Didn't want to further derail the exploding heads vote thread, so:
What are the criteria that should be applied when determining whether to defederate from an instance? And should there be a specific process to be followed, and what level of communication if any with the instance admins?
For context it may be useful to look at the history of the Fediblock tag in Mastodon, to see what sorts of stuff folks are dealing with historically in terms of both obvious and unremarkable bad actors (e.g., spam) and conflict over acceptability of types of speech and moderation standards.
(Not saying that folks need to embrace similar standards or practices, but it's useful to know what's been going on all this time, especially for folks who are new to the fediverse.)
For example:
- Presence of posts that violate this instance's "no bigotry" rule (Does it matter how prolific this type of content is on the target instance?)
- Instance rules that conflict with this instance's rules directly - if this instance blocks hate speech and the other instance explicitly allows it, for example.
- Admin non-response or unsatisfactory response to reported posts which violate community rules
- Not sure if there's a way in lemmy to track incoming/outgoing reports, but it would be useful for the community to have some idea here. NOT saying to expose the content of all reports, just an idea of volume.
- High volume of bad faith reports from the target instance on users here (e.g., if someone talks about racism here and a hostile instance reports it for "white genocide" or some other bs). This may seem obscure, but it's a real issue on Mastodon.
- Edited to add: Hosting communities whose stated purpose is to share content bigoted content
- Coordinating trolling, harassment, etc.
For reference, local rules:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
No Ads / Spamming.
No pornography.
That's a much more sensible approach to the question.
What were the criterias that lead to defederating from lemmygrad? That should give an idea of the reasoning that should be applied for other instances.
Disclaimer: I never checked any of their communities so I don't know how bad it is and I wasn't there early enough to see if they were brigading other instances.
I would probably be helpful for TheDude to give some additional context to what's going on at lemmygrad that led to the ban, I haven't been over there to check but tankie communities I've had the misfortune of interacting with tend to lean pretty heavily into conspiratorial content and definitely have streaks of homophobia/transphobia.
Yeah, I think basically people have a reasonable right to know if the site has a hard line on tankies and a soft line on fascists, because if so, it's a cryptofascist site IMO.
Like, I think absolute free speech maximalism is not a sustainable moderation principle, but even if I did, that's not we have here to begin with.
From what I understand the scale of then isn't the same and lemmygrad was already known for brigading so hopefully it's the only difference. I certainly hope it's not because they don't mind right wing BS and just want to censor left wing BS...
Yeah, I dunno at this point in terms of what the intentions are. But in terms of how this all looks to the outside on the nazi-bar-ification scale, it's not great. Give an inch and they'll take a mile, and failure to cut them off reads to them as tacit approval. The longer it goes on, the more attractive this instance looks to them, and the more likely it is that other instances that actually host content people want to see will choose to defederate this instance to stop the spread.