I love this story, thanks for sharing it.

Yeah I’m finding beehaw a great, very active community. They’re doing something right.

I’m glad people have correctly realized that the French should be associated with violent anti government riots and not surrendering. That was a meme that needed to die.

It’s not much better in other places. Lots of us rely on being “better than the us” so as it slides, so do we, just a few meters behind.

Politicians need to actually feel concerned about how the people they are hurting will respond. Currently they know there will be nothing more than a few grouchy news articles and upset social media comments.

Removed by mod

Aye

We can’t do anything to enforce moderation of content on another server. If they come here to do it we can boot em.

You already know but posting for those who might not yet, the reason defederation is framed as a “slippery slope” is because they know full well that there will be a clone of exploding heads rising soon enough and we’re going to need to continue defederating alt-right bot farms in perpetuity to maintain a good instance. They want to keep having two week long debates about it in every. Single. Case. By framing it as a slippery slope, they’re hoping to keep these incessant arguments going on, forever, or until anyone decent has given up and left.

I’m sorry, you’re the only representative of the instance in here responding to stuff like this and as a result I feel like I’m coming down harder on you than you deserve…

But you already have this guy and me in the thread who have left because of the instance’s inaction and through it, tacit support of e-h. We’re two who bothered to watch the server to see if anything actually happened. By nature, most people who left will definitely not have done this. They’re just gone, they’re not popping into agora to see if you got your shit together. I only did because I have a community I was working on and don’t really want to restart it.

Your “oh maybe, I kinda guess it’s possible” attitude here is the problem. You are acting now, great, but this was an incredibly slow response, it doesn’t matter if your vote is tomorrow. It’s already incredibly, mind bogglingly slow, and you still decided to post a day long debate thread before the vote (it seems to show overwhelming support for defederation, which I consider totally unsurprising, and makes me wonder again what you’ve been waiting for).

I understand a little about why it was so glacial, but you continue to appear to not understand that this was actually a huge issue, that in that time you let the server bias towards the alt-right, showed a general support for alt right topics, and alienated an unknowable number of users in the process. Those are all the sort of users you probably wanted to keep, the ones who aren’t just content to see things go badly and will take action when they see it rather than stare like a deer in headlights. If they’re like me, they were probably posting and trying to find out the delay before leaving in disgust. They’re folks that care about having an instance that reflects their values, and you’ve let them - us - down.

That can’t be undone, but the way you keep shrugging it off as though you really don’t see it does not inspire confidence. It tells me that you think it’s not really a huge issue that you lost a bunch of users who aren’t comfortable with hate media showing up in their feed, stored on the servers they’re using, because you’re more worried about alienating the people who are okay with it by acting too quickly.

I don’t disagree with any of this in principle, but I don’t think any of it applies here. Time, evidence, and even some sociology have shown us that all we gain from trying to mix alt right communities online with other ones is an increase in conflict, alienation of people disgusted by alt right, and strengthening of the alt right as a result. This isn’t a place for conversation and conversion in those regards. Helping someone through ignorance and extremism requires an empathy and understanding that is almost impossible to achieve online, and certainly isn’t suited to this kind of environment.

As I said, I deal with this stuff in real life all the time. I talk to these people often, and have I think even opened a few minds now and then. I don’t even attempt it online. It’s fruitless. That doesn’t mean I think they’re all lost causes individually, but it does mean I don’t want their distasteful opinions stanking up my leisure time as well as my professional time.

I like the cut of your jib, fella.

Yeah and if you replace “opinions” with “babies” then “shut down” with “murder” then suddenly you’re talking about murdering babies!! Oh man. This is a real slippery slope.

My friend, I’m worried I’m going to come across dickish here in my next paragraph, so let me say that you’ve proven intelligent and pleasant to talk to and I think well of you from our conversation here.

With that out of the way, I’m not sure how - as someone who seems legitimately pretty intelligent and reasonable, overall - you could hold an opinion like this in the year of our lord 2023. Have you not seen what’s happened to public discourse over the last seven years? I think we’re long, long past the point of wondering what the consequences of letting things that seem distasteful and unfunny in the particular vein of e-h go unchecked. It’s an experiment that has been tested, tried, tested again, and tried again, and always to the same end. How many times do we need another /pol/ or r/t_d or r/conservative or r/asktrumpsupporters or on and on and on and on before people are allowed to point at something like this and say “yep it’s this again” and be understood?

