until they push back against the echo chamber.

But I doubt it is. It seems more likely that this mod is leveraging his position to instrumentalize this community and shape it after his own vision of political activism. All under a laughable guise of democracy. Every single vote on this instance has been presented in a biased and manipulative way that leaves no doubt what the outcome "should" be. How very democratic of you. Slow clap.

Hey, unruffled: your attempts at social engineering and radicalization are ham-fisted and painful to watch.

I initially joined db0 because it seemed like one of the more heterogenous communities on Lemmy. That there was no clear label that comes with the db0 tag like "the tankie" (hexbear) or "the normie" (world). That it had the shortest list of defederations in comparison with the other bigger instances.

Over the past few months this has changed. There has been a shift towards echo chamber, armchair revolution and increasingly more hateful language. Give it three more votes and you'll be voting in favor of roasting babies on a stick. Because free Palestine, or Zionism, or something. SMH.

I don't like being told what to think about a certain topic. Even when that view aligns with my own. And before the mob frothing at the mouth charges at me - yes I'm German and yes, free Palestine and down with Israel (preferably with not a single additional life lost).

For all instance members reading this:

"Don't worry you'll get the wall"

Do you want to be associated with people who unironically spout this type of hatred? I don't. Bye, db0

I've got a few thoughts on this.

First, its insane to me that someone could read the rules and decide anti-zionist is anti-semitic. That is either someone who doesn't understand words and has no interest in learning them, or is someone actively zionist (and supports genocide, thus the issue with zionism).

Second, I've got my complaints about what I'm seeing from the flotilla/friendly instances.

• Someone saying "Fuck off you piece of trash" getting banned from a community is in no way a surprise.
• The same goes for "You'll get the wall"
• Same for "kys"
• Same for calling someone a Nazi for what I assume is a supportive comment about the war in Ukraine. Just to note, don't bother trying to respond to me with anything about Russia being in the right on this one. I'll just block.

Third, there are quite a few comments there that are completely appropriate (support for Israel is support for genocide, etc), the thread about quokk.au is utterly nonsensical to me, as are the discussions in MoG (which shouldn't really be a surprise).

To sum up my thoughts.... At no point do I regret voting in support of rule 8. I am really disappointed by some of the comments I'm seeing being used as support for de-federating though, some of those are just disgusting.

Overall, I'm in support of dropping the comms due to the blatant zionist posts that go on there.

Edit: formatting fuckup, and a whole word.

Just yesterday I had an odd interaction with an .ml user who reposted a straight-up nazi tweet, by a nazi profile, even with their own thread title resembling a frequent nazi dogwhistle. Several non-.ml users, apparently mostly from feddit, pointed out the post looks like it was posted by a nazi. .ml users responded in part by attacking their instance allegiance (calling them "whingy fedditers"). Since I posted enough clear evidence of the Twitter profile being a fascist, OP commendably deleted their thread.

What I saw there is feddit users being met with a hate boner from .ml and their correct suspicions of a tweet that looks antisemitic indeed being antisemitic being ignored and made light of.

That's my personal experience with feddit and its zionism, and consequently I've ended up suspicious of some of Lemmy users' standards regarding this whole matter.

The examples of feddit moderation posted here in OP are almost entirely sanctions against grave personal attacks. I am completely unconvinced that this is proof of the moderators' zionist positions. "Fuck you, you piece of trash" and "fuck you and your whole family" is not "a few hard truths". I'm also unsure if I get the context right, is mrdown a Palestinian? Many of those comments break the most elementary civility standards and verge into murderous fantasies.

Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu’s genocidal fascist regime.

Then say it like that? No, destroying a country is not the same as overthrowing its regime, those are different things. I support the latter with regards to Israel, but would hardly dare say the former.

This post was supposed to convince me feddit's behaviour is problematic. I come away with the opposite impression. So, I vote against the bans.

I agree the mods are using antisemitism as a bit of a blanket power for abuse, but this whole post just sounds like personal beef.

Their rules look reasonable and most of their mod logs look acceptable. Some of the removed comments are over the top hate.

I never see these posts in my feed but I would disagree with this ban.

With how big some of those communities are, blocking them is paramount to defederating from the instance itself in terms of losing access to posts unrelated to Israel or Zionism (a quarter of Lemmy monthly active users are subscribed to !europe@feddit.org).

Zionism should be spoken out against, but the repercussions of further Threadiverse fragmentation should also be considered. Just as troubling are extremist posts on lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear, but if their federation is maintained with the benefit of Threadiverse unity gained (with the user retaining the option of implementing their own blocks), then avoiding what amounts to partial defederation with another major instance should also be avoided.

