There’s that weird place discussed by the other instance’s admin here:
https://lemy.lol/post/17093789
It’s a small nitherlandian instance that automated posting of christian testimonies (30k+, basically a youtube crawler by keywords, updated hourly) in one community and others are filled with conspiralogical content. Maybe they had their place somewhere before?
Haven’t seen a direct bigotry at a quick glance (closing my eyes on muslims finding christian Jesus-posts), but it looks like spreading conspiracies and serving as an ad for a cult. Is that against our rules? They sometime showed in my feed too. And they are an outright spam entity having 30k posts for like 50 users.
I think that’s either a sectarian indocrination or someone being very ill in the head.
I vouch for defederating them and maybe contacting them if they need personal support.
It’s exactly what some of youtubers would do a write up about a year after.
I’m not seeing much of the posts outside that single community though. This makes it trivial to avoid.
And, no, I wouldn’t see it as any different from scientology, or islam, or Buddhism, or taoism, or Hinduism, or whatever ism. When it isn’t an instance wide issue, the answer isn’t defederation. It’s per-user blocking.
Let’s be real, they aren’t reaching anyone with the kind of bat-shit, overly long videos they’re linking. Nobody has the attention span for that unless they’re already indoctrinated into that kind of bat-shit crazy thing anyway. If I see them pop up in my all/federated feed, I’ll block the community. Just like I do with any of the religion focused crazy C/s out there.
It’s a matter of how the fediverse should work, imo. Defederation is the final step, not the first. The only times defederation is a first step is when the instance hosts illegal things that the defederating instance would have legal liability if the materials in question; when the instance is dangerous to the fediverse, and/or when it’s nazis.
You can’t federate with an instance that hosts loli, if you’re located in a place where that’s illegal. So you defederate as soon as possible.
When something that’s going to destabilize lemmy/the fediverse by design, you can preemptively defederate.
And nobody likes nazis. We don’t want a nazi bar, so we have to keep them out from the beginning.
Anything else? You start with blocks by users, then user initiated instance blocking (now that it’s possible) or app based instance filtering, then consider defederation.
Since that instance isn’t doing any of those big things, and the problem content is very localized, I would vote against defederation in the agora. Which, btw, is where any defederation is decided for sjw as an instance.
Do you have proof of their instance acting to proselytize here (or elsewhere in the fediverse)? I haven’t seen any of their users doing it as individuals, and I found no threads planning such action. That is a big enough problem to change my vote if it ever comes up in the agora.
I felt like general spam and lunacy are enough to cut them off even though they play safe. Is it wrong considering their content?
But they aren’t spamming elsewhere. There’s no indication that the community is doing anything other than posting in their own community. The content itself is bland, boring, but crazy. What it isn’t is inherently dangerous or bad. The only reason it counts as spam is the sheer volume. Since all it takes is a C/ block to prevent that spam, nothing else matters.
The rest of the instance is not harmful either, and none of the other communities have enough posts to be even close to spam levels. Defederation would remove access to ghost other communities and users.
Like someone else said, it’s like using a nuke to get rid of a single fly. You can do a surgical strike and completely avoid the C/. If isn’t like the posters there are out on other instances doing anything.
Unless you have proof of bad acts, and you haven’t provided any, there’s zero chance a defederation vote would succeed in the agora. This instance has a fairly consistent result on defederation issues when the INSTANCE being voted on isn’t disruptive.
And, frankly, the content is fine. Or, as fine as any religion’s more effusive elements. They aren’t calling for pogroms or crusades, they aren’t bashing other religions, they aren’t calling for some kind of Christian uprising, nothing like that. It’s just a bunch of religious nutters babbling about loving their religion. Which may be crazy, but it isn’t something that rises to the nazi test.
If we apply your criteria to content re: lunacy, then we’d have to defederate from any instance with a busy political C/, because most of those are full of posts from people treating politics like a religion. Are we going to defederate from any instance that has a C/ where they post constant anti-(insert politician of choice here) memes? It’s exactly the same thing.
If that’s what you’re arguing, that we defederate from any instance with crazies on it, bye-bye fediverse. Fuck I’m a left wing crazy, I just don’t post about it. But there are C/s on this instance that are no better than the one you’re objecting to, in terms of sane and rational posts. Should we defederate from ourselves?
I get it, though, I do. It’s easy to get on the anti-religion train and just stoke the boiler all the way. Organized religion is fucking cancer. But that’s irrelevant to federation as long as the offending material can be avoided by individuals. And, frankly, trying to outlaw any religion is a bad idea to begin with. And that’s really what you’re trying to do is go ham because you don’t like that religion.
I can’t support that way of thinking and would argue against defederation in the agora. I would argue against it even more vehemently than in this thread. Here, we’re just casually discussing the idea (or that’s what I’m doing anyway, this is casual for me lol). But if this was in the agora, where it would get voted on and possibly get the results you’re wanting, I would actively oppose the proposition. It goes against the very principles of lemmy in specific, and the fediverse as a whole.
Thanks for this long-form answer of yours.
Seems like my position gets it’s bashing even before voting. And it’s not an issue worth leaving or whatever. I wanted to know what everyone think about it, even if I myself biased against it.
It’s not even my hatred against religion, but the defenition of a harmful content. For me these videos of ‘finding their God’ is the entry content, like a first cigarette, a natural invitation. I’d argue having a public stall with that content in our mall is not great.
Another problem is that they joined the Fediverse with that archive instead of making a dedicated website. Can’t blame them for being, probably, just a hobbyist. Either they added other communities around this archive, or they thought to host this archive after that, it’s a little weird they didn’t think it would be seen by many others. Or they wanted it? Either way, I find isolating this collection is a good thing. It should’ve probably happened on their end.
Offending materials can be avoided by individuals, np, yet we don’t usually write ublock filters ourself. We choose lists of rules in order to optimize our efforts. Instead of every person finding a way to block that ad banner, one person does it and helps other save time.
It all comes down to how universal the despise to that said banner and if you trust someone to choose it for you. As I see, both despise isn’t that universal and users don’t want their feed to be dictated over such a thing. I accept that.
As Lemmy proved it’s there to stay, I’d like to see how the discourse of policies and defed\refed processes would go. This being not one Reddit but a threadball of many teams and userbases makes it interesting.