Catpocalypse

Here is something important that I learned about discussions/arguments/debates though.

If you are presented with (real, verifiable) facts that conflict with what you hold to be true, will you change your stance? Does your stance change and grow as new facts are acquired or does your view stay stagnant?

If the person you are speaking with will not or does not agree to this basic idea, then there is no amount of productive debate to be had and you are generally only wasting your time.

If someone comes in with scientific papers and the other with think tank articles, these two things are not the same.

It's chess with pigeons.

18 minute old account using the same language as used in the exploding-heads crosspost for "soft defederation". Not a good faith account, most likely.

Most likely.

I would like to think an account like that would violate our server rules and face a ban.

But the content is being pushed in my feeds, they are making posts (from what I can see) to our community (including a recent one about options for not defederating, iirc), and we have obvious examples in this thread of bad faith behavior.

I've clocked at least one new sh.itjust.works account with only only activity in this post, which makes it suspect to me.

This thread is going much like the others the longer it goes on.

From a newly created exploding-heads account.

For perspective, you joined two days ago and your only comments are on this post.

I continue to vote for defederation.

Having looked at the instance in question myself and participated in the various conversations regarding defederation for them, I can see no valuable reason to keep federation at this point.

As late as yesterday I came across (and blocked) in my feed an account with a name from exploding-heads of ihate(trans_slur) that made its anti-trans purpose on their server clear. I would be glad to privately provide the screenshot of the account in question on request as I do not want to boost visibility or post hateful content myself.

There will always be ideas I personally do not agree with, that's fine. But it seems that this conversation around this one single instance has caused much trolling, many bad faith arguments, and has been at general odds at what I perceive the server is trying to accomplish.

The new information regarding botswarming is something I was not aware of until this post. I was monitoring the general posts regarding that type of content and supporting removal of bot instances, and that does add another layer to why defederation should be considered for this instance.

I should clarify, it wasn't the beehaw defed. It was the notification that our defederation was being discussed elsewhere, the Donald community was closed, and users were banned, which did not occur with the beehaw defed.

At the time of that ban, this user came, with similar though less antagonistic talking points, replying in the same thread as their only activity as a registered user, and has since deleted their comments in that thread.

It is possible it's in good faith, though given the above experience, I find it less likely.

No, that's on me for not closely looking at who I was replying to in thread.

Edit: I should not be multitasking, it's not my thing

It started with a discussion on sh.itjustworks, but due to the open nature of federation, anyone can wander in to the discussion, as you can see with input from users outside our instance.

There was some confusion, some trolling, but I think if as a user you weren't really active in our Main or Agora communities it may not have been something you would have been aware of, if that makes sense.

Honestly in my experience, most (I'd say as close to all as you can get) of sh.itjustworks users are really just here to chill and make an awesome experience.

Genuine apologies, as that's not my intent.

We've had what has seemed (to me) an influx of just really bad faith and downright trolling type stuff going down recently and it's perhaps colored my take on things more than I realized, and it probably has for others as well.

We really did just come here for the chill vibe, read the thing, and were like "yeah, this works for me."

Other things may get added to that block list in the future, yes. I pointed you to the Agora because you may not, as a new user, be aware of it, as the Dude set it up as the place where these kinds of decisions will most likely be made in the future and where community discussions tend to be focused.

However, as a Canadian based instance, they have different laws on what does and doesn't put them at risk, so there are times where those calls may be his and his to make alone (which is why there are two where there was only one on the list of defederated).

I was definitely of the check the comments to see if the article was worth the click mentality. Too much clickbait and spam to bother otherwise.

However, one thing I'm hesitant to do here is start the conversation when it's just an article with no comment or commentary given. I tend to just read and move on.

It's like "oh, that's interesting," and then I'm on to the next thing.

I want the stories from this campaign please!