My opinion is more or less that we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from big communities if their theme is not centered on endorsing crimes and if they’re not a community solely for whitewashing them / spreading disinfo.

I think a lot of German speaking users are people who have been exposed to only a narrow view of the world and that they can be valuable allies in the long run. Our instance has been relatively successful at bridging many gaps, I think it would be a shame to defederate entirely.

I’ve seen some questionable takes in places like YUROP but it’s no worse than a large enough .world thread or shjw thread.

My thoughts are unchanged since January. Strikes system for external users promoting imperialism (and the lebensrauming of me, I’m in Lebanon!) on our instance, a special text in German because of how prevalent this issue is among German people. And banning Zionists from signing up to the instance. I’m sure a fellow Arabic speaker could imagine a similar situation for antisemitism. It’s the socialism of fools after all. Surely concern trolling about women’s rights in Gaza is a sort of (subtly imperialist) feminism of fools?

I want the tent to be as big as possible. I want those who excuse these crimes to be exposed to as much common sense as possible. I don’t want them to feel like they have the mainstream opinion anymore.

I get why you are doing this, and while I can generally relate, this would shut off a huge portion of the fediverse from me. I am austrian and all german speaking and european communities are there. the loss would be significant. Lemmy already has a problem of a limited selection of topics and this would take one away,

Do Feddit users come here and harass communities to an intolerable degree with Zionism? If not, I am completely against defederation. It is fundamentally wrong and should only be considered as a last resort. And that is not the case here. Most Feddit users are just average people who probably don't even know what Zionism means. The same applies to blocking “only” the communities. If you don't like them, block or ignore them yourself. But don't dictate that to me.

I want the Fediverse to be as open as possible. But guys like you want to turn it into a walled garden. Isolated, small, and insignificant. Unfortunately, this seems to be an incurable tendency among left-wingers.

They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] "antisemitic" language, or they might get in trouble.

Just following orders like good obedient German citizens

They say they are just complying with German, Austrian, and Swiss laws. If criticising Israel is illegal under said laws, I'd rather just shut down feddit.org entirely than comply. If it were me.

I agree that these communities should be blocked, however I am much more in favor of defederating Feddit as a whole and not just banning these communities. This is because it is Feddit as a platform who enables this behavior, and who ultimately is suppressing anti-Zionist and antifascist voices, while making bad faith arguments to defend Zionism. Including threatening and ultimately defederating other instances for calling them out on it as well as their admins coming here to apologize for Zionism.

The problems with Feddit run much deeper than a few communities being run by Zionist apologists. They run as deep as the management of the site itself. So blocking these communities isn't enough. I believe more will spring up in the future, not necessarily to replace them but because their userbase is predominantly Zionists or Zionist apologists.

They are bad news, we don't need them, and they clearly don't want us. Their admin agreeing with a known Zionist troll and implying we wish to cause harm to Israeli citizens just further proves this:

Feddit is bad news, more than just a few communities there, if they don't do serious work to change we shouldn't be connected with them. If anyone here really wants to be a part of Feddit that badly, you can make an account there or a server that federates with it, likewise with any feddit user who wishes to be on dbzer0.

Sure, ban those communities. But, out of curiosity, what does an instance wide community ban achieves that my own block list cannot? I already have a sizeable feddit.org presence on said list, so I doubt I would personally see any difference.

Not a big fan of instance banning though, unless there's serious evidence of wrongdoing on our instance from their users. I'm not a wallflower that needs protecting from opinions, I can make my own mind and choose what to read and what to engage with. See: personal blocklist.

I think this will raise the chances of an echo chamber happening here, and I have not seen the Zionism that you are claiming it is be as widespread as you are claiming to be. I oppose until you can convince me otherwise.

Shore up the yardarms, me hearties. We need to rid ourselves of a few fascists.

If feddit.org is harboring these ass-bags, then they're part of the problem. The issue I see with only banning the communities from showing here is that the users within those communities don't likely know they've been censured.

Playing devil's advocate for my own stance, I should say that the "right" thing to do would be to give them enough rope to hang themselves from the yardarm themselves. In other words, if they're feddit.org user and start spouting Zionist shit on db0, then they're probably someone that should be outright disallowed.

At the risk of being banned this instance is starting to get annoying with the amount of political keyboard warrioring posts. I thought this was supposed to be a pro piracy anarchist community.

For self proclaimed anarchists there sure is a lot of desire to censor and dictate what opinions everyone is allowed to see.

For fucks sake if you are that bothered by a handful of users just block those individuals. Not all of us have a panic attack when we see an idiot spouting nonsense we don't agree with.

id rather get into arguments with zionists than stick my head in the sand and hope they change on their own.

Zionism is just a fucked way of thinking. Nothing gives you more right to a home than someone else.

