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!
What do pawb.social’s admins think of this? Both the proposal and the whole situation?
I’d love to hear what they have to say about it.
CC: @crashdoom@pawb.social @crashdoom@furry.engineer @southernwolf@pawb.social @Spitfire@pawb.social
Confirming we’ve seen this and are discussing internally with the whole team.
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.
Echos of Reddit shenanigans
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.
This is an outcome I’ve pondered on. Say a split happens, and the large number of lemmy.world users remain there. That community would still be large enough such that it could hypothetically be treated as a separate sector of lemmy, completely cut off from the other communities, but large enough to keep its own.
Only some instances will be able to bridge the gap of this, and tap into both pools (lemmy.world & everyone else) by playing the neutral game. Eventually, things will happen that can push those shared instances further to one side, eventually hostility from the opposition and support of the nearer side brings them together. And yet, the problem remains unsolved, the split still festers. Who knows though, maybe lemmy.world is entirely supplemented by new communities in this new space that’s formed, and leads to the bulk beating the powerful.
Dipping into political theory: In some ways, it almost seems to mirror a power struggle, I view it similar to the population vs powerful. Lemmy’s decentralization makes for a somewhat ‘anarchist’ technology, and this hypothetical seems to allure me, as it seems representative of real struggles a possible anarchist society could/would face when a group grows to be ‘too powerful’. The internet is not a mirror of real-world society, but I feel the comparison is hard to deny.
Edit that’s halfway relevant: Could someone point me to some guidelines, or policies, etc. about creating a community on this instance? I’ve had two on the mind that I dearly miss from Reddit, and consequentially haven’t felt I can share content that’d pertain to them.
Lemmy is already pretty split. The “Tankie Triad” (Lemmygrad, Hexbear and to a lesser extent .ml) are mostly isolated from the more “center” instances.
That is interestin’, it is. In retrospective, it makes a lotta sense that these groups would form and spat at one another. I had a massive cloud in the head about why X community seems to dislike Y instance, and yet Z community talks ill of X and Y, and it’s just a whole mess. I hadn’t considered that to be because of a split like this, as of yet.
Could someone point me to some guidelines, or policies, etc. about creating a community on this instance?
There’s not really any - you can just create whatever you want, and make the rules whatever you like. As long as the community follows the code of conduct it’ll probably be fine!
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.
Does the “Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla” as they call them, expect to be defederated by lemmy world?
Yes. The administrator who defederated the instance originally is currently pushing for both AN and db0 to be defederated from Lemmy.world, despite the fact that the AN user in question who had the inappropriate name has been removed from their admin position, citing “an odd feeling”.
This endeavor is advocating for pawb.social to pledge to defederate from lemmy.world if lemmy.world chooses to defederate AN and DB0 over this issue.
Hmmm, instances could also simply defederate in solidarity if lemmy world decides to defederate AN and db0 over this. There is no use pressuring lemmy world into a decision with a pledge if the admins are bad, they will just do more bad things another time. It would make more sense to me to wait and have a discussion about defederating lemmy world if this issue does escalate.
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.
I am in favour of this.
If one doesn’t have the energy to read the original stuff, it’s not a call to defederate. It’s a call to pledge to defederate unless World takes action and improves.
Further, a defederation, while drastic isn’t necessary permanent. Should they not improve and the fediverse ends up defederating, it’s not like we can’t federate again should they improve down the line.
I’m willing to put up with my feed going a little barren if it means things could improve
I don’t know if it would go more barren, honestly. There a lot of content on the fediverse, we’d just see different content take its place when World doesn’t drown it out.
I just checked my ‘All’ feed.
Out of 18 posts on the front page, 3 are from .world.
It might be noticeable, but it wouldn’t be a catastrophic loss.
I’ve been browsing New, Top 6 Hours since I got to the fediverse. Is it time to try active or does it still not change much and it’s the top LW threads for days?
PieFed combines together all cross-posts into a single view, plus the categories of communities combines many communities under a topic heading into one view. You might try out your sister instance PieFed.zip and see if you like it.
