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: +6.3
• Percentage: 81.00%

This vote will complete in 5 days

Pro complete defederation. Same reason instances don't federate with Nazi instances. Nazism and Zionism are both just different forms of fascism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NZS FCK OFF

ZIOS FCK OFF

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Actually with their response to this being even more Zionazi bullshit, can we please just defed?

Defed them entirely, we don’t need to allow a ZioNazi bar here.

Ban zionist existence!

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.

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,

Non-db0 making a non-voting comment:

Careful now, or you'll provoke some people that stand with Epstein!

voting to defed the instance

our anti-zionism rule follows the same fallacy, as anti-semitism laws in many european did: it is too narrow and too broad at the same time.

it is too broad in a sense that we talked about banning problematic users. now we talk about banning communities, which cover much of a language. dach is a big collection bucket for europeans speaking german. in their sidebar they mention, that they want to keep palestine / israel discussions out of the comm - which is fair play IMO.

it is too narrow in a sense, that it is hyper focussed on one issue. zionists are bad and commit atrocities, which need to be harshly reprehended. but there are many bad things, which do not get caught by this rule. as an example: what happens to the uyghur population in china is simply not ok. still .ml is an instance, which quite openly denies that anything even happens. yet we are not discussing banning accounts and or communities, which do these things.

i would much rather have an anti-discrimination rule, which covers zionism, racism, sexism, discrimination on hair colour, medical things, ... this rule should also define what actions we can and want to take again who and what.

this would cover more problems, while not excluding anyone. hopefully also reduce needed arguments.

Just want to point out that in my experience, outside Germans the "Euro" public are generally against what Israel has been doing in Palestine. Those more politically aware who know what that is are against Zionism explicitly.

The exception is of course for the Far-Right types who, of course, love the whole white-colonialist thing.

IMHO:

Germany has massive issues with still holding hard to the mental framework from the "good old days" were people are just deemed members of etnic groups based on things they were born with, and are treated above all based on the ethnic group they "belong to", rather than Modern Humanism were people's deserved treatment is based on their need and their actions.

Because of this profoundly backwards Prejudiced and Racist foundational element of moral thinking widespread in German, it was a lot easier for the ethno-Fascist Zionists to subvert guilt in Germany into support for Zionism and the Zionist Genocide, as well as cultivating Islamophobia.

The same backwards moral fundational element also explains the ease of expansion of AfD and their ideology in Germany.

Not to say other countries in Europe don't have Prejudice, Racism or even support for 19th century style white-colonialism, just saying that Germany seems to have a far more insidious problem than most in that regards due to this specific foundational piece having been repeatedly reinforced in the broad political discourse in Germany even while in other countries in Europe openly singling out people's ethnicity and demanding ethnically-discriminatory treatment (either "positive" or negative) was frowned upon.

Just want to point out that I don't at all think all Germans are like this.

Not even close.

My point is that this kind of thinking is more widespread and normalized in Germany, were it's constantly pushed by the Press and Politicians of most colors (which is why even the Greens were pro-Israel during the worst of the Genocide in Gaza, unlike any other Green party in Europe)

Death to zionists!
Fuck feddit.org for allowing these fascists.
Oooh they're German? say no more.

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.

I don't see why we have to limit the reach of our community to keep it safe. How does the nazibar parable apply? Isn't this just censorship with a mighty dose of virtue signalling?

I'm subbed to c/europe because that's the most happening European sub. I'm more concerned the place is being overrun by guardian posts than any type of fascist apologia.

I don't know if I have a vote, but a big nay from me on this one. 🐎

"you should be lined up against a wall and shot"

"Kill yourself"

It blows my mind how this type of speech is being used by the op as proof that they're on the right side of things. This is so wack that some part of me wants to believe this is some kind of social experiment to find out how far you can push people on social media until they push back against the echo chamber.

But I doubt it is. It seems more likely that this mod is leveraging his position to instrumentalize this community and shape it after his own vision of political activism. All under a laughable guise of democracy. Every single vote on this instance has been presented in a biased and manipulative way that leaves no doubt what the outcome "should" be. How very democratic of you. Slow clap.

Hey, unruffled: your attempts at social engineering and radicalization are ham-fisted and painful to watch.

I initially joined db0 because it seemed like one of the more heterogenous communities on Lemmy. That there was no clear label that comes with the db0 tag like "the tankie" (hexbear) or "the normie" (world). That it had the shortest list of defederations in comparison with the other bigger instances.

Over the past few months this has changed. There has been a shift towards echo chamber, armchair revolution and increasingly more hateful language. Give it three more votes and you'll be voting in favor of roasting babies on a stick. Because free Palestine, or Zionism, or something. SMH.

I don't like being told what to think about a certain topic. Even when that view aligns with my own. And before the mob frothing at the mouth charges at me - yes I'm German and yes, free Palestine and down with Israel (preferably with not a single additional life lost).

For all instance members reading this:

"Don't worry you'll get the wall"

Do you want to be associated with people who unironically spout this type of hatred? I don't. Bye, db0

I have no say in governance decisions here but for context, I have all of feddit completely blocked because I could not tolerate the bullshit that came across my feed originating from that imstance. 🤮

I would suggest members of db0 vote for defereration in spite of the implications for the network.

