Hi all, I noticed this community hasn't been active for a while. Might be a good time to bring it back.

Chances are, you already know what I'm talking about. For those who don't: the moderators and admins on feddit.org, especially !europe@feddit.org, have been removing comments and banning the users that are pro-Palestine, most of the time without even directly addressing them, just straight to banning.

Check out this pinned post. While a some were legit insults and calls to violence, most were just expressing dissatisfaction and questioning the policy.

While not all of us would always agree on things, we've been trying to engage in meaningful discussion even if we'd sometimes end up agreeing to disagree. The same cannot be said on the above community. At this rate, it would become an echo chamber for pro-Israel who'd say anyone disagreeing with them is antisemitic.

I've heard some servers struggled or even had to shut down because of storage costs. But that was a while ago, so it may not even still be a thing anymore.

There's the option of posting images to third-party services (like imgur or whatever), but I've been frustrated with not being able to see third-party images when scrolling the feed in Lemmy apps.

What's the meta right now?

Hello everyone. We recently defederated from the two instances below. In the interest of transparency, I am opening this discussion post as a place for our users to discuss any questions or concerns.

• chinese.lol
• lemmy.doesnotexist.club

Both instances were identified in a recent post (https://hackertalks.com/post/8713785) for harboring suspected vote manipulation accounts. The spoiler in that post names 49 suspicious accounts. A bit of database digging on our side confirmed that all of those accounts are being used solely for coordinated downvoting of a small number of Lemmy users. They are also only the tip of the iceberg; at least 92 other accounts on these two instances also match the same pattern of behavior.

We have reached out to the admins, and have not received a reply. Until we hear otherwise, these two instances are considered unmoderated and have been defederated.

That is all. Have a great Friday!

I want to say thanks to the Admins here. I got a fediverse chick DM today, I was going to report it earlier but I was busy. It was on our instance. When I looked later the DM was deleted (due to Lemmy being Lemmy only Admins can delete DMs). So, thanks for your hard work, it is appreciated.

Edit: I got another one today, again the admins deleted it. Thanks again

The Issue

Currently, it seems to be that the majority of instance defederations happen silently on SJW: As of writing this, SJW currently blocks federation with 86 instances ^[1], yet, from what I can tell ^[2], there has not been 86 announcements. For clarity, this is not intended to be construed as an accusation, pointed at the SJW admins, that this is some sort of intentional obfuscation; however, for the sake of transparency and understanding, I think it would be a good practice to open these practices up to the rest of the instance.

Proposal

I propose that whenever an instance is to be defederated, an open (ie unlocked) post should be published by the SJW admins (eg it could be published to !main@sh.itjust.works) detailing the name of the instance that is to be defederated, the rationale for why it is to be defederated (including evidence to support the rationale), and what steps would need to be taken by the respective instance's admins in order for that instance to be re-federated.

Benefits

• I think it would provide users with an opportunity to better understand the rationale and alignment SJW's admins.
• I think it helps keep the administrators (both locally and federated) publicly accountable.
• Having an open announcement for defederation could invite discussion on the topic. I think this discussion could offer enlightening insight.
• It will create a sort of searchable database for users to reference if they wish to know why a given instance is defederated.
• I think it could potentially reduce the administrative burden on the admins in that it serves as a sort of FAQ in place of users repetitively asking the admins why an instance was defederated.
• I think that It may provide a more targeted opportunity for the admins of the defederated instance to directly, and publicly, engage with the issue.

Drawbacks

• If there ends up being a large volume of defederations, this practice may end up becoming a sizeable burden for the SJW admins. One note on this is that it may be possible for some defederations to be grouped together, but this would have to be done carefully so as to not become obfuscative.

Additional Context

I think a potential counterargument could be: "If a user wishes to know more about why an instance is defederated, then they should just make a post asking about it, or they should dm the admins."; however, I think this may actually increase the workload on the admins if the question is posed frequently enough, furthermore, I fear that this sort of active approach on the part of the inquirer could have a sort of chilling effect: the topic of "instance defederation" is often a contentious one, and some may be hesitant to actively open themselves up to that sort of potential conflict in order to seek the desired information. This proposal would offer sanctuary for the inquisitive lurker.

