Dbzero Governance Vote Post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63525728
Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. …
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again. …
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that’s the better option, then we’ll do that instead.
In the end the Post had around 70% of support by dbzer0 users, who in the comments also called for defederation.
Here is a Link to Dbzer0 instances tab https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/instances where if you go to blocked instances you can see fedddit.org is now defederated
i dont think feddit has made a post now, but when they do i will add it
I’ve noticed this too and have been following the conversation. However, I think self-isolation isn’t the answer. Allowing r/The_Donald to go private didn’t stop the far right.
What works is challenging these people, constantly. Mockery, abuse, whatever it takes. But building up echo-chambers, or allowing echo-chambers isn’t the solution.
Feddit.org bans criticism of Israel. There is no point in a Zionist instance which does not allow debate on its own turf.
We tried they still defending the terrorist statr of Israel. It’s like debating neonazis it is useless
its not really an echo chamber, lemmy unlike reddit is decentralised, so nothing is stopping a dbzero user from just making an account on feddit.org and interacting with them, in reddit if the admins decide to ban a community that community is just gone.
also having an echochambers isnt bad, like an instance like blahaj should be allowed to exist and not federate with instances that have a lax policy on transphobia, and thanks to lemmy’s decentralised nature you can join or make an instance that does have wide federation
Just because lemmy is decentralized doesn’t mean it doesn’t for echochambers. I mean look at ml. Or look at what squid did as a moderator to worldnews and political memes.
Echo chambers are absolutely a thing on lemmy. They exist at different scales (instance, sub, individual) but they absolutely exist.
You mean the place constantly flooded by disagreeing liberals? Let’s be honest here; by “echo chamber” you just mean “place where my ideology isn’t the default”
The idealist, liberal myth of the “marketplace of ideas,” in the face of domestic and Israeli fascism.
Socialists—and in particular antifascists & Marxists—understand the paradox of tolerance.
Antifa: the Anti-fascist Handbook
You can’t change the mind of someone you don’t have access to.
Does no one here understand the younger generations access to ideas? I think the idea that every one claims of creating echo chambers is not an effective one. The law of diminishing returns (as a business term) states that all else held equal an increase in production( or the free debate or posting of opinions) will not produce more profit after a certain point ( or the changing of others opinions) . When it comes to people posting and espousing for state sponsored genocide I think we have hit the top of that curve. If you stop the flow of that information you are not creating echo chambers but more effectively stopping the spread of bullshit and hate. They have Xhitter. Fucking ban this genocidal shit every chance you get, either foundationally or personally. I dont get a whiff of this on shitjust works because I dont engage with it.
Feels an awful lot like “won’t somebody think of the children?”
All that means is you’ve closed your eyes to the world around you. It doesn’t mean that the world has changed. Avoidance doesn’t help. It actually makes things worse because you cede the moral and intellectual territory.
Alternatively, you can actually take the fight to people instead of hiding from problems. And as far as what the younger generation sees, if you aren’t providing arguments against fascism, against zionism, who is going to win that mind?
No one is hiding from problems, but flowers do not grow in a battlefield. They’re trampled. You need to have safe retreat, a place to teach, cultivate and grow. Inclusion means ensuring safe harbor through the exclusion of bad actors. I’m here now in the trench, but I do not have to live in the trench. Don’t you get that? I have a place to return to, a place to regroup, discuss, laugh, be marry in dark times. What you’re advocating for is a horizonless battlefield, with no end in sight. An endless sea of torment and combat with no safe harbor. And for what? “The market place of ideas’”? What a joke. What a dated and dead concept.
– Michael Parenti
This idea applies to these modes of communication as well. The ideological expression of an instance is at it’s core the ideological view of it’s administration in the abstract. There is no equal footing. Zionist instances will ban you on Zionist grounds. Creating an “inclusive” space for Zionists and their cohort. You can not “win” a debate in their realm as they always have the administration on their side.
The same is true for db0. This motion is simply the negation of the contradiction between wanting to maintain an inclusive and welcoming space for Palestinians, anti-zionists of all stripes, Muslim and Arab peoples; and the open federation model of activitypub.
