this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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sh.itjust.works Main Community

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Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.

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founded 1 year ago
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EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.

First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.

Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.

Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.

Now on to the meat:

I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn't follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.

When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn't take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.

It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.

Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don't fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn't seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.

Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?

Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.

tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Hi Nahvi.

Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.

Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I've since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.

One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.

That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn't be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the "be a good human" category.

I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey dude, thanks for dropping by.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate the direction you're trying to herd cats towards.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

@TheDude

Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you've struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.

I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I'll see if I can find it.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

I’m gonna park my car here for this.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (26 children)

When I first made an account on lemmy.ml, I looked over at the lemmygrad.ml "Introduce yourself" thread. Heavily upvoted hot comment was somebody saying "Joined up to troll and fight liberals! Gonna show those libtards how stupid they are" (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact words).

When I eventually moved here, I was happy to see it defederated already. Celebrating trolling and "fighting" people isn't something I want to see here.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.

Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don't have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren't, given how many instances have defederated them.

Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don't speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.

You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.

https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora

Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.

We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.

I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there's anything I left out.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I have nothing to add to the topic for you OP, but I have to underline the irony of seeing some anti-defederation people suddenly resorting to the same arguments they were previously waving away, and this in order to justify the blocking of lemmygrad 😂 (which I'm not trying to defend; them being blocked is one of my criteria for selecting an instance).

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be defederated. I will say they openly brigade. That is just my personal observation, and you shouldn’t trust a random comment without data to back it up. But maybe keep an eye out and you’ll see it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

lemmygrad.ml is generally defederated.

To explain it, remember r/thedonald?

lemmygrad.ml is the communist equivalent. (literally). Its an extremist group.

Edit- @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Please do explain your disagreement (downvote). Are you saying lemmygrd.ml is not an extremist group? Or are you defending them?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Dude. You're late to the party. This has already been posted about and discussed to death.

You don't have the background info to understand yet. Hang back a bit, read older posts. There are very good reasons that there are several instances that are damn near universally defederated.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

There is now @goat doing a "lemmygrad findings" collection here: [email protected] for anyone who is interested in those gems.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

federating with lemmygrad means opening your communities up to the same behaviour displayed there, such as active calls for political violence, suggesting users kill themselves, ableist slurs etc

having personal convictions against this sort of behaviour seems entirely reasonable

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you want to ask TheDude specifically there's no need to open a comment thread here, you can just PM him directly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

That makes sense and I probably should have considered it more, though I also thought it would be useful if the response was public. Since I went searching for it myself, I thought other new users might do the same.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"I want someone else to pay for hosting and maintaining an instance for me, to admin it and moderate its communities, but when they make a choice I disagree with that's not okay."

Well, good thing there's a way for you to stand up your own instance that you can federate or defederate whatever instances you want.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Thank you for literally putting words in my mouth, quotation marks and all.

If you had bothered to spend one minute reading the post, that I literally spend thirty minutes typing up, you would have noticed that the first sentence was to express appreciation for the time and money @TheDude on creating and maintaining this instance. At no point did I say he was wrong or even that I disagreed with his choice. I just asked for clarification on the matter.

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