References

1. Type: Website. Publisher: sh.itjust.works. Accessed: 2025-03-03T05:15Z. URI: <https://sh.itjust.works/instances>.
   • See the "Blocked Instances" tab.
2. I simply searched for posts with keywords like "defederate" and "block" in !main@sh.itjust.works.

I propose that the UI version be included alongside the backend version at the bottom of the page. For example, Lemmy.ml does this ^[1]:

!

I think this information is useful to have for diagnostic purposes, reporting bugs, and for referencing documentation.

References

1. Lemmy.ml. Lemmy. Accessed: 2025-02-08T05:59Z. URI: <https://lemmy.ml/>.
   • Found at the bottom of the page.

I think it could be useful to collect this data, both for administrative and research purposes.

I'm unsure, currently, exactly what data should be collected by the censuses (that would be proposed and discussed here). The data that is collected, should be collected anonymously. Furthermore, participation should be entirely voluntary.

Other social media sites have been doing it. Do we want to join in?

EDIT: Some people are saying that this is a power that ought to be left to communities... do we have a specific delineation of powers that relegates these decisions to communities? If not, then I recommend that these users propose such a delineation of powers. I would be very ok with this proposal failing because instead we got a more explicit set of checks and balances.

Project: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract

Demo: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

What it is:

Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content. It's an alternative front-end that can be hosted on the sh.itjust.works servers side-by-side with the current interface, similar to how oldsh.itjust.works operates.

In addition to the overall improved user experience, it also has enhancements for moderators and instance admins. These are worth checking out, I quite like the modlog.

What I like about it:

• Improved Media Support in Feed and Posts
• Community Browser / Enhanced Discovery
• Better Moderation Tools than Lemmy-UI
• Alternate Sources Menu (All link posts have a dropdown menu next to the link which contains alternate links to the post URL from Ghost Archive, 12ft, and Archive Today.)

Try it:

An open, public demo instance is available at tesseract.dubvee.org. Try it with your favorite Lemmy instance by changing settings in the Demo Account Page.

Proposal:

I believe this front-end should be included and hosted by SJW as an option, under a unique subdomain.

I propose de-anonymising the moderators names in the mod log for transparency.

I'm curious to get all of your thoughts on this. It's no secret that AI has been growing quite exponentially over the last year. I feel that new models are being released almost every other day. With that said many of these models need a tremendous amount of data to train on. It's no secret that reddit sells its users interaction to the highest bidder. This was partially the reason why they made the changes to the API limits that got many of us to move to the fediverse in the first place.

My question is how does everyone feel with knowing that multi-billion dollar companies as scraping this instance and the others, creating extra load on the servers for nothing more than to be able to profit from it?

What can be done to continue providing a free, open network to users but prevent those who are only looking to profit from the data?

edit: fixed title typo

Does anyone here like the idea of a community to request abandoned communities, similar to Redditrequest back on Reddit where you are able to request a community here if it's been abandoned. Wanna hear your thoughts on this and what you all think about this.

Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?

To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?

Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.

What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.

This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.

If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)

Another community with the name politics@sh.itjust.works that I mod is online but it has a different address: https://sh.itjust.works/c/sino

To me that's confusing to have the same name on the same instance. I realize that different instances have the same named communities, but it seems crazy that you can have the same one on the same instance. Has this been addressed before?

Edit: I should add that I'm not mad or anything about it, whatever you guys say goes. I forget how harsh it can sound in text. I do find it confusing, but in a "I had no idea" way.

I am in the opinion that some alternative UIs should be available on the instance (domain) – if possible, of course. Lemmy.world already has many alt. UIs, I think we should have something like that. So, here's a list:

• Alexandrite – a nice modern one
• MLMYM – a familiar old-reddit–style one
• Nemmy
• Photon – sleek af
• Slemmy – again, a modern one
• Lemmy Modern UI – web default UI, but better

… and more, check out https://lemmy.world/post/465785

What do you think?