I never see pro-Zio stuff on c/buyfromeu. I don't interact much with feddit anyway, but I'm really not sure about this one.

No. I have issues with how this is approached and communicated primarily, and if those are addressed maybe there is enough information to support. I'll try to keep it brief:

1. There isn't really any indication about what we hope to achieve with the community bans. What concrete improvements do we hope for and are we taking any steps to see if they are achieved? It reads to me like a LOT of words explaining why they are utter shit (no disagreement), but then doesn't connect any further dots, seems to just imply "so clearly our users should not see those" or something.

2. Frankly it's unclear to me why I see largely Flatworm proposing these lately, and little POV from the wider admin and mod team. It's no shade to you Flat, I like the cut of your jib. But this is an anarchist instance, if we are proposing rules that impact all our users, I need to start seeing a lot more broad weigh-in from the other people doing the work to keep this place running.

Now for both of these there are charitable interpretations for why I'm not seeing what I think I should. But I'm not willing to guess on that and shouldn't have to. This is frankly a totally insufficient basis, as written, for governance action. As written, I say absolutely not.

Leave my feed and default interactions alone please unless we are going to see better and wider justification.

Pro complete defederation. Same reason instances don't federate with Nazi instances. Nazism and Zionism are both just different forms of fascism.

NZS FCK OFF

ZIOS FCK OFF

Unsure if I'm allowed to participate here, so delete please if inappropriate.

I have always been of the impression that banning single accounts reactively to what they post is more work but also more impactful in terms of teaching people to view a problematic world view with the required precision in choosing to express their views.

On the one hand a blanket ban decreases engagement and encourages radicalization through isolation.

On the other hand would engaging with them allow people to see what precisely is a balanced take with precision to what you want to say.

You showed evidence from the modlog that exists only because people were able to engage, stopping that would reduce workload for mods but reduce engagement in political discussion.

Lastly, in this lost you went and made a more precisee statement about who needs fighting in Israel, which was encouraged by the modlog morsels. So again I ask: is that not useful? It teaches to avoid overgeneralization, which a lot of people need very much to learn.

Our German politicians for example. they, like most of our populace, react reflexively negative to anything anti Semitic. Because of our shared cultural shame around the genocide. On the other hand we see ideally politicians acting line we did back then and feel as uneasy as you do. So we do what Germans to, we find a more precise way to express what we see. Overgeneralization of redderic against Jews is bad, specification of anti Israeli genocide sentiment good.

I think it would be in the interest of your cause not to blanket ban and instead add another well balanced volunteer mod to your ranks. :)

Yeah ditch em. No space for folks like that.

I am not a member of your server, but I think it's amongst the top 4 best servers on the threadiverse. I have a great deal of respect for your server and the communities that have come to be on it. I would advise that when dealing with a -----bar on the fediverse, be that a nazi-bar, a zionist-bar, or any other kind of authoritarian-bar, the smaller concern isn't if there's things on it your users will miss (with the threadiverse, those things are communities) and the bigger concern is how the problem figures that have coagulated in that bar act and behave when they engage with the things originating on your server. I commend the desire to do this gracefully, but if you're going to limit yourselves to blocking communities (which will ultimately limit your own users more than feddit.org's users, though I'm not sure your users will be bothered or that their users will notice), I think you ABSOLUTELY MUST plan a period of time to revisit this. I'd probably say 1 month. If next month you feel that what you're seeing on your server is improved in the way you want it to, then leave it be, and if not then de-federate.

Otherwise, I would recommend immediate defederation if this is a recurring problem. These fediverse servers all act as garden parties. Blocking communities at other garden parties is less effective at combating bad behavior than not letting people through the gate in your garden. If this path is followed, I'd recommend maintaining channels of communication between the admins of both instances for 6 months to see if and how things change.

Again. I am not a member here. More of an outside observer with a ton of respect with a little bit of input after years of being in online spaces and having very little tolerance for bad faith behavior. You can take or reject these observations depending on how you align with them. Hell, I may even be full of shit. But one of us leftists' greatest weaknesses and greatest strength is our tolerance. The strength is in that it helps us build coalitions and confront our own biases. The weakness is that bad faith actors exploit this to string us along and keep making our spaces worse on purpose, so I tend to support a relatively strict federation/defederation policy and to let users find the admin teams that align best to their own desired defederation policy.

Ban 'em. If they want to host literal genocide enabling content. Its undeniable at this point and if you are still supporting Israel you can join them in Cocitus.

Feddit

A little on the nose...

Hope you guys cut em loose.

Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the ~~Middle East~~ world

Defed them entirely, we don’t need to allow a ZioNazi bar here.

Ban anyone trying to foster a purely pro Zionist point of view