Hexbear and Grad users defend genocidal regimes like Ruzzia and China. They excuse their crimes and argue in bad faith. I had so many insane discussions before I decided to block both of these instances entirely.

They are, by every single sense of the word, tankies.

Tankie is not just an oblivious term that has no meaning. It signifies a red fascist. It's like arguing that it's bad that we don't let neonazis in discussions. They do not care about discussing. All they want is to spread their disgusting ideas while hiding them behind leftism.

By defederating from these instances, we don't become less leftists. These people are not leftist.

This is not a slippery slope. It is a necessary step to ensure the growth of this website and actually worthwhile discussions.

I expect you need to look in the Lemmy.World moderation log to see to what degree lemmy.ml users were or were not problematic (I've no idea either way.)

I was harassed by them and insulted for not agreeing with them (mistakenly commented in one of their instances posts) and elsewhere and they kept saying certain people deserve to die (which I’d classify as hate speech).

When there’s so many that can bombard or overwhelm the rest of the discussion they should stick to their own echo chamber. I don’t see the same problem you do with defederating from them and am more likely to use the site more without their presence.

Edit: We also don’t know what the mods or admins are seeing and removing from them. I couldn’t even have a conversation without being overwhelmed and shouted out/insulted

Yes… agree with this take. I’m disappointed in the Lemmy World Admins for this move..

If Lemmy World is going to just defederate from instances where the opinions of users of one instance annoy the admins, then I will withdraw my monthly donation and go elsewhere.

Also, seems like there should be more of a process involved in defederation than a knee jerk post where the admins assure us it was a decision made with lots of deliberation. Despite that, it all feels very abrupt and top down and driven more by the admins’ personal geo-political opinions about recent events than other factors.

I discussed a lot with people at lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Because I really thought that these are people from a developing nation, which are fed russian and chinese propoganda all day and giving a second perspective benefits the discussion.

Ive never gotten death threats before. Now I got dozens. And not in private messages, but straight up as comment.

tl;dr of this ramble: ignore the paradox of tolerance!!!

give me a break. If you disagree with this, set up your own instance or find another, you're acting like you are now cut off from this instance and thus this entire instance will become an echo chamber because it doesn't tolerate intolerable content. If you actually cared, you'd look at the modlog, but instead you post an emotional reactionary response.

Very cool

I disagree with this defederation but it's how online political communities work unfortunately. Whatever views the most people generally agree with will become the most visible, that means milquetoast and agreeable "good" points of view will always dominate, ie centrist liberal stances. The communities also become over-paranoid of outside infiltrators, the idea that the space is in some way authentic and pure and needs to be protected.

Over time as things happen in the world and the acceptable view is established, more views become cleaved away until it just becomes an agreeable and boring comment section of people rewarding each other for also having the correct opinions on everything.

Finally a voice of actual moderate reason. Thanks for the well said contribution.

"Hate speech" will be abused because it's a fluid opinion. An echo chamber will emerge.

So... Admin = Bad?

Thank you for saying this. I'd never visited until the ban and probably won't again it's just not my scene. I spent about an hour browsing and saw lots of critique of Israel but never saw hate speech.

I'm disappointed lemmy.world admins consider justifiable criticism hate speech. Maybe I'm missing something but if there was true hate speech it was certainly a small minority and not the majority.

We are very much seeing the powers that be flexing a ton of influence right now.

Now I firmly and staunchly do not believe in any kind of dumb new world order or any crazy beliefs about Jewish people, but we are definitely witnessing a lot of very powerful people influencing this story towards a very pro Israel stance.

This is an objective statement.

There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.

Neither would I, I'm a Libertarian, so I have beliefs on both sides, and more importantly, I think for myself. But let's be real, what we wind up with isn't honest questions, or people honestly questioning why either side has a belief out of honest curiosity, it's hatred and trolling, and I don't mean "hatred" in the 2023 version, where it's everything you disagree with, I mean the actual definition of the word.

I't sad because nobody should have to put themselves in a like minded echo chamber, people should be able to interact with each other like adults, but again, it's 2023, and I fear that's not coming back.

I could not agree more. Not only are comments removed, and users banned way too easily, is the nuclear option, defederation, used perhaps a bit lightly too.

In my personal experience I much more enjoy the comment sections of the more open instances. Feels much more like the thing I enjoyed most about reddit.