Hello everyfur <3!
For those of you unaware, Lemmy.World has a significant problem with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel admin team. As one of the largest instances, they have a lot of weight to throw around, and they are acting extremely unprofessionally and counter to the ideals of the Fediverse by defederating with AN/db0 - which are broadly very well behaved and active instances.
More details are available in the OP. You can check this summary by Stamets, or sort the comments by Top, and check the top comments for the receipts of this recent issue.
As a pretty active, long standing member of this instance, I am calling for and advocating for Pawb.Social to join this action in standing against power-hungry instance admins acting according to their personal whims and vendettas, by agreeing to join in by pledging to defederate with Lemmy.world if the admin team refuses to back down from this behavior.
I would like to suggest that this is put to some kind of vote/referendum of Pawb users to decide how to approach this issue.
Thank you for reading! :3
Original post follows, cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67858553
🏴☠️ Hoist the Black Flag: Pledge to Boycott Lemmy World!
… if Lemmy World dares to defederate from any ship in the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla - https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/, https://anarchist.nexus/, and https://quokk.au/.
Mateys, we can’t let a mega‑instance captain bully the rest of the fleet just because their ship’s bigger. If Lemmy World tries to throw the FAF overboard, we’re calling for a show of solidarity: a fediverse blockade of Lemmy World in response, until the landlubbers see reason (i.e., there is an acceptable change in their leadership and/or this policy).
This is about mutual aid, not mutiny - standing together so no single admin gets to rule the seas unchallenged. A united armada of smaller instances can absolutely blunt Lemmy World’s outsized influence (and, let’s be honest, their ego).
☠️ A word to the captains: before hoisting colours or locking in a course, we ask ye to let your crew have their say. Run a poll, open the deck for discussion, and listen to the voices aboard your vessel. These seas belong to all of us, and decisions that shape our fediverse should be made together, not from the captain’s quarters alone.
If other captains be keen to chart this course with us, drop anchor and make the pledge public in the comments. The more hands on deck, the harder it is to sink any one of us. Let us know if you are holding a vote!
dbzer0 and AN members can vote on this pledge in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and quokk.au will be holding their own vote.
🏴☠️ Solidarity forever, and fair winds to the Flotilla!
After discussing with the team internally (admins & mods), we’ve come to a few points:
tl;dr We call on Lemmy.World to be fully transparent and explain their actions to the whole community, and we’re setting more concrete policies for our own moderation actions going forward.
——
While we won’t be formally joining the boycott of Lemmy.World, for reasons I’ll go into in due course, we do call on them to be transparent with the community and act in good faith in regards to whom of their staff came to the decision, why they felt a non-directed comment is worthy of banishing an entire instance, and what they’ll be doing going forward to course correct.
Defederation should not be a bludgeon to be waved around. Individual users commentary (admin or not) should never be the sole, snap reason that an instance is defederated due to the potential for irreversible damage to federation (loss of posts, comments, users, etc.) and the subsequent impact on users.
There’s a way to handle problematic users who say things you don’t like, but they’re allowed to say: Block, and move on. Rash defederation instead demonstrates behavior akin to schoolyard bickering, not that of an admin, a custodian, operating a service for the good of their users.
If allegations are true, LW has some cleaning up to do with their moderation policies, especially not using abusive tactics to hide or manipulate the Mod Log.
On moderation policies, we have an internal document that explains our federation policies with other instances. We’ll be making this public in due course, but here’s a snippet from it that we’ve been using since Day 1:
We are an open-first instance, however in rare cases where an instance has been identified as being, indifferent to, permissive of, or actively encouraging abusive conduct, that instance will be blocked from federation.
At this time, while we have distain for how LW handled things and for their actions (if the allegations are true), we will not use defederation as a weapon as we believe it irresponsible and an avenue for subjective defederation actions in the future.
Also, if the subtext is not clear: It is childish behavior to wield your admin powers as a bludgeon, and to use your admin tools for a personal grudge instead of blocking an offending user. “Go kill yourself” or anything akin is not a reason to defederate an instance, that’s overkill and I’m fucking disappointed, but when anyone can become a “fediverse admin” that’s the shit situation we’re in.
How can we fix LW and large instances being a problem we have to even care about?
Move. Leave those instances. Make communities elsewhere. Be the change you want to see.
There are no rules to who or what communities can be made here, other than I won’t platform hate, harassment, or abuse of any kind.
I don’t quite see a point in this endeavor. Does the “Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla” as they call them, expect to be defederated by lemmy world? Are they trying to get defederated? The linked/crossposted post feels more like an overreaction and panicking to me.
As for the accusations of lemmy world admins supporting genocide, I don’t quite see that. While I agree that an admin should not act entirely on their own and just defederate an instance without talking about it with other admins, a person who calls themselves “kill all [x]” does sound dangerous. Wishing murder to anyone is not quite conforming to lemmy world rules … or most social standards.
It seems to me that this pact might just be a childish ploy to try and destroy the lemmy world instance. They just get a bunch of instances to join, then provoke a conflict with lemmy world, everyone defederates and lemmy world most likely will be fine while everyone else in the pact will isolate themselves further.
But maybe I simply don’t know enough of the history of lemmy world mod actions. I do trust this instance and the decisions of the pawb social admin team. And I do not condone what Israel is doing in the middle east and I do think db0 is an important instance but I’d still be careful with unnecessary pacts. Someone wants to instill fear here, don’t let that influence you.
