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!)
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don’t have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t pay attention as closely.
I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I’ve seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I’ve left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you’re foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons…). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.