Have you watched the alt-right playbook? It’s a wonderful summary of what people are concerned about.

You want me to explain myself, but don’t want to read what I say. I don’t quite know how you figure that will work, but I appreciate you being up front about it I suppose.

Lol I almost responded with, “I appreciate the options.”

I chuckled good at that. And I too enjoy conversations like this, no worries. This thread has mostly been nice, intelligent discussion and I’ve liked it.

(bit concerned as it seems the trolls are now coming in, but I won’t doomsay yet)

• Not every dissenting opinion is an obvious apologist account. If it were, you wouldn’t see me through this thread all over the place having what I consider productive discussion with other people who have differing opinions.
• Within the post you just quoted, I explained why I am unimpressed. In the replies, I explained it far more. I find it a little hard to believe you could read what I wrote even in that one post and come up with that reply in good faith, but if you’d like to hear what I mean in more detail, try reading the copious explanation I’ve added in this very thread over the last six hours.

Frankly, I think the evidence thus far suggests that users do side with me, so your hostility is both unwarranted and kind of nonsensical.

I gave you some extras above in case you ran out, no worries

I apologize for being a little harsh here but I don’t know how this is a reasonable response to what I said in this very thread. Edit: woops, apology rescinded, didn’t realize you were just here to troll. Blocked instead.

I think I’ve made it very clear that my problem isn’t that I feel the admins were beholden to that very flawed vote. It’s that there was a nine day gap of nothingness including very loud refusal to respond to requests for information.

That vote was literally the first thing users did with agora, almost the moment it opened. Clearly it’s something users of the instance feel strongly about. Personally, it is something I consider time sensitive and that is deeply important to my own values. I’m willing to assume this is a problem of new admins on a very rapidly growing server, provided a show of good faith from here onwards, but taken on its own it is a bad look. At this stage, sh.itjust.works has taken longer than any other major instance to address the problem with e-h. Even this thread, which is a step in the right direction, is more deliberation. I suspect it’s going to be another week of careful deliberation, foot-dragging, and hand-wringing to decide whether or not we’re okay with hosting and serving this sort of pure garbage, which I literally found only by opening their front page and screencapping the two most recent posts.

It’s an easy fucking decision, we don’t need a month to decide if we’re going to be a breitbart link share site.

I agree, but also I think defederation isn’t the bogeyman it’s being made out to be. Remember that when instances are federated, they download, store, and transmit information from each other. Sh.itjust.works is currently hosting alt-right stuff from e-h. There are plenty of things I don’t like that I’d be fine just blocking myself, but I also have a line, which e-h crosses, where I am no longer willing to be an active member of a server that’s okay with hosting and amplifying that signal. Even if I could block the instance from all my feeds, I’d leave sh.itjust.works for being a passive supporter of that stuff. I definitely wouldn’t donate to help pay for server costs, or try to increase traffic by hosting a community on it.

There are, however, plenty of cases where I - as someone who comes here to relax - would prefer to block particular instances and to have better control over blocking specific users and communities, but would not be put out by the instance as a whole still being okay with that content. This isn’t that. And as I’ve said elsewhere, if the community disagrees, that’s fine. I’ll go somewhere else, where the instance better reflects my values. I largely already have.

Option option option option <-- you may add this in there wherever you like, since you clearly love the word 😋

This doesn’t make sense in a number of ways.

First, the problem most people have is specifically with the admins of exploding heads. I don’t imagine they’re attracting a great userbase given the content they promote, but it doesn’t much matter. If the problem was how they moderated their users it might be something we could discuss in a different way, but the problem is that the instance is run by the people causing issues. It will not improve, you can’t isolate that without just removing the instance.

Second, if there are people at exploding heads who can abide by posting rules in other instances, nothing stops them from going to other instances. Defederation is a form of democratic selection. If enough people excommunicate e-h, then the users there who can post productively on other instances will go to other instances and not get banned, and all will be well.

Defederation isn’t a vote to cut every user of an instance off the internet in perpetuity. It’s a vote against the administration and content of a server.