The Lemmy Club is currently suffering from “The Nazi Bar” problem. All of their top communities are run by three right-wingers as illustrated below.
The Lemmy Club instance admin doesn’t seem to want to ban them, for the reasons mentioned below:
This vote is on whether or not we should defederate from this instance until they address their Nazi Bar problem.
Upvote = for defederation. Downvote = against defederation.
Edit: As others have mentioned, happy to treat this a only a temporary measure until the problem is resolved.
Edit 2: The Lemmy Club admin has said they will implement a rule against right wing communities, and has taken action on some problematic posts and users (see original comments below).
I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the admin here, as they have responded in good faith:
If you implement those changes then I’d be willing to withdraw the defederation proposal and consider the problem resolved.
Voting against, as I don’t believe that jumping directly to talk of defederation is the best option. This stance by OP, along with their suggested method of handling the recent blahaj-related posts to YPTB, gives me pause with regards to their admin status. They have not crossed the line into authoritarian behavior or admin abuse, but it does feel that they are toeing that line.
It is good and justified to spotlight these issues and bring them up for discussion and consensus, which is what OP has done in both cases, but I question the extreme suggestions made in each circumstance.
I like what you said but I strongly disagree. We are not some agency that should hesitate via “guilt by association” when it comes to Nazi or similar right-wing ideology. It is not a slippery slope.
The amount of money spent by nation-states used to prop up these organizations and their ideologies, who are then responsible for misinformation that results in political power shifts that has destabilized the world makes it simple for me.
People are actually dying because of this misinformation, and it is a clear MO to take over social media platforms. Controlling this bot-infestation tactic is impossible, but mitigating of such influence on Lemmy it is absolutely necessary.
So yes, absolutely either defederate or otherwise get rid of any Nazi.
Quick edit: I take back most of what I said above. I’ll leave it there for posterity.
What I mean by “take it back”. The admin over there (I can’t quite see his name… my eyes are not great) is trying to grow his community and didn’t realize how bad some of that actually was. The final screenshot DB0 mentions that it seems reasonable at this time to hold off, since the account were banned. For now.
I’m a lurker at heart, but I’ll subscribe over there a try to post some things that are not harmful to the social structure. I tried something like that when Voat started up years ago,and it didn’t go so well, but Voat had bigger problems.
You seem to have come to the same conclusion I did, in a sense, but via a different route: the first option, imo, is to alert the instance admin as to what is going on within their instance. If they are unaware, they cannot stamp it out.
After they’ve been made aware, if they either choose to actively or passively condone such behavior then defederation is called for. If they continually “slip up” and such content falls through the cracks repeatedly after they’ve been made aware, that would also be grounds for defederation.
My stance is that the first course of action should be to actively push these bad actors out of spaces that they seek to take over rather than leave those spaces to them.