My primary argument is that they post hateful content and covid conspiracies and it is irresponsible to platform this by including it in our federation. Secondly we already got rid of lemmygrad. Thirdly, there's little to be lost in the defederation given the type of stuff being posted over there. Do as thou wilt
Aye and nays pls
Edit: putting the screencaps I posted below here for clarity
I should probably put a content warning so
CW: homophobia, transphobia, and just being a shithead.
Edit 2: let's try not to downvote people just saying nay. Unless they are making bad faith arguments we should respect their opinions even if we disagree.
Edit 3: Imma be real with y'all, this has been a real shitshow. We gotta work out some kinda single voting infrastructure because the ayes and Nays isn't efficient at all.
The problem being that they don't want to be convinced, they just double down. Experts refuse to debate them for this reason and you want laymen to do it instead?
The little you'll manage to bring back to reality is insignificant compared to the number they'll convert by being allowed to take part in discussions.
I agree with you that the worst of the worst in that instance will do exactly as you say. I have no interest in arguing with them, and if I see them here I'll block them.
But I am interested in acting as a counter to their hate, by having our posts show up in their feeds. If we can show their regular users how to have civil discourse, and expose them to new topics, we can get some to question the narrative.
They can come to our instance, sure. They can take part in our communities. But then they have to play by our rules, or get banned. Remember, a community lives on one instance and is propagated throughout the fediverse. Once they're outside of their walled garden, they won't be seeing that constant drip of hate.
And if any of that instance's users are questioning what they've read there, they can come to us for an opposing view.
Defederation doesn't prevent them from subscribing to communities here and seeing what we're saying, it prevents local users from seeing what they post on their instance and on our instance. People who question what they see here can just subscribe here or on an instance we're still federated with and come ask questions in good faith, it will be way easier to manage than letting all of them take part.
But again, experts don't debate them, we can't expect people who have no special training to be the social workers these people need when they've reached the deeper end.
Again, I don't want to debate or discuss with any of the repeat offenders in the posts that @chalkman showed us. You are right, we won't be able to save them, only they can do that.
I don't believe that every user on that instance is as bad as those folks, and the only way to make sure they don't end up like that is to show them another way.
And would you take part in a community that you couldn't interact with? In my case, I haven't gone to interact with any communities in Beehaw because what's the point?
If you don't want to interact with anyone from that instance, then don't. We have the tools, and likely more are coming with future updates to Lemmy. But one thing we can't forget is that these are people. I just want them to see that we are too.
I think another point of view is we are not "convincing" the creators of this reprehensible content of anything.
We are, instead, posting opposing views which may expose persons who wind up down that rabbithole - on purpose or by misadventure - to a different way of viewing the world.
That Utopian concept said, "AYE."
People that won't fall down the rabbit hole in the first place if they're not exposed to these beliefs in the first place. They'll still see people with the opposing point of view though.