Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org’s explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it’s not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] “antisemitic” language, or they might get in trouble.
- Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu’s genocidal fascist regime. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for “Death to Israel” or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I’ve also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all… mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It’s apparently “xenophobic” to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you’d prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that’s the better option, then we’ll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don’t really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:
- For:
- Against:
- Local Community: +0.3
- Outsider sentiment: Supportive
- Total: +7.3
- Percentage: 82.00%
This vote will complete in 5 days
- For:
I think this will raise the chances of an echo chamber happening here, and I have not seen the Zionism that you are claiming it is be as widespread as you are claiming to be. I oppose until you can convince me otherwise.
My opinion is more or less that we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from big communities if their theme is not centered on endorsing crimes and if they’re not a community solely for whitewashing them / spreading disinfo.
I think a lot of German speaking users are people who have been exposed to only a narrow view of the world and that they can be valuable allies in the long run. Our instance has been relatively successful at bridging many gaps, I think it would be a shame to defederate entirely.
I’ve seen some questionable takes in places like YUROP but it’s no worse than a large enough .world thread or shjw thread.
My thoughts are unchanged since January. Strikes system for external users promoting imperialism (and the lebensrauming of me, I’m in Lebanon!) on our instance, a special text in German because of how prevalent this issue is among German people. And banning Zionists from signing up to the instance. I’m sure a fellow Arabic speaker could imagine a similar situation for antisemitism. It’s the socialism of fools after all. Surely concern trolling about women’s rights in Gaza is a sort of (subtly imperialist) feminism of fools?
I want the tent to be as big as possible. I want those who excuse these crimes to be exposed to as much common sense as possible. I don’t want them to feel like they have the mainstream opinion anymore.
I’ve got a few thoughts on this.
First, its insane to me that someone could read the rules and decide anti-zionist is anti-semitic. That is either someone who doesn’t understand words and has no interest in learning them, or is someone actively zionist (and genocide, thus the issue with zionism).
Second, I’ve got my complaints about what I’m seeing from the flotilla/friendly instances.
- Someone saying “Fuck off you piece of trash” getting banned from a community is in no way a surprise.
- The same goes for “You’ll get the wall”
- Same for “kys”
- Same for calling someone a Nazi for what I assume is a supportive comment about the war in Ukraine. Just to note, don’t bother trying to respond to me with anything about Russia being in the right on this one. I’ll just block.
Third, there are quite a few comments there that are completely appropriate (support for Israel is support for genocide, etc), the thread about quokk.au is utterly nonsensical to me, as are the discussions in MoG (which shouldn’t really be a surprise).
To sum up my thoughts… At no point do I regret voting in support of rule 8. I am really disappointed by some of the comments I’m seeing being used as support for de-federating though, some of those are just disgusting.
Overall, I’m in support of dropping the comms due to the blatant zionist posts that go on there.
Edit: formatting fuckup.
Thanks for writing this up so thoroughly, wholly agree.
Agreed. Your take is the most reasonable and one I can get behind. Full defederating is insane.
Some of those modlog screenshots are 100% warranted. Dude is coming in angry and just slinging out hatred.
I get that not all the examples used were being polite, but why should anyone be polite towards people making excuses for Zionism?
It goes leagues beyond “not polite” to tell someone to kill themselves. I don’t find it acceptable to tell someone that in any scenario, so I don’t find it acceptable to say regardless of the source. Simple as that.
Why are you so focused on that one example? There are plenty of comments removed that don’t include such provocative language.
There are plenty of comments removed that don’t include such provocative language.
Which I commented on in my post already in point 3, and why I agree with blocking (as well as a revisit to see if further action is needed).
Why are you so focused on that one example?
Because its a pretty ridiculous example to use. Probably the worst example in the list, and its in the post multiple times.
That doesn’t change my opinion of feddit, though, as I said. The fact that I find feddit as a whole to be an indicator of whether or not someone will have what I consider to be some of the worst views also has no bearing on my being disappointed with that sort of comment being used as an example.
Edit: Its also a violation of rule 2 right here. So using it as an example when its explicitly something against the rules right here makes it especially ridiculous. Making it also very worth pointing out how shitty it is to see.
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com can my emoji get updated to match my dbzero account?
Sure, ban those communities. But, out of curiosity, what does an instance wide community ban achieves that my own block list cannot? I already have a sizeable feddit.org presence on said list, so I doubt I would personally see any difference.
Not a big fan of instance banning though, unless there’s serious evidence of wrongdoing on our instance from their users. I’m not a wallflower that needs protecting from opinions, I can make my own mind and choose what to read and what to engage with. See: personal blocklist.
Read a few more comments here, and I would also exclude BuyFromEU from the ban list tbh.