Lemmy.world used to have ~80% of all Threadiverse users. Nowadays they “only” have ~40%. Many communities have also, if not quite shifted, at least opened up alternatives on other instances - although the most popular ones do still remain there (so I doubt merely switching your sort to active would help). Though community discovery is really poor on Lemmy, yet as I mentioned above PieFed has outright solved that in several ways.
It is possible to achieve what you want on Lemmy, but it requires a great deal of effort, diligence, knowledge, continual upkeep, and most likely multiple accounts.
One easy thing you could do though is to start your browsing by showing only Local posts, then when you inevitably go through literally all of the new content in a handful of minutes, switch back to browsing All. That at least would help you prioritize your content differently though.
It’s genuinely such a shame, some of my favourite of the bigger communities are on that server. I really hope things can change
Yeah, I agree, or I hope we see a mass migration of users/communities to other instances. Most lemmy.world users are probably against this kind of thing too. It sucks that power tripping admins are ruining it for everyone.
Phew, went down quite a rabbit hole with that one, I did. I can say that I do appreciate that it’s not a “pledge to defederate when enough people pledge,” rather, it’s actually a “pledge to defederate if they attack a pledger.” Basically just beholding them to having acceptable behavior.
While I don’t feel I’m educated enough on the subject to specifically say yay or nay, I will say that pawb.social has my commitment, and I’ll back whatever option is chosen for, even if I lose the lemmy.world communities.
On a sidenote, I don’t know who owns the website join-lemmy.org, but it was invaluable to me learning my way around the lemmyverse, and how federation works. So if that does happen to be owned by lemmy.world, it would be worth considering. I don’t believe it does as of now though, since I couldn’t even find lemmy.world suggested as a “Consider this instance” after scrolling far, far down.
Thanks <3
On a sidenote, I don’t know who owns the website join-lemmy.org,
It’s operated by lemmy.ml, interestingly enough - lemmy.ml is the original Lemmy instance. But join-lemmy.org seems to be generally operated in a reasonably impartial way, at least so far.
This logo is awesome,I want it on a t-shirt Edit : fuck zionists ofc
While this has been on the horizon ever since LW admins showed maintaining a liberal echo-chamber was more important than the fediverse project by “pre-emptively defederating HB as a last resort”, I should point out LW itself is >50% of active users and then there’s Pifed. [https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list]
Maybe it would be better to start a campaign of growing leftist and non-political instances until defederating doesn’t mean cutting your users off from a majority of Lemmy users.
But if your users are OK with it and the alternative is exposing them to constant zionist apologia and everything else that cones with running a nazi bar, maybe you have a duty to defed in the name of maintaining a safe space for those users.
ever since LW admins showed maintaining a liberal echo-chamber was more important than the fediverse project by “pre-emptively defederating HB as a last resort”,
I mean, we’re also defederated from HB. That instance’s userbase behaved very poorly towards some pawb users.
Yeah, having a singular “biggest instance” that so many people use kinda defeats the purpose of federation anyway. Though, perhaps it’d be defederation that gets people to move anyway?
Maybe it would be better to start a campaign of growing leftist and non-political instances until defederating doesn’t mean cutting your users off from a majority of Lemmy users.
Yeah, I think we need to really start a push to decentralize away from LW, especially communities. I think most LW users are probably anti-Zionists relatively unaware of the admin team’s stances, and there are plenty of great folk and communities there, and it would be a shame to have to defederate with them, but yeah… there’s no point at all in having a Fediverse if there’s a single instance eclipsing all others, that’s just how we end up right back where we started on Reddit. The fediverse is at its’ best decentralized.
But we also need to be willing to take a stand and refuse to allow big instances to use their weight to bully smaller instances out, one at a time. That’s why this mutual defederation pledge seems like a strong option, it lets us stand together, at least a little bit.
I think most LW users are probably anti-Zionists relatively unaware of the admin team’s stances,
Or who are relatively aware, but have enough history with their account that they don’t want to start their reputation over from scratch unless it’s really necessary.
(Speaking of “relatively aware,” though, it still isn’t entirely clear to me to what extent the LW admins are driving the problem vs. Germany itself driving the problem and the admins feeling compelled to comply.)
Or who are relatively aware, but have enough history with their account that they don’t want to start their reputation over from scratch unless it’s really necessary.
