I wish there were a way to block entire instances per user.

Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you're participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It's no different for disinformation campaigns.

It's not like they're just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they're taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it's very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.

I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn't mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.

I understand the reasoning but I think it's not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent. Exploding heads is just violent propaganda. I hope you defederate.

What about hexbear? Is programming.dev federated with them? Or are they intentionally defederated with everyone?

I am not a fan of reaching for defederation often; I actually came here from beehaw because I felt like they just pulled that trigger too fast and too frequently.

However, I do think that we should defederate from exploding-heads and hexbear. I don’t go looking for chances to be offended, but I do notice that when I see something truly distasteful on All it is almost exclusively from one of those two lately, and at this point removing them from All would make my lemmy experience just a bit more friendly.

It’s not even worth reporting content about them because when you do it seems like a common theme is that they just tag you so they can harass you. I tested this myself recently by reporting obvious misinformation/propaganda and the next time I logged in there were indeed items waiting in my inbox calling me a coward, etc.

Edit: fun fact, even if you block a user, and you block the community they are posting from, any time they mention you in a post you still get a message in your inbox, which seems like a pretty ridiculous oversight and a tool for harassment.

Here's the front page of exploding-heads.com. It has a picture of a trans person hanging themselves with slurs I censored with an emoji since it's probably against the rules to post here

There's a lot of disinformation and propaganda on it. They also used rammy.site to post exclusively harmful shit because it's unmoderated

The issue with purging them is it can devolve into whack a mole if more problem communities pop up (and they likely will considering the current communities are not being handled by the admins when things like drawings of people hanging themselves are posted) (Could also be whack a mole with instances but a community on an instance with 10 members can do a lot less than a community on an instance with 7k members)

The solution would be limiting the exploding heads instance so that posts don't show up but would still allow users there to participate in coding chats. Unfortunately though that functionality is not currently built into lemmy (and can't be coded into this instance for awhile) so the next best option is just defederating and users there having two accounts which would be the case on any other site

If we get more things coded into the site we can revisit what we decide later since we would have more options to manage it