If the admins of this instance think there are clear zionist apologia, and have proof of said zionist apologia, then I will leave it to them to do what is best. I am anti-zionist, but haven’t seen these issues with my own eyes in real time.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and hopefully, Feddit can fix the issues described here, but like Flatworm, I don’t think it will happen. I don’t like defederation, but as a real last resort, I trust in the admins here at db0.
I would be opposed to full-defederation, since there is still a lot of good users on feddit. I think removing those communities is a good middle ground.
No. I have issues with how this is approached and communicated primarily, and if those are addressed maybe there is enough information to support. I’ll try to keep it brief:
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There isn’t really any indication about what we hope to achieve with the community bans. What concrete improvements do we hope for and are we taking any steps to see if they are achieved? It reads to me like a LOT of words explaining why they are utter shit (no disagreement), but then doesn’t connect any further dots, seems to just imply “so clearly our users should not see those” or something.
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Frankly it’s unclear to me why I see largely Flatworm proposing these lately, and little POV from the wider admin and mod team. It’s no shade to you Flat, I like the cut of your jib. But this is an anarchist instance, if we are proposing rules that impact all our users, I need to start seeing a lot more broad weigh-in from the other people doing the work to keep this place running.
Now for both of these there are charitable interpretations for why I’m not seeing what I think I should. But I’m not willing to guess on that and shouldn’t have to. This is frankly a totally insufficient basis, as written, for governance action. As written, I say absolutely not.
Leave my feed and default interactions alone please unless we are going to see better and wider justification.
Thanks, don’t shoot the messenger though, I’m just the only admin willing to write these governance posts up. We do discuss these things internally in our admin chat before posting them.
I’ve defended you on the last one and said similar, that the phrasing led me to assume internal discussion.
And I know we’re a cantankerous bunch at best lol, hard to please everyone. But it needs to be clear this isn’t the Flatworm show, please, because of how central that is to the premise and organizing principles here. Ya know?
But hey, I don’t actually DO anything to help around here. I don’t want my perspective to come off entitled, and I deeply appreciate the work you and others do.
Maybe for these governance decisions, a primary post with the main info as is, and one or more top level comments with specific categories of additional info? Maybe a blurb or POV from each admin/mod team contributor, maybe a section with concrete “we want this to improve by doing such”, or etc.
As is, it’s beginning to ring alarm bells for me and requires too many assumptions.
Edit - to elaborate a little more since I never really manage to be brief, the biggest thing I’ve liked about this instance from when I first got to know it, is the commitment to transparency around decision-making. I’m just asking for that. If trying to change instance governance, the discussion among y’all should simply be here. I can imagine that poses some challenges.
So if that’s deemed unacceptable, and we’re to simply receive a condensed and unified blanket POV representing the team - that hasn’t actually been done unless that fact is presented and declared, ideally by all parties whose perspective fits under that blanket. Ideally with a dissenting one(s) too, if not all can accommodate the motion into their own actual wishes for the instance. OR we should be seeing varying other proposals (maybe we do?) and not what are apparently effectively committee-produced ones. See what I mean? Evidence of group decision, evidence of differing opinions, etc.
I’m more willing to make charitable assumptions with y’all than just about anywhere, and I’m telling y’all that even with that, this isn’t enough. I can’t tell how anyone feels but you, and the goals need some guesses too. But again, thank you for being the one willing to take the effort here.
Yes, you called me out directly for what you characterized as a borderline personal vendetta in that previous defense. I am glad that you seem to see some of the same signs and signals that I do. My alarm bells just happened to go off slightly sooner than yours, with more intensity. I believe we are coming from the same place of concern based on what you’ve said here.
I do take a somewhat less charitable view of how the admin conversations on these topics transpire. My perspective, and please note that this is my own personal imagining of events, is that an admin who has a pet governance topic takes that topic to the rest of the group. They make their case for it, and in the absence of much pushback, they post it for general governance discussion. Regardless of whether or not this is accurate, the plausibility of it based on what we observe directly should give us all pause. Hence, I previously suggested that Flatworm/unruffled should take a hiatus from admin duties.
The optics are off, and it is troubling.
I did, the bigger concern for me at that moment (and also by my view, over a less controversial measure) was concerns about admin burnout and similar.
I supported that governance decision and oppose this one. Your stance on the last one absolutely helped me better see and articulate what’s bothering me here, I thank you.
And further, your conduct kept that disagreement from getting unproductive, thanks for granting me the opportunity to disagree without it getting out of hand.
I find your POV more compelling than I did and now require a higher bar. Ultimately this place will not do well (nor function very differently, in practice) if we have to guess and imagine stories for ourselves about how these processes go. That has to change and it’s probably worth a governance change proposal on its own. Maybe I can be arsed someday, this is about as far as I get today sadly.