Threads will be implementing federation in the near future and many instances have been discussing whether they should be pre-emptively defederated to protect the fediverse. See below for our local discussion thread, which will remain active until this vote is complete.

Given that this is a time-sensitive issue and it's the holiday season, we decided to initiate the vote a few days early to make sure everyone gets a chance to vote. The vote will be tallied on Friday, December 29th.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/11011288

Only sh.itjust.works accounts may cast a vote

Vote by commenting either yes/aye/oui or nay/no/non

Any further discussion should be posted in the thread linked above

Additional Context/Discussions

Curent lemmy.world discussion

41% of instances have blocked Threads

Extensive discussion at Fediverse@lemmy.world

This article has already been linked 10 trillion times in previous discussions, but in case you missed it

For the hard of hearing

IF YOU ARE NOT A SH.ITJUST.WORKS USER, YOU CANNOT VOTE IN THIS THREAD

***

VOTE RESULT

In favor (aye/oui/yes) : 200 votes

Against (nay/non/no) : 55 votes

Sh.itjust.works has voted in favor of preemptively defederating Threads.

Thank you for your participation, and happy holidays to everyone!

While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: "any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.")

Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?

Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.

Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.

What do you think should be done?

EDIT: correction

EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.

Fediverse instances' status on federation with Threads

English message:

As some of you may have noticed, there's an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.&nbsp;&nbsp;

I expect there are multiple valid opinions&nbsp;on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone's opinion on the situation.&nbsp;

You might also want to read lemmy.ca's discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Things that I think need to be pointed out:&nbsp;&nbsp;

• alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in.&nbsp;
• together they've made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
• That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy.&nbsp;
• They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona.&nbsp;
• alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different instances with copies of different subreddits.

I don't have an exhaustive list of such communities,&nbsp; I haven't found an official one.&nbsp; I'll post a fewfrom my personal blocklist in a comment below.&nbsp;

And a note on the upcoming 0.19 release:&nbsp;

• the new user-level instance block feature will block all the communities of the blocked instances,&nbsp; but will not block these users' posts or comments if they are done on another instance's community.&nbsp;&nbsp;

My opinion isn't any more valid then anyone else's so I'll put it in a comment below.

Our users' input is welcomed.

What do you, dear users of sh.itjust.works, think about federation with them?

Thanks

---

Message français:

Comme certains d'entre vous l'ont peut-être remarqué, il y a une instance peuplée de 1,1M de bots qui copient ees posts et commentaires Reddit dans plein de communautés sur plusieurs autres instances.

Il y a plusieurs opinions sur le sujet et ce fil de discussion vise à prendre le pouls de l'opinion générale sur la situation.

Je vous suggères de lire la discussion chez lemmy.ca à ce sujet ici, discussion intéressante.&nbsp;

Quelques points qui, selon moi, doivent être soulignés&nbsp;:

• alien.top compte actuellement 1,1 million de robots, dont seulement 6 sont des utilisateurs hebdomadaires qui se login.
• collectivement, ils ont déjà fait 1,59 million de commentaires dans une multitude de communautés dans différentes instances.
• Ce projet proclame essayer de convertir des utilisateurs de Reddit à passer à Lemmy.
• Il existe un portail pour permettre aux utilisateurs de Reddit de prendre contrôle de leur version bot.
• alien.top a une seule communauté locale, les bots publient tous sur différentes instances, des copies de différents subreddits.

Je n'ai pas de liste exhaustive de ces communautés,&nbsp;à première vue, je n'en trouve pas une liste officielle.&nbsp; Je mettrai dans un commentaire ci-dessous quelques communautés que j'ai bloqué au niveau personnel.&nbsp;

Pour finir,&nbsp; une note sur la version 0.19 de lemmy qui s'en vient&nbsp;:

• La nouvelle fonctionnalité pour bloquer une instance au niveau d'un uutilisateur bloquera toutes les communautés d'une instance bloquée, mais ne bloquera pas les publications ou les commentaires de ces utilisateurs s'ils sont publiés dans une communauté d'une autre instance.