The people who want to get into the trenches will. For those who don’t, db0 is finally a safe harbor for those listed above. Free from having their identities, their lives, their humanity debated for the sake of the free market of ideas.
Man you really beat the fuck out of that strawman.
Go back to Reddit
Where’s your free market place of ideas now? Out of stock? Bankrupt? Need to be bailed out? Pathetic.
This user is suspected to have relations to Russo-Chinese state media and Marxist sympathies, please report any suspicious behavior to https://cia.gov/
Bruh is so desperate for me to say something I didn’t. Bruh go find one of your op friends to fight with.
Its not won’t somebody think of the children… Its get this shit out of their face. Block it. Thats the beauty of the fediverse.
The initial point was that younger generations feed off engagements. You block the conversation and it doesn’t exist. Its not a matter of closing your eyes to the world. Its closing the gates to the exact statement I made. Does no one understand how the younger generation get the information? Engagement. Was the answer. Failure to allow a platform will stop the spread of the misinformation in the first place.
‘Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference’.
Yeah. Is what it is. I don’t think feddit is some kind of zionist propaganda machine, although its clear that it hosts plenty of zionists. I’d rather berate, abuse, mock, and contest them in the comments. I have enough respect for the youth to trust their judgement.
The mods would ban you if you did that
People love to criticize the marketplace of ideas and sure it’s imperfect… but what’s he alternative? Covering your ears and going lalalalala is even less effective than persuasion.
Some of the options can’t be discussed on lemmy.world because of rule 1.
I’m sad at how selectively they use that rule
deleted by creator
Did you know that it’s illegal for you to say,
“I want to kill the president of the United States of America?”
Well I don’t think that’s very effective either but if we can’t have a discussion then we’ll just have to disagree.
It’s worked before. If only we’d had more premature antifascists, we might have nipped it in the bud before it enveloped most of Europe and China.
What worked was the might of a multiple empires waging total war against one another. I don’t think any Lemmings have that power at their disposal.
Of course this only worked after tens of millions of deaths, so it wasn’t exactly the ideal solution even then.
Idk if it’s building echo chambers in this case or just wanting to get away from a toxic admin.
See the comments and actively of them before the vote and then as it was happening
Plenty have alleged that db0 admins are toxic. I don’t think that but plenty have. See the ptb sub.
People throw around all kinds of slanderous language all the time: it’s the internet, our account is hyperbole. It’s fine.
The bigger issue that I see here is the cultural tendency to not want your viewpoint challenged, and that’s coming from both sides on this one. It’s also an issue on ml and hexbear; and those instances will throw the same accusations right back in the face of the broader fediverse, and not be wrong.
Every defederation hurts the fediverse, and substantially. The issues that came up in 23’ between .world and .ml, things like that destroy these kinds of projects. Defederation also doesn’t change the minds of those who are on feddit, and for the db0, and versus vice. If you think someone is wrong, you should tell them so, and you need to be able to tell them.
I think it’s the wrong move. I think defederation is always the wrong move. It’s more important to fight about important things than it is to be comfortable right now. If db0 users think reddit is a bunch of fascist Zionists, then get into the comments and call them out. Don’t just let them comfortably be Zionists while you ignore the problem. And the same applies to feddit. If they’ve got the right of it, take the fight and defend your points.
But defederation is a lazy and community damaging move, not just to db0, but to the entire project. Defederation is how Lemmy dies.
No. Having instances with varying approaches to defederation is good for the fediverse. Having no defederation is how you end up with nostr.
Hard disagree, and thats thoroughly evidenced by the usership and engagement numbers.
The numbers of fediverse users have more to do with onboarding, VC funding for marketing and the inherent nature of federation itself than it has to do with defederation policies
Social networks thrive because they are networks. De-federation collapses the network. Its not more complicated than that.
Less content, less interactions, less engagement.
It is more complicated than that. Vulnerable minorities don’t thrive in spaces where they’re endlessly playing whack a mole with bigots and trolls.
