this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023

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@TheDude What is the Deal with Lemmygrad and Are You Going to Block Other Instances for Personal Reasons? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Nahvi@sh.itjust.works to c/main@sh.itjust.works

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EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.

First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.

Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.

Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.

Now on to the meat:

I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.

When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.

It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.

Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.

Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?

Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.

tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?

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[–] TheDude@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hi Nahvi.

Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.

Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I've since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.

One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.

That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn't be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the "be a good human" category.

I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.

[–] lol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech

That's great but please define hate speech and give us some examples.

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey dude, thanks for dropping by.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate the direction you're trying to herd cats towards.

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

@TheDude

Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you've struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.

I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.

[–] loaf@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

I’m gonna park my car here for this.

[–] nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Go look over lemmygrad.ml and decide on how much you want to argue with passionate communist and tankies everywhere. Lemmygrad.ml will brigade posts and comments on other instances they are allowed on to spread their beliefs and they are not interested in the same happening on their own instance.

[–] Shit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I'll see if I can find it.

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you. I would be interested to read it.

[–] Shit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think this is the thread https://sh.itjust.works/post/37624

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is quite the interesting thread. Especially that History of Lemmy link. Not sure what I expected but it wasn't that.

[–] Shit@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

To be fair I had the same feelings about it being defederated when I joined and went to check it out. The top post was pretty much talking about killing liberals. Tankies and fashys are pretty much the same rhetoric at the end of the day. They both have no place in civil liberal democratic society and poison everywhere given enough time.

[–] aspseka@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Bear in mind, that lemmygrad.ml is not lemmy.ml. The latter instance is run by the devs.

[–] ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be defederated. I will say they openly brigade. That is just my personal observation, and you shouldn’t trust a random comment without data to back it up. But maybe keep an eye out and you’ll see it.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FWIW, my original response here was 7/0 upvoted and then I checked a few minutes later and it was at 11/6. Certainly an unusual upvote pattern.

[–] ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep. I’m thats usually how it goes. Once of of them makes a comment or posts about a comment they don’t like they show up. And then the downvotes begin. They are openly narrative driven, and the way they “discuss” things comes off as digital warrior-esque. They’re here to for the showdown of their lives.

I actually wouldn’t mind their odd positions if they weren’t so hyper aggressive and unwilling to discuss facts. I’ve been banned from threads over there for pointing out that while I see their frustrations with western interventionism, it’s odd how they don’t seem to mind BRICs members also intervening in conflicts worldwide.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, its not their political positions, it's their behavior. I have absolutely no problem debating the merits of communism and capitalism. But they don't necessarily seem interested in debate, or really objectivity in general.

[–] carbon_based@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There is now @goat doing a "lemmygrad findings" collection here: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for anyone who is interested in those gems.

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know goat pushes some buttons (whether just due to being contrarian but earnest or actively trolling - I'm still kind of on the fence about that beyond 'they're kind of a dick'), but I've said this would be an interesting concept before, so it's neat to see it in practice.

Will reserve judgement until I see what's being curated, though.

[–] goat@sh.itjust.works -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what's your opinion now?

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Two thrusts to this: re: your community, haven't followed it too closely, but from what I did see it's mostly just shitting on tankies. That's fine I guess, though my thought was more sifting through the garbage and sharing posts of decent quality/worth seeing despite defederation or the larger tenor of the instance.

Re: you specifically - also haven't followed too closely (have reverted to lurking more in fewer communities - bad Cracks!), but maybe the binary I mentioned is a little too stark. From what I have seen, you're opinionated, maybe contrarian for its own sake sometimes, but apply it evenly. I saw you getting in people's faces over at EH too, and it looks like you don't care which side of any given divide you piss off - gotta respect that.

And moderating FoxNews? Obvious but legitimately hilarious bait, and I have to tip my hat. Edit: Though you might not anymore?

[–] goat@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

sorry, but moderating fox news? I'm a lil confused at that one

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Going off a vague memory at this point, but didn't you moderate/create a community somewhere called FoxNews that was news about foxes?

Recall when people were going at you this was brought up ("This fuckin' guy, he moderates FoxNews! Of course eye roll" kinda thing), though that may have been someone else. Apologies if misattributing.

[–] goat@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

nuhuh, wasnt me, that's a clever idea tho!

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml "Introduce yourself" thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying "Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are" (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact words).

When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and "fighting" people isn't something I want to see here.

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds like a good reason to block that idiot or maybe even that community from my own thread, but I would rather make my own choice as to when someone or a community is not acting in good faith. I don't need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.

On the other hand, blocking burggit so I don't have simulated CP showing up in my feed is not the kind of choice that I need clarification about.

[–] Lols@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t need someone with different values than my own trying to protect me from some words I might find offensive.

it seems like you have a fundamental issue with instances like sh.itjust.works and would be better off joining a different one, or even better making your own then

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.

Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don't have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren't, given how many instances have defederated them.

Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don't speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.

Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.

You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.

https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora

We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.

I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there's anything I left out.

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude's intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.

I really don't care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn't had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?

I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.

It's a single event. Anything else?

[–] Nahvi@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse's mouth.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

It's going to be hard for TheDude to run the server and also his real life if he constantly needs to be addressing hypothetical questions from users who joined within the past 24 hours.

That's why I'm here.