Mon opinion n'est pas meilleur qu'une autre et je mettrai plutôt dans un commentaire ci-bas.

Les commentaires de nos utilisateurs sont les bienvenus.

Que pensez-vous, cher utilisateurs de sh.itjust.works de la fédération avec eux?

Merci

before people criticize me I am not using my main account because I do not feel safe bringing up these issues there, as these people and issues still are not dealt with. I do not want to put myself in danger, I will not be engaging in or attempting to post polls or votes here.

I would like to start by saying that I've noticed a lot of bad faith or spammy communities pop-up recently. The user is dramaticcat many of the communities break rules 1 and 2, maybe even rule 3 (an example of one such community is !kiwifarms@sh.itjust.works) as they are purely dedicated to hatred, trolling, and possibly even spam.

Also a small handful of users have also been making threats or calls to violence and while these have been moderated nicely moderators and external instance admins the admins of this instance haven't done anything about this. This is worrying as admins are supposed to enforce the instance rules and remove disruptive users and communities who are in violation of said rules but the admins of Sh.itjust.works have not been doing that. This is a problem because it means that any malicious actor could join at any time and wreak havok on this instance just like Exploding-heads did on another unmoderated instance known as rammy.site way back when. We obviously know how that went.

It's important that we discuss this problem now while we might have a chance of contacting the admins rather than later when the damage has been done.

Hello everyone, I operate an instance previously defederated by this instance known as lemmy.comfysnug.space and we were defederated because many people didn't like our current rules.

Well we have since changed our rules and are no longer allowing the content that so many people complained about. So we were hoping to be able to get refederated with other instances including this one. What do people think, do we deserve a second chance to be federated again?

(I'm posting from a lemm.ee account because my main is on the Defederated Instance, there's no other real way for me to do this).

Please share your thoughts, concerns and opinions. Try to keep it constructive.

Link to announcement

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new bot in town. But this time, its one of ours.

What should we name it?

Post your entry.

Rules.

• The 5 most upvoted entries will be brought to a vote.
• The winning entry will become the display name of the bot.

Welcome, this vote will determine which image we use for our banner image for sh.itjust.works. The discussion thread is in the Agora, and was also cross-posted to ImageAI

Fantastic work on the banners sh.itheads, I think we've got several excellent choices here. I've reposted the candidates below, with credits to the users who submitted them. I culled some submissions at my own discretion.

Each candidate is labeled with a number. In order to vote, simply comment on this post with the number of your preferred banner. You only get one vote. ***

Number 1 - @TendieMaster69@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 2 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 3 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 4 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 5 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 6 - @scumola@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 7 - @ComfortablyGlum@sh.itjust.works

! ***

Number 8 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 9 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 10 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 11 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

!

Number 12 - @thelsim@sh.itjust.works

! ***

You may also specify a few honorable mentions in your comment if you so choose, as a way to acknowledge the artists' work.

The vote will run until next Friday. ***

VOTE RESULT

1. Banner 8 by @thelsim@sh.itjust.works: 91 votes

!

2. Banner 11 by @thelsim@sh.itjust.works: 49 votes

!

3. Banner 6 by @scumola@sh.itjust.works: 24 votes

!

4. Banner 7 by @ComfortablyGlum@sh.itjust.works: 20 votes

!

5. Banner 3 by @scumola@sh.itjust.works: 19 votes

!

The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.

As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.

You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.

I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.

Lemmy.world looks like this

!

This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.

Like the title says. How do we create a new community on sh.itjust.works?

I want to start a new community for a specific topic. How do I do that?

I've seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here's a recent one).

I didn't see an Agora discussion post, so I'm making one.

Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I'd appreciate it!

Hello,

I'm the mod of Japanese Metal. For a few days now, the community appears empty to me, both on Liftoff and my browser on my desktop. Edit: it's fine if I view it on my lemm.ee account, but that's not optimal.

What might be the cause, and how do I fix it? Anyone with a similar problem?

Thanks in advance.

I'd like to ask for @TheDude to make a server-wide announcement, visible to all members of this instance, that a binding vote about defederation is currently taking place.