I didn’t leave Twitter for the fediverse because of its network. I left even before Musk, because Twitter was full of hate that the admins didn’t feel the need to action.
Your preference is just that… And as long as there is room for your preference on the fediverse without it being the only way to experience it, we can both have the experiences we want.
how do you explain hexbear’s growth?
If my instance didn’t defederate hexbear I wouldn’t be on the fediverse at all.
What makes it different from just blocking the instance at user-level?
Defederating also blocks the users. Instance blocking at the user level just blocks the communities, you have to block each user individually.
It makes it so I don’t have to individually block the myriad trolls that emanate from that cesspool. I was seriously a couple pig shit images from never opening this site again.
it is important for people to be able to build spaces that provide community for people who have perfectly legitimate reasons for not wanting certain things around.
unfortunately providing that functionality inherently provides the functionality to create echo chambers for arbitrary reasons
you cannot have one without the other and I’d rather have both than neither
I think defederation only really makes sense if there is a concern of botting. Individual bad actors should be banned on a case by case basis, blanket banning seems shortsighted. However, I do believe there are bots on some instances now, compared to say a year ago where I believe they were more far and few between.
Part of my issue is also with bad actors “flooding the zone”. If enough noise is getting pushed constantly by bad actors/bots, it can sway public opinion just by virtue of people seeing those opinions more often. This was one of the things that killed Reddit for me, personally. Well that and a slew of other issues.
This is what I agree with. Regardless, I think almost the entire thread would agree that the fediverse/ lemmy is not fully cooked when it comes to the issue of federation.
Building an echo chamber isn’t something done intentionally. Well… Sometimes it is.
It’s most often created by avoiding people you find annoying, toxic, etc. As long as you keep up that reasoning you eventually only interact with people who mostly agree with you. You’re blinding yourself to counter opinions. The definition of an echo chamber.
This is only the case if you’re annoyed by people disagreeing with you. That’s what makes echo chambers.
You’re right, we should continue listening to the opinions of fascists and Lolita Express passengers until the end of time, otherwise we’ll be blindly bumping into furniture in our echo chamber.
I think you misread my comment. I agree that we shouldn’t let the fascists speak. I’m arguing against the comment above that says blocking fascists is a slippery slope to blocking everyone.
Oh my bad
First: your comment appears to be a reply to them not me. I think that’s where the confusion came from.
Second: You seem to be conflating listening to ideas with supporting them.
Third: Blocking places with bad ideas doesn’t silence the people there or eliminate their ideas. It contributes to their isolation and echo chamber. Often more then yours. You in fact end up helping make them worse. Which of course is worse for everyone.
We’ve already heard more than enough Zionist & fascist ideas.
This echo chamber obsession is silly.
Online discourse isn’t going to defeat fascism. Fascism isn’t an ideology. It’s capitalist crisis management. It’s capitalism in decay.
Once more let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt – it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
— Tommy Douglas
When avoiding ideas or being challenged yes. When avoiding abuse no
The former often feels like the later.
Even more so when you’re not used to it.
I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say “what works is challenging people” if the people you want to challenge have an “ignore” button for when you get too loud for their taste.
I mean it is. Look at .ml versus . world versus say… hexbear.
Banning, defederation,anything to de-voice people: it’s constantly being used to create local echo chambers. And it’s not like we don’t have a down vote button. We have a way to do “no” to content. But banning or defederation is saying “I don’t think you should be able to form an opinion on this content”. It’s very different.
I’ve been banned from communities merely for downvoting posts in them. Such behavior is toxic (on the part of the community’s mods, not me), but that doesn’t stop it from happening.
💯 . As a project we’ve got some governance things to figure out.
What’s toxic is downvoting everything in a community you don’t like instead of curating your feed. It’s vote spam.
Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.
ah gotcha. Now I understand.
I agree in principal but not in part. I do think its possible to set up echo chambers in the fediverse, and while its not impossible to break out of them, its definitely not convenient.
I agree entirely that its a design/ conceptual issue. I’ve long argued that the fediverse in its current format is very clearly a “1.0” conception.