As a mod, what are the rules in regards to leftist/socialist communities and posts?

I’m a mod of !leftism, and the last resort preemptive defederation from hexbear has me concerned. As a mod, what are the specific rules that I need to know about to make sure our community fits the guidelines of LemmyWorld? We aren’t a huge community and there aren’t a huge number of posts every day, but I want to see this community grow and thrive. I can’t do that without knowing the guidelines hexbear violated to warrant defederation. We’re focused on left unity, so I need to know what we can’t allow.

fkn, (edited )

How does everyone miss the part that hexbear is intending to build bots that mass vote and troll other instances and their communities by exploiting the way federation works?

What the duck is wrong with people. They explicitly said they were building a bot network that couldn’t be blocked except through defederation… I feel like I’m taking crazy pills

Don’t make bots to break other instances and destroy their communities. Problem solved. You won’t get banned or defederated.

Edit: my source is the announcement post. Half of the linked comments for justification were about brigading and bots.

Edit2: it looks like most of the hexbear comments about brigading and bot building were deleted or made private. I don’t have the energy to go through their modlog.

honeynut,

Where did they mention building a bot network?

QuazarOmega,

Wasn’t that never actually followed through though?

amio,

Source?

bdonvr,

Hey could you link that?

epicspongee,

Please link a source. I haven’t been able to find anything about this.

Silverseren,

Is your instance promoting actively cultivating essentially a troll army to go and push pro-dictatorship propaganda across other instances and brigade threads?

If no, then you should be fine.

rockSlayer,

We don’t have an instance, I’m just a mod of a community here. I was scrolling through threads on hexbear last night for 3 hours and didn’t see any rulebreaking behavior.

solrize,

The hexbear thing was bizarre imho, and made me believe the federation concept is unworkable. There were even people saying to also defederate lemmygrad, which has federated with lemmyworld for apparently years while causing zero probs that I know of (I am new here though). I looked at lemmygrad out of curiosity when I got here, had a few lulz, and moved on. They have their own culture and in-jokes and it stays there, which is fine. Chapo Trap House (CTH) on Reddit was the same way from what I could tell, but Reddit banned it at the same time as the metastasized cesspit The Donald so it would look less partisan.

I think lemmmyworld is probably best seen as a mostly no politics instance. That can be ok I guess. It means though that your leftist community is probably better off on lemmy.ml or hexbear or whatever.

rockSlayer,

I don’t think it makes it unworkable, but I think it warrants a democratic process in this kind of decision making. We as a society should shift away from the mindset of “this is my ball, you just get to play with it” and embrace the idea that forming instances is a form of mutual aid (maybe that’s part of why I’m a mod there lol). I think hexbear culture might leak a bit, but I think you’re right that it will mostly stay there (also I personally I enjoy their style of humor).

As for moving the community, I would like for it to stay here. We aren’t big or active enough to get a migration to occur, and most of the alt instances already have a leftism community. If the admins want to pivot to strictly no politics, then fine I guess

solrize,

But an instance is someone’s ball the server, the domain name, the admin credentials, etc. We are guests here, including community mods. And the server admins as you say are volunteers. They shouldn’t have to put up with bullshit just to please us. So any topic community like politics that generates disagreement will be precarious.

Starting a new instance isn’t the answer because of siloing and network effects. So we need more of a peer to peer model than a federation of servers. Or anyway, put the federating onto the client side. I made another post about that earlier.

CaptObvious,

Isn’t federation already a form of peer-to-peer networking? And while I agree that clients need the ability to block entire instances, spinning up your own server is already a way to do that.

deweydecibel, (edited )

I don’t think it makes it unworkable, but I think it warrants a democratic process in this kind of decision making.

Without something to enforce that Democratic process, and with no incentive for instance hosts to commit to it, it’s unworkable.

The issue with the whole platform, from the get go, has always been that without a central authority to hold it together, each instance is inevitably going do whatever it wants. The technology for Lemmy does not inherently solve the social issue. Defederation, as a concept, is antithetical to the ideal of the fediverse. But it’s also necessary to keep it managed. As long as people can choose to, for any reason, they will use that tool.

I think a new solution needs to be proposed. Like…I don’t know, floating communities or something. Communities that are not tied to any instance. Or perhaps instances that only host communities, not users. Just spitballing, I have no idea what can be done.

The way it exists now is not going to save us from another Spez, it’s just giving us hundreds of mini-Spez’s.

ImaginaryFox,

Federation model works, since people can make their own instance where they set the rules or join an instance that is federated with the instances they want. Like kbin.social I think is federated with lemmygrad and bunch of other places.

I think people are just having trouble getting used to the idea of not needing one central site to deliver everything they want. Don't forget. These aren't corporate run websites running with the goal of monetization, but user run and cost them real world money that they are opening up to users to use for free.

There is some degree of entitlement that isn't necessary to begin with, since if people are that upset they can make their own or join a more networked fediverse instance.

the_itsb,

I’m a little hesitant to wade into these waters - I’ve not been around Lemmy long and know Lemmygrad only by reputation - but I was a r/CTH lurker/commenter before it got quarantined, during the quarantine, and right up until it got banned, and from what I remember, the kinda tankie stuff I’ve heard that Lemmygrad espouses (however jokingly/sincerely) would get the kind of real pushback on CTH that started slapfights and flamewars. Idk how strong the “those bastards killed Rosa” component is over at Lemmygrad or how effectively they counter tankie bs, mostly because I’m too old and busy to bother with things that don’t enrich my life (like arguing online). Consequently, I absolutely understand and sympathize with not wanting to waste whatever precious time someone might have left to live engaging with genocide denial and other authoritarian handwaving.

ada,
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

lemmygrad, which has federated with lemmyworld for apparently years

Lemmy world is a couple of months old :)

amio,

I think lemmmyworld is probably best seen as a mostly no politics instance

Really? Seems political as fuck to me - this whole place does. Whole thing is predominantly left-wing (minus the odd troll and "enlightened centrist") and in principle I agree with most of it - it does get fucking exhausting, though. Saddening, frustrating. And that's just the content itself, to say nothing about volume: a dozen instances on here, multiplied by a dozen or two explicitly or just practically political communities/mags per instance, and more appearing every day.