Yeah, that too, which I do understand - but, honestly, the Fediverse would ultimately be in a much healthier place if users and communities decentralized away from lemmy.world even putting the zionism aside.
it still isn’t entirely clear to me to what extent the LW admins are driving the problem vs. Germany itself driving the problem and the admins feeling compelled to comply.
Personally, I feel like that’s just a convenient excuse. Anecdotally, I’ve seen anti-Zionist messaging suppressed that wouldn’t violate any German laws as far as I understand them. Personally, I very strongly believe that the LW admin team has a pretty strong pro-Zionist/pro-Israel bias, through my years of experience in the Fediverse (I’ve had other accounts older than this one) seeing the way they approach moderation and so on.
Their scrubbing of the modlogs is also highly suspicious to me.
but, honestly, the Fediverse would ultimately be in a much healthier place if users and communities decentralized away from lemmy.world even putting the zionism aside.
Was kinda hoping that would happen naturally via other instances growing to match it, rather than LW having to shrink.
Their scrubbing of the modlogs is also highly suspicious to me.
That’s the other part of the story I’m relatively unaware of: the modlogs are generally shitty and incomplete anyway just due to bugs (or bad design decisions) in Lemmy that have nothing to do with admin actions, so I’m not convinced they’re doing any deliberate manipulation of them.
For example, if you just remove a comment the comment text shows up in the modlog, but if you ban a user and check the box to remove the stuff the user posted that content is nuked and (AFAICT) doesn’t show up anywhere anymore. That’s not an admin thing; that’s something any mod can do and it’s easier than the alternative that would preserve the moderation history (i.e. manually removing each comment individually before banning the user).
Was kinda hoping that would happen naturally via other instances growing to match it, rather than LW having to shrink.
This basically can’t work, unless Lemmy gets an absolutely absurd amount of growth, just because of the numbers. According to fediverse observer, LW has 13.5k active users, whereas the next largest instance, sh.itjust.works, has only 2.3k. LW has around as many active users as the other ten largest instances combined. In order for those ten instances to catch up to LW, over 100,000 new active members would need to join the Fediverse and choose one of those ten instances, and new members are encouraged to join a semi-random instance, so in practice, it would most likely require far more than that. And again, this is ACTIVE users. LW has 13.5k active users, and a total of 192K users. So assuming that ratio holds, to gain 100,000 active users across those 10 instances, Lemmy would need to gain around 1.4 million users total. And this is assuming that none of these new users would go to lemmy.world.
I’m not convinced they’re doing any deliberate manipulation of them.
Again, I can personally attest to seeing things vanish from the modlogs. This is the problem, it’s really hard to independently prove. Even if I set up some sort of automated tool to download the modlogs regularly, you’d need to trust me that I wasn’t somehow interfering with the operation of that tool.
This basically can’t work, unless Lemmy gets an absolutely absurd amount of growth, just because of the numbers. According to fediverse observer, LW has 13.5k active users, whereas the next largest instance, sh.itjust.works, has only 2.3k. LW has around as many active users as the other ten largest instances combined. In order for those ten instances to catch up to LW, over 100,000 new active members… So assuming that ratio holds, to gain 100,000 active users across those 10 instances, Lemmy would need to gain around 1.4 million users total.
I mean, I joined in the first Reddit exodus three years ago, and I’ve been expecting and hoping that it was the beginning of a mass migration from Reddit to Lemmy in the same way that migrations have happened from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit in the past. From that perspective, 1.4 million users, or 100K active ones, is nothing. But whatever; that’s a different conversation.
Again, I can personally attest to seeing things vanish from the modlogs.
Wait a second, you’re saying you saw the modlogs change after-the-fact to remove information that was previously there? Holy shit, never mind what I wrote previously – that’s definitely fucked up!
(You say “again,” but I didn’t catch that aspect of the claim before. Sorry about that.)
You’re right that it’s both important and difficult to have proof, but I have no particular reason to disbelieve you, so for now I won’t.
Now I’m second-guessing myself… maybe I just experienced a bug, maybe I just saw a user get purged rather than their content deleted… I think what I’m going to do is maybe find some sort of way I can automatically download the modlog periodically and see if anything goes missing.
