Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).
It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.
My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you’re not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.
I’ve linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325
Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.
https://lemmy.world/post/747912
https://lemmy.world/post/577526
Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.
Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.
TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.
EDIT: To clarify, this isn’t the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.
EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.
A counter-aegument to your point is that EH users are using other instances to recruit and radicalize for alt-right by linking back to their instance. By not defederating, we are complicit and condone this recruitment and radicalization. These groups do advocate for violence on the regular even if not every single post does. They use dog whistles and hide behind plausible deniability and “edgy” memes to do it.
The only to help stop their growth is to block their content.
They are analogous to pedophiles in that an isolated pedophile who is constantly reminded how wrong their desires are is much less likely to act on them. But given the opportunity to find others like them, they will group up and conspire to commit horrible atrocities.
The only way for a tolerant society to remain tolerant is to be intolerant of intolerance.
I sort… of see your point, but I can also say if you put me in a room of pedophiles, no amount of time spent in that room will turn me into a pedophile. I think the idea some people here are trying to express is that (and I’m going to change the analogy from pedo to antihomo) if you’re in a room of people who are against homosexuality, at the very least the ones who are such for superficial reasons outside of their own resolve can be snapped out of it. The ones who truly believe that their reasoning is sound will continue to be alone in that thought.
The very notion of having a popular platform be censored from bigotry is laughable. It will become corrupted, always. Maintaining free speech with productive conversation is no easy task, it actually requires a lot of hard work and a lot of maturity within the userbase, and because it’s so difficult to have some of these conversations, people want to completely chop it off. It’s understandable, but I just don’t like seeing people pretending to take the high ground here. Also, the fact that we cannot leave it to users to self-defederate is concerning and disrespectful to the userbase. Where does a community get the idea that it should choose what to redact from individual users, as though the users are too stupid to make that choice for themselves?
That doesn’t really work in this instance.
De-federation doesn’t remove them from their instance, it doesn’t remove their instance from the Fediverse, they are free to sit and talk to other people who share their ideas and, since they’re de-federated, they’re cut off from anybody who could possibly tell them that they have the wrong ideas.
There is nothing that you can do to make, for example, the EH instance not exist. De-federation doesn’t make them go away, it doesn’t prevent people from joining their instance, it simply blocks everyone on this instance from interacting with them. They’re still posting every day, still having bad ideas, still sharing bad content.
De-federation is just a block list that is enforced on everyone on the same instance. By asking for de-federation you’re not asking for your ability to block them (you already have that ability), you’re asking for the ability to force other people to block them.
You curate your own block list, and I’ll curate my own block list. De-federation doesn’t exist for you to apply your idea of a good filter to everybody else that shares an instance with you.