Without knowing what the Lemmy UI allows, I was hoping for a text similar to the one informing new users that email verification is currently enabled. Here is what I would like the announcement to entail:

"A binding vote to defederate from another instance is currently taking place in /c/TheAgora. Should the vote be accepted, no users of sh.itjust.works will be able to access the defederated instance or interact with users of that defederated instance anywhere on Lemmy. Should the vote fail, the instance to be defederated remains federated, its content may still be shown on the home feed of sh.itjust.works and the users of that instance may still participate in discussion on this instance."

I am of the very strong opinion, that no vote should be binding, unless it was announced early enough to all members of this instance! This vote will have instance-wide consequences, the fact that it is taking place needs to be broadcasted beyond this community!

Edit: fix typos (again)

So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It's been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It's now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.

For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It's very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I'm open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it's actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it's fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.

Edit: since my thread was locked and I can't reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I'm not "a beehaw user", I've barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I'll be closing that now.

I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That's enough of that for me.

Please consider using my theme on this instance, so that everyone could enjoy a more more modern, efficient UI when browsing sh.itjust.works. It works with Lemmy 0.17, 0.18 and 0.18.1rc. It has a light theme variant, dark theme or both (auto).

!screenshot 1

!screenshot 2

!screenshot 3

Repository with more screenshots: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon

Theme files for download: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon/releases

It's also a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme

The only downside would be maintenance. Whenever a new version of Lemmy breaks the theme, someone will have to fix it. But I believe that together as a community we can easily maintain our own theme.

Say "aye" or yes" if you are in favor of defederation.

Say "nay" or "no" if you are against defederation.

All of the relevant information can be found in the link below. Thank you all for your input.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/564252

I can only hope for this level of engagement in all discussions going forward 😅

I apologize for the lack of clarity and structure surrounding the process and just know that we are working to streamline the process ASAP.

EDIT: If you post anything in addition to aye/yes/nay/no, it will be removed and I will reply to the comment with your vote.

I am not voting, I am simply cleaning up comments that try to continue the discussion. Just vote and get off the pot people.

If you're from another server, you don't get to vote

VOTE RESULT

In favor of defederation

We are now defederated from EH.

The mod team is currently examining the data in greater detail to arrive at a final count of legitimate votes. Nonetheless, whichever voting system/restrictions we arrive at, the result of the vote is not in question. I will update this post with the final count ASAP. Thank you for your participation, it was a largely successful debate and vote.

[SOLVED] I had to enter my email and not username to make reset password work 🤦

So I've been browsing lemmy and this instance for a couple weeks using the jerboa app for Android and thought I'd try another app to see if I liked it better. However I can't find lemmy or sh.itjust.works in my password manager, or anything in my email. So I using my Brower I went to reset my password and the password reset button is greyed out. What do?

edit This might (probably?) be the wrong place to post this. My apologies if so, I'm still fairly unfamiliar with how lemmy works.

Xo

We should try to keep this instance as a Free Speech destination, rather than yet another island controlled by the thought police.

Could we please set some rules for defederation? I'd like to suggest these two:

1. Is it spam?
2. Is it illegal?

If either is yes, then go ahead and ban it, otherwise allow free discussion and don't get upset that some people think differently than yourself.

Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).

!

It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.

My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you're not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.

I've linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325

Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.

https://lemmy.world/post/747912

https://lemmy.world/post/577526

Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.

Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.

TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.

EDIT: To clarify, this isn't the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.

EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

!

It seems like the mod has abandoned the community and none of the posts seem like a very good look for our instance. !conspiracytheories@sh.itjust.works

I don’t think bot link posts are good for this platform. I think original content is useful, but links back to Reddit just makes this the shittiest possible Reddit client. Best case scenario it clogs the feed, worst case it actively pushes people back towards Reddit. If anyone disagrees, please let me know why.

First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We're all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We're look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!

Ok, on to the announcement:

Today, I'm excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.

The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.

Next, let's discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.

Regarding the [Vote] tags, we're introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week's [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.

For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.

This is by no means the final process and we're depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.

We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.

As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn't work so well.