Just yesterday I had an odd interaction with an .ml user who reposted a straight-up nazi tweet, by a nazi profile, even with their own thread title resembling a frequent nazi dogwhistle. Several non-.ml users, apparently mostly from feddit, pointed out the post looks like it was posted by a nazi. .ml users responded in part by attacking their instance allegiance (calling them "whingy fedditers"). Since I posted enough clear evidence of the Twitter profile being a fascist, OP commendably deleted their thread.

What I saw there is feddit users being met with a hate boner from .ml and their correct suspicions of a tweet that looks antisemitic indeed being antisemitic being ignored and made light of.

That's my personal experience with feddit and its zionism, and consequently I've ended up suspicious of some of Lemmy users' standards regarding this whole matter.

The examples of feddit moderation posted here in OP are almost entirely sanctions against grave personal attacks. I am completely unconvinced that this is proof of the moderators' zionist positions. "Fuck you, you piece of trash" and "fuck you and your whole family" is not "a few hard truths". I'm also unsure if I get the context right, is mrdown a Palestinian? Many of those comments break the most elementary civility standards and verge into murderous fantasies.

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.

Then say it like that? No, destroying a country is not the same as overthrowing its regime, those are different things. I support the latter with regards to Israel, but would hardly dare say the former.

This post was supposed to convince me feddit's behaviour is problematic. I come away with the opposite impression. So, I vote against the bans.

voting to defed the instance, we should not tolerate any instance that actively chooses to harbor fascists, and the admins seem to largely agree with the decisions the mods of these oomms made.

I forgot about that instance after they did their "compliance" requirement against free speech lol.

Just defed them.

As a not-a-db0-member, thank you for your attention on this matter.

(yes, I get the irony)

Defederate from Feddit.org, enough is enough!

Unsure if I'm allowed to participate here, so delete please if inappropriate.

I have always been of the impression that banning single accounts reactively to what they post is more work but also more impactful in terms of teaching people to view a problematic world view with the required precision in choosing to express their views.

On the one hand a blanket ban decreases engagement and encourages radicalization through isolation.

On the other hand would engaging with them allow people to see what precisely is a balanced take with precision to what you want to say.

You showed evidence from the modlog that exists only because people were able to engage, stopping that would reduce workload for mods but reduce engagement in political discussion.

Lastly, in this lost you went and made a more precisee statement about who needs fighting in Israel, which was encouraged by the modlog morsels. So again I ask: is that not useful? It teaches to avoid overgeneralization, which a lot of people need very much to learn.

Our German politicians for example. they, like most of our populace, react reflexively negative to anything anti Semitic. Because of our shared cultural shame around the genocide. On the other hand we see ideally politicians acting line we did back then and feel as uneasy as you do. So we do what Germans to, we find a more precise way to express what we see. Overgeneralization of redderic against Jews is bad, specification of anti Israeli genocide sentiment good.

I think it would be in the interest of your cause not to blanket ban and instead add another well balanced volunteer mod to your ranks. :)

I vote to defederate the whole instance as well.

Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the ~~Middle East~~ world

I'm all for banning the listed communities, although I'd candidate giving their c/buyfromeu a temporary pass given the other societal context surrounding it (finding and promoting alternatives to produces and services from the US, the other big zionist state in the list). How long a pass? Uuuuh dunno, something like three strikes or whatever.

Regarding Note 2: For the time being I am against a full instance ban, but I expect that position to change. I understand that some people want to still see them so they can "refute their bullshit" but let's be honest, when has that ever worked? We all know f.o are going to double down on their fascism because they feel they have the backing mandate (power) of a state, and those here willing to go and try "ackshually"ing them, are free to do so via an account elsewhere.

id rather get into arguments with zionists than stick my head in the sand and hope they change on their own.

They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] "antisemitic" language, or they might get in trouble.

Just following orders like good obedient German citizens

I'll sit out the vote itself, because I don't have enough personal interaction with Reddit to form an unbiased view of their workings.

That being said, I'm pretty cautious towards the idea of defederation; if the issue primarily stems from those communities, I'd prefer targeted bans. Otherwise, we're only shutting ourselves out as dissenting voices, which only leads to more of an echo chamber effect on feddit.

Don't hide from those who need confronting.

Ban 'em. If they want to host literal genocide enabling content. Its undeniable at this point and if you are still supporting Israel you can join them in Cocitus.

They say they are just complying with German, Austrian, and Swiss laws. If criticising Israel is illegal under said laws, I'd rather just shut down feddit.org entirely than comply. If it were me.

I am not a member of your server, but I think it's amongst the top 4 best servers on the threadiverse. I have a great deal of respect for your server and the communities that have come to be on it. I would advise that when dealing with a -----bar on the fediverse, be that a nazi-bar, a zionist-bar, or any other kind of authoritarian-bar, the smaller concern isn't if there's things on it your users will miss (with the threadiverse, those things are communities) and the bigger concern is how the problem figures that have coagulated in that bar act and behave when they engage with the things originating on your server