It has blatant homophobia, transphobia, racism, vaccine anti-science misinformation, etc. What is mander stand on this?

  • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Hey @Sal@mander.xyz long time no see. Hope you are doing good. I just want you to be aware there is a active campaign to get every instance to defederate with exploding heads. Probably by Lemmy grad folks. Some of the offending content is likely posted by them. And they are using dozens of alts to attempt this. I think they are mad lemmygrad.com redirects there. Anyways, I don’t admin there but know the admins and would be happy to help you clean up any trolling or bad faith post coming from there. Even if you decide to cave to this mob (it’s really only a few with lots of alts) no big deal. Just want you to know the context because I came across your post.

    • SalamanderMA
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Thank you! I appreciate the warning. Long time no see indeed! I hope you and your family are doing well too!

      I can purge a few users, but if exploding-heads is used as a platform to launch a coordinated brigade against Mander, I will block it as soon as I see an indication of this to mitigate the attack. I fear that now that have spoken about this publicly, a massive target has been drawn, and the probability of this happening soon has sharply increased.

      At that point the brigadiers would have been successful, which is not something that I like, because I don’t think we should hand out so easily the power to cut off connections to those who come here with the purpose of manipulating the network and creating even more polarization than we already have.

      That said, removing the block at that point would require either the deployment of better moderation tools, the ability to soft-block instances and deployment of instance-blocks at the user level. I will always be open to dialogue and open to finding alternative solutions to prevent de-federation.

      • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Thanks. I’m researching some solutions to federation problems. This sort of situation is one of them. But right now I’m more interested in the nostr protocol. I think it has the potential to solve a lot of these problems. I think other people are working on the moderation tools. I may swing back and submit a pull request for improvements for some if no one else does. At the very least a user should be able to block a instance. That’s been asked for by lots of people and shouldn’t be to hard to do. And do what you need to it’s not my instance. I’m just trying to help out a little bit. I did ask them to enable email verification and I believe they did it.

      • Bloodbeech Forest
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        You seem to know this person so maybe you won’t be surprised by their posting history, but for anyone else, I recommend checking it out to get an idea of what to expect from that instance and some context to these discussions.

        The fact that you even hesitate to defederate from them is reason enough for me to abandon this ship before it turns into an intellectual dark web hub.

        https://slrpnk.net may be a reasonable alternative for some of us who are closer to the intersection of nature, science, sustainability, and decentralisation of power and wealth.

        • SalamanderMA
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yes, I “know” him. Masterofballs was the administrator of a right-wing instace (wolfballs) - it was the predecessor of exploding-heads.com. He was very active in the Lemmy community, and contributed to the development to an extent. Eventually he was banned from lemmy.ml, possibly due to user pressure, and later on closed his instance to focus on other projects. I disagree with Masterofballs in pretty much all political issues, as I am much more aligned with ‘left-leaning’ policies and he is more aligned with ‘right-leaning’. I am also not a ‘free-speech’ absolutist like he is, nowhere near that! But we do share in common our interest for decentralized social networks.

          https://slrpnk.net may be a reasonable alternative for some of us who are closer to the intersection of nature, science, sustainability, and decentralisation of power and wealth.

          Thank you for that suggestion! I have checked, and they do block exploding-heads. I think https://slrpnk.net is a great alternative to those looking for an alternative tech-related community that has a slightly more strict federation policy, but is still very open.

          As I have said in other comments before, if someone wants to create a science-based instance that has a more strict policy, I am more than happy to help.

          • Bloodbeech Forest
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            If you put the url (instead of the community alias) into the search field it will retrieve it if it isn’t yet federated (which is probably the reason it can’t find it by alias). It’s an unfortunate UX quirk.

            • TonyTonyChopper
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Actually I got it to work on my PC browser. It only bugs on the Liftoff app. It also doesn’t work with the link on this app.