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NZS FCK OFF
ZIOS FCK OFF
I get why you are doing this, and while I can generally relate, this would shut off a huge portion of the fediverse from me. I am austrian and all german speaking and european communities are there. the loss would be significant. Lemmy already has a problem of a limited selection of topics and this would take one away,
Literally same (I’m from Germany tho), but them having no issue with outright Zionazi, vile evronationalist or NATO-bootlicking slop, while deleting leftists or just generally humanist comments (imagine not wanting a genocidal colonial entity to exist) because e.g.:
Israelis a state, not a “state”is entirely unacceptable. Banning those comms is what I believe to be a nice balance, keeps out their reactionary politics, while allowing for the rest of the communities to still be interacted with.
You can create an RSS feed or an alt on like IDK lemmy.zip
Edit: With how they have been reacting to this, and doubling down on the valid points in this post, I believe a full defend would be much better
This is a fediverse. You can follow those same communities with an account in some other server.
There already other german communities on other instancesbut they aren’t well visited.
You can follow those, too.
We were talking about this on a thread with some piefed developers, about the chapotraphouse folks over there at whatchacall it, the tankies. Idk about lemmy but piefed has other options, they said, like putting a sort of warning over their community, or users, or making people opt into seeing them, idk if like nsfw or something.
But yeah we don’t want to withdraw into echo chambers. At the same time as anti censorship as I am, when you have instances like theirs trolling people, brigading, harrassing under alt accounts, etc., you almost have to at some point or risk chasing off new or otherwise sensitive users. The same could be said for the zionists, especially as they are either fabrications of the US government ultimately, paid for influence operations by us, mechanized trolls, infuence agents, chatbots; or they are real people that for whatever reason support fascists in Israel.
I didn’t notice the instances but did run across a number of genocide deniers counter accusing everyone of being bigoted just the other day. Then playing victim when called on it, as usual. On reddit calling them on it means reddit will violate your account on unrelated posts that aren’t against the rules in short order, I noticed a pattern. You can’t back and forth with the influence agent accounts on reddit.
Anyway the one I talked to yesterday sure looked like an influence agent and there was a group, and a larger bloc of votes with them. I suspect government sponsored fuckery, mechanized troll divisions slumming it down on lemmy here, because somehow our leaders are more concerned with Israel having unqualified support than they are about the countries they supposedly represent. Might have something to do with them and their monied donors fucking children at epstein’s place that they have videos of.
That and all of our leaders are nihlistic, they believe in nothing other than self. There is nothing they wouldn’t support if it was in their interests to do. They would sell their own village out to a company poisoning their water and air if it served them. And because of all the child fucking support for Israel amongst the elite in the west, those sold out politicians naturally support them.
deleted by creator
Actually with their response to this being even more Zionazi bullshit, can we please just defed?
@Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com I agree. While we’re here doing this thread Emopunker is out there bad-jacketing the rest of our users and whining that we’re even having this discussion in the first place. There is nothing that could benefit from cooperation between Feddit at this point. If Feddit’s admins really do think that complaining about us in MeanwhileOnGrad to a Zionist troll who is also an ex Voat user I should add is prodictive, appropriate, or even acceptable. Then why should we even give them any consideration. It’s so clear by this point that most people who are here because of what we value do not want to be a part of it. It’s also clear the people who want to keep federating with them or who disapprove of the uncivil responses cited in the post do not have our instance’s best interests at heart.
Does anyone really think there is anything redeemable about an instance which allows Zionists, who’s admins go whine to a troll and lie about another instance’s users because they got banned from it and then that instance began considering defederation because of their shitty behavior which is seemingly backed up by the other admins by their refusal to remove or reprimand that admin for their shitty behavior. Is this even worth considering or debating at this point?
@borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com Are you literally stalking me through this whole fucking thread. You are pathetic. You don’t get to say I’m immature or refusing to disengage with you when the reason you won’t block me is that you’re stalking my threads because you hate what I’m saying. And you’ve been doing it since I posted the 3 threads about Zionist apologia on Feddit in the anarchism communities.
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Why are you tagging me? Please stop engaging with me this is completely unproductive.
i assume it’s because you were mass-downvoting Draconic NEO’s comments, including benign ones that didn’t involve you.
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Defed them entirely, we don’t need to allow a ZioNazi bar here.
Ban zionist existence!
I never see pro-Zio stuff on c/buyfromeu. I don’t interact much with feddit anyway, but I’m really not sure about this one.
Ok, thanks for the feedback.
Yeah I could agree with others, but c/buyfromeu seems off on the list.
That said, I’d probably vote for defederating whole feddit.org until their problems are solved, since it’s just not a single comm that’s problematic but the whole instance policy that’s promoting zionism
That’s a fair point. I voted down on the proposal, mostly because I don’t really know how things are on feddit as a whole and the one community I do know isn’t really Zionist… Not sure how /0 should proceed here, frankly.
this one is the only community I interact with feddit.org and I didn’t see any problem
