this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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No decisions have been made and will not unilaterally make one. I am assuming discussion in good faith. If you are not vegan do not add your comments or vote.

Hello,

When we defederated lemmy.world I was not familiar with how to administrate or moderate a lemmy server. Since the defederation this instance has changed a lot. We now have an appointed leader in @[email protected] to serve as a level head and counterbalance to any unilateral decision making, we have more users, more community with our weekly threads and we have a better sense of an identity for Vegan Theory Club.

The original reason that I blocked lemmy.world is because I do not want to retransmit American fascist propaganda on a server that I host, this will not change. Any communities there that are in violation with our ethos will be blocked from the admin side to prevent caching, so this problem is solved for me. Additionally, we were being heavily downvoted on every thread so when people posted the votes started at -2 making the experience miserable in my opinion. We have since disabled downvotes and will not ever be re-enabling them.

While I do not agree with the politics of the admins and general community there, I also recognize that it is by far the largest lemmy instance with the most users regardless of their political leanings. There are likely many vegans and leftists who use the site who are unaware of other alternatives in the fediverse and I do want to reach them. Ideally to create an account on this instance and join our community here. Also the way defederation works is it creates a situation where we can't see or respond to the activity on threads that we post due to the split. They can still see our posts when they are on other instances communities but we can't see the users replies. Experience wise I think this is poor.

My same hesitations as sh.itjust.works (who revoked their "endorsement" of this instance that I never asked for lol) apply here, they host drama communities with the intent to harass users (tankiejerk), though honestly what really put me off from sh.itjust.works was a thread in NoCredibleDefense where people were supporting the use of chemical weapons against conscripts which is a hard pass from me and I can't believe people support this cruel and inhuman tactic for any reason. To be honest what I have seen from lemmy.world is less extreme in nature so I thought I would gauge the community and what they thought here.

Even though the last thread of this kind went poorly, I am hoping this time no one immediately posts it to a meta community and starts using alts to manipulate the thread. If I detect any of this behavior I will lock this thread immediately.

Please note: My thoughts and my opinions are my own and not representative of a community of friends.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I think the consensus is that we will not be refederating at this time. Thank you everyone for your feedback!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hestitantly I would suggest we try but the users do increase moderation burden massively.

They are completely unable to just move on, never read community local rules, and just generally fucking suck.

So if we do, I would like a sort of trial period where we evaluate after a couple of weeks whether it's worth it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Personally, I maintain my original position that lemmy.world is basically unsalvageable. When I briefly had a .world account there were a ton of users who were assholes to me for literally no reason (even on posts that had nothing to do with politics, veganism, or anything else). There are far too many users who treat it like another Reddit. It's sad that there might be some leftist vegans there who might not be aware of this place but in my opinion .world is just too big and too Reddit-like to be worth it.

At the end of the day though it's the admins' decisions and I will respect whichever one they make.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Those guys are really shady. They have crazy vote patterns on their own instance where other admins can't see the source of votes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At the end of the day though it’s the admins’ decisions

No way, we're coming to consensus together and we are in alignment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

In that case, I guess I'll vote no, simply because my experience with worlders hasn't been positive in the past.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I'm not from here so please delete if unwanted but I really like the posts from here and the only reason I don't have an account on here is because I see you all from hexbear.

That said, if I had an account, I would strongly vote against federating with reddit 2.0. Everytime I've posted something about being vegan or pro-vegan from my lemm.ee account there it got absolutely bombarded with bloodmouths trying to rationalize their corpse munching or drown vegan voices out with their own noise.

These people have 0 respect for other peoples spaces as they never had their own spaces threatened. By that I mean irl as well, these people think they can come and go as they please because that's how its always been for them. And they will act like they're at home here, starting all sort of asinine "debates".

If you actually want that, in the name of outreach or whatever that's completely fine and certainly a direction you can take. Other than that I don't know why you would want .worlders on your instance because looking at their instance I see nothing I would miss and quite a lot I wouldn't want on my feed.

Which I wouldn't see anyway because I don't have an account here so, again, this decision will have no direct impact for me, but I would be sad to see this istance closed down because the admins were overwhelmed and got burnt out.

Edit: or keep some communities local and federate only specific communities. That's how hexbear does it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thank you for your opinion, and I consider you a member of this community and value it. I mostly agree with your position but was wondering about how everyone thought about it.

I would also delete and ban any master-debaters. I have witnessed the white supremacy and anti-intellectualism coming from liberals who as soon as they came in contact with a Persian person who didn't exactly align with their values went to manipulation and fraud to get their way, but this is typical of liberals in general, brother Malcolm was right about them. Frankly I am not a "tankie" in the non derogatory sense that I understand the term and do not align 100% with them, that said IRL some of my real friends believe this and I respect them and their ideals and on this I am able to agree to disagree. I believe I have more in common with a "tankie" leftist than a liberal and am able to have a respectful conversation, not debate, with them. I want them to be able to enjoy this space along with my anarchist friends to talk about veganism, our personal experience being vegans, cooking vegan food and what this instance is actually about.

I do not really want to have local only communities (yet) because as a unity server I do want hexbears, dbzer0's and all the other varied instances to be able to participate but I was also frankly completely unaware of this option so I am glad you mentioned it.

Thank you for your feedback!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Aw thank you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is where I think I'm at too. My opinion probably doesn't have as much weight mostly because Hexbear is blocked server-wide by .world so we won't be as affected as the VTC users.

I think community-based blocking is a thing now so that could be an option but opening a vegan community back up to Omnis would probably require some extra moderation since brigading is bound to happen.

But also shitjustworks should be nuked from orbit. I don't and never have seen anything worthwhile come from that server. Just adult kids making themselves mad about things.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

sh.itjust.works is just terrible imo. It's basically the 4chan of the Fediverse from what I've seen.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is a hard problem isn't it. It would be good to reach the good people that simply join the popular servers, but it sounds like it could be opening a pandora's box of toxicity.

Would it be hard to undo if it goes badly?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think this is a good question!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's easy enough to defed and/or remove content.

What's harder to guage is if damage is done to communities in the medium term.

E.g. suppose there is federation for a few months, then it is undone due to say an increase in combative atmosphere. Nice people may have moved on, or blocked comms from feeds to avoid toxicity. Comms might have shifted to a more inflammatory dunk-centered culture and so on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

That's a really good point I hadn't considered.

I hate the idea that growth should be the goal for an instance. I don't think anyone is suggesting that, but it is a nice idea to be able to meet other new buds. It would suck to lose the chill vibes that have been cultivated here trying to do that tho.