The promise of the fediverse is that no single entity can have control of the ecosystem. That if an instance goes rogue, or is bought by a nazi billionaire, or is otherwise Evil™, then we can just leave it behind.
This has yet to be tested in practice. If there is an instance that is “too big to fail”, then we’re not really in better shape than if we were on a corporate platform.
Agreed - even putting the Zionism aside, it’s best for the health of the Fediverse to decentralize away from lemmy.world as far as possible anyways.
Lemmy.World has a significant problem with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel admin team.
Is there any actual evidence of this? I’ve read the posts regarding this topic and what I’ve seen is an admin defederating an instance over a admin called “Murder all Zionists”. I’ve personally not seen any actual evidence that they’re “pro-Zionist, pro-Israel”. I think you can definitely question how they handled this though. Seems like there poor communication from lemmy.world’s side. On the other hand, I’ve seen many of the .world communities I’m subscribed to being flooded by newly created troll accounts that spam accusations of zionism, so I’m not sure you can really say that the userbase of those instances is always “well-behaved”. At this point, and with the information I currently have, I’d vote to stay out of it and not participate in instance drama.
Is there any actual evidence of this?
Yeah, you can start with this, where the admin basically self-identifies as Zionist (this is a reference to the user who had the username “murder all zionists” or whatever):
There’s more screenshots and so on in this comment
They’re very cagey about openly identifying as zionist, and openly cracking down on anti-Zionism, because they know it’s a terrible look - so unfortunately it does require a bit of ‘reading between the lines’. What they primarily do is selective rules enforcement, where rules are very strictly and punitively enforced against anti-Zionist users, and pro-Zionist users get a lot more flex.
You can also take a look through the Lemmy.world modlog - again, sometimes they’re quite “crypto” about it, sometimes they delete stuff without putting it into the modlog, and regularly scrub the modlogs, as you can tell by the weird gaps in the dates, but often there are some traces:
There’s also this recent thread in the comic strips community, and this post: Lemmy.world Is Anti‑Humanity. How Its Admins Weaponized Defederation to Silence Palestine Solidarity
There are probably others out there who can fish out more evidence, if you’re still not convinced, there are probably a couple users I could reach out to and see what else we can dig up.
So what this shows me is that the .world admin and his organization have repeatedly been accused of being zionist (including, supposedly, being called a “zionazi” by the AN admin). So when the AN admin changed their name to “Murder all Zionists”, the admin took it as a threat against himself, as they consider him a zionist. I can see that - if a guy wearing a “kill all nazis” shirt was screaming at me that I’m a nazi, I’d probably feel threatened, despite not being a nazi.
It’s really not clear enough for me. I’m also pretty hesitant to follow the FAF’s narrative here due to how they previously treated feddit.org’s defederation. That instance simply followed local laws which they had to if they wanted to, y’know, continue to exist, as well as banning things like calls for violence. But the FAF treated them like rabid zionists. After that, I’m frankly not inclined to support them now.
I understand how you feel. We had similar issues back in the early 2010s when fascism was on the rise – fascists would often be very subtle and “hide their power level”, and accusers were made out to be overreacting or accusing people of being fascist without any evidence.
History has borne out that, yes, they were fascists, once there were enough of them, they stopped hiding it. This is the exact same pattern, once again.
If you want to believe that otherwise reasonable people are just accusing people of being zionists for no particularly good reason, and that we’re all just irrational, and that the lemmy.world admin team are just scrubbing their modlogs for no particular reason, by all means, that’s your prerogative I suppose.
Out of curiosity, do you believe that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza?
Out of curiosity, do you believe that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza?
Yes, they absolutely are.
OK, good! Was just checking out of an abundance of caution :3 <3
That instance simply followed local laws which they had to if they wanted to, y’know, continue to exist
Frankly, I would prefer instances to migrate to servers in a less fascist jurisdiction in that sort of case, rather than comply.
The laws in Germany and Austria (against questioning Israel’s right to exist etc) were actually created precisely because they stopped being fascist. That they can now be abused to silence criticism of a regime committing a genocide is a horrible bit of irony I suppose.
The fediverse foundation is an Austrian non-profit organization, who’s running feddit on their own servers. Just moving their entire operation to a different country is not really a practical suggestion, as I don’t think they have anywhere close to the funds they’d need to do that.
The laws in Germany and Austria (against questioning Israel’s right to exist etc) were actually created precisely because they stopped being fascist. That they can now be abused to silence criticism of a regime committing a genocide is a horrible bit of irony I suppose.
Yeah, that sort of thing is why the First Amendment in the US is (supposed to be) pretty damn close to absolute.
The fediverse foundation is an Austrian non-profit organization, who’s running feddit on their own servers. Just moving their entire operation to a different country is not really a practical suggestion, as I don’t think they have anywhere close to the funds they’d need to do that.
I’m more concerned with lemmy.world than I am with feddit.org, since (among other reasons) that’s where my account is. Although I don’t know much about lemmy.world’s funding or administration, I kinda expect that they’re getting enough donations that lack of money shouldn’t be an excuse not to move out of German jurisdiction. And even if they aren’t right now, I’m willing to bet if they created a funding campaign for that purpose they’d change pretty quick.
Anyway, I think it’s worth trying to get them to move so that they can relax the ToS. If nothing else, the response might help us figure out whether they’re “follow[ing] local laws” because they have to or because they want to.