The sheer weight of all the politics and (admittedly justified) outrage started getting to me, and I started taking steps to filter it out for mental health reasons. Stewing in this much politics is frankly not good for anyone. Let alone US (and, somewhat, UK) politics. Let alone US politics for those of us who aren't American - and are therefore powerless to do anything about it, but for whom assorted idiocy over there still has very serious repercussions. (And is being eagerly mimicked by assorted wannabe-fascist twats over here, too - see, it's easy to get caught up in.)

So, filtering it out is the obvious solution, right? Unfortunately, that is not easy: in fact there's no good way of doing it at all, because mags end up on the front page even if they're ghost towns where only one guy/bot is posting. In other words, the front page has absolutely no notability requirements. (I'm on kbin if this is less of a problem on other instances/"frontends" or whatever.)

Even the one mag I saw with any kind of decent memes was offputtingly, angrily political half the time. And I'm not doing the "bOtH sIdEs" thing or similar shitheeling - it was mostly LGBTQ stuff, and they have every fucking right to be angry about a lot of things. I am too, for that matter. It's just the quantity, and negativity, and the difficulty in getting a tiny, little fucking break from it to look at some cats in boxes. Even on Reddit it's at least more feasible to block individual subs, because here one "sub" can correspond to several communities on several instances, all of which need to be individually blocked.

I'm jonesing for regex or tag-based community filters like a heroin addict, frankly. My only worry is that there'd only be ich_iel left and I'm not that steady in German.

deweydecibel,

I can’t speak for the admins but I feel like people are trying to turn this into an ideological thing when it’s really more about the fact hexbear is openly positioning itself as a sort of army with the purpose of going out and spreading onto other instances. Like, regardless of ideology, not wanting instances that are almost explicitly encouraging the brigading of other instances to be able to target yours isn’t the worst decision.

Now personally I feel preemptive defederation is wrong, full stop, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I can’t see it happening with that particular instance eventually. But that’s another issue.

I don’t think you need to do anything different than you were already doing.

rockSlayer,

I don’t want to get into it right now because it’s late for me, but from my perspective it very much appears like it’s along ideological lines. I have been scrolling through hexbear for the last couple hours trying to find other signs of bad behavior, and I haven’t seen anything that stands out. I figured scrolling through active posts would be a better indicator of what they’re like, and it’s mostly articles and leftist humor. Our community doesn’t have a lot of humor, but there is a lot of articles

the_itsb,

I almost commented this reply from my lemmy.world account, but I decided to switch to be commenting from my midwest.social account - an explicitly leftist server - to back up my assertion that I’ve not seen any indication that lemmy.world is anti-left with demonstration of the federation between the servers. Idk why the defederation happened, but I’m skeptical of the idea that it was simply the fact of their leftism.

rockSlayer,

I don’t want to speculate on their reasoning, but everything about it seems like it was reactionary to their statements about the IMF, NATO, and the World Bank. Those are pretty milquetoast leftist opinions. I don’t think that they’re actively trying to be anti-left yet, but signs are there and I want to make sure the leftism community isn’t breaking the same rules hexbear did

honeynut,

honestly it’s probably a minor part of the decision. IMO the admins on world just seem like they wanna have the final say on things and felt threatened by the potential influence of a larger instance. If hexbear were as small as lemmygrad or newer than world, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal for them.

rockSlayer,

You know what, that actually makes sense. Nothing else about the situation made sense other than “we’re anti-communist now”, so it was a pretty easy shark to jump. If there isn’t a rules update within the next couple weeks, I think this is the most likely reason they went with defederation.

kabe, (edited )
@kabe@lemmy.world avatar

from my perspective it very much appears like it’s along ideological lines.

I wouldn’t say so at all. The admins took action to defederate from the alt-right explodingheads.com instance because the content there broke the servers rules here, and they made a similar judgment with HexBear because of their apparent intention to brigade.

While the decision to defederate from HB was arguably premature, the admins here do at least seem more concerned with protecting their users than they are with deplatforming specific political stances.

rockSlayer,

From what I recall about the exploding-heads debacle, there was a lot of polls and hand-wringing before defederating. An actual last resort. I spent hours on hexbear last night, it seemed like they mostly shitpost in the comments. Nothing I saw indicated that they were going to brigade or harass people on LW.

kabe,
@kabe@lemmy.world avatar

Have you read the admin’s explanation post? They cited posts from HexBear admins which suggested they were intending to stir things up on other instances after federation.

Again, I don’t necessarily agree with the decision, but either way it seems to not be about political ideology as much as keeping out unpleasant behavior.

rockSlayer,

I saw them referring to a year old post about brigading Reddit which saw major pushback from the community, is that what you mean? Like I said in other comments, I was on HB for hours last night and didn’t see anything that stood out as a rules violation in LW.

Blamemeta,

The first time is always the hardest. After that, its easy, because theres precedent.

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