But that’s what’s happening now? They broke their own rules - not merely removing comments, but also mass-banning from communities people have never commented in before, and then deleting the mod log entries afterwards. The former is not ideal but expected, the middle is… extremely excessive and warrants all of this right there alone, but the latter bumps the whole matter up significantly to be outright disingenuous, so that “that side” making its case is no longer expected to yield any results, given the not only manipulative but outright deceptive practices that have been (allegedly) proven.

I do worry about the use of a pejorative term though. In thinking about it more, I waffle back and forth between it should never be done, vs. whether someone can “earn” that badge not by holding a belief but by their actions?

We should definitely respect their contributions to the code and actually I would guess that they may legit believe that what they are doing (supporting China by suppression of alternate viewpoints, using any means necessary including ones that violate and abuse their own code of conduct) is right. But that does not make it so.

It seems really hard for some people to turn down free stuff: If Dessalines is receiving money from the Chinese or other fascist government to develop the Lemmy sourcecode, even if only partially funding the project alongside other funding from e.g. the EU, then I can well understand why he would want to see them kept happy - on top of what he may feel personally. And then in turn people on the Fediverse seem only too happy to accept that free software, rather than make an alternative (Mbin being in its infancy still).

That said, a lot has changed in the last year (I wasn’t on Lemmy then, though I was on Kbin.social) even as a lot remains the same. For one, I am told that this is the first time that Dessalines has been caught red-handed manipulating the database mod logs - it is one thing to hold authoritarian viewpoints, another to do mass-removals of lets be honest people who are quite often rude & condescending & it at least makes sense to some that they might deserve it (“first they came for…”), but it is a whole other matter entirely to cover up the latter fact later. Your counter here should be “is it though, really?”, which would be an excellent point, except again I refer to the earlier point that people like free stuff, and also it’s just easier to go along with the flow…

But the other big change should give us some hope: there are now more communities than there were, back then. Free moderation done by people on Lemmy.ml might not transfer over if the community were to move elsewhere, hence lemmy.ml held the Fediverse hostage by holding those communities, and yet that means less now than it used to. See for instance the discussion at https://sh.itjust.works/post/20461175, and in particular the instance admin imaqtpie’s response, summed up as “the complaints are not without substance… However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction…” It goes on with outright praise to remaining - “That [defederation] seems really lame and somehow duplicitous… I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling… I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine. TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them.” In short, if a user on that instance were to accidentally walk into chapotraphouse (hexbear.net is also not defederated on that instance) and say something that would anger the trolls and get you brigaded (from their discord server), then that’s not the problem of the instance admin of sh.itjust.works to protect their users from such a mistake. I have not yet seen similar discussions on other instances e.g. Lemmy.World but feel free to point me to them if you are aware of any.

And too, we do now have the ability to block individual instances on our own… which isn’t nothing. Except (a) it doesn’t work, b/c their comments still show up, and their votes are still applied to us (which furthermore, especially if part of a brigade campaign, can affect whether people even see a post at all or not, if you can work in more downvotes than upvotes early on and thereby prevent it from appearing on Hot and from there go viral - it’s yet another important tool in the fascist toolbox to control the conversation, except they really really would like it very much please and thank you if you would just pretend that you did not know that this even exists… - hence not adding the capability to reveal who is doing the downvoting to the codebase!?), and (b) the most vulnerable among us, the new users, won’t know any of this, and so will most easily fall into the trap (this one too, fascists would please just like it very much if you would go along with pretending that it does not happen, ever). With the ability to block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, I got cocky and started recommending Lemmy to people that I know irl, however upon thinking it over in greater depth, I am afraid to do that anymore. It is like Linux - if I set it up for them or walk them through it that is one thing, but to just say “you should use [Arch?:-P] linux btw”, that is quite insensitive to their needs, knowing full well how much pain is in their short-term future as they struggle to come to terms with this very large & exceedingly complex structure.

Why not make it easier on new users, by preemptively defederating from Nazi fascist instances?!? I dunno, you tell me…

In the meantime, I am impressed to see people working to overcome the existing obstacles, so that even if not now or in the next few months, perhaps one day we can get there, e.g. https://reddthat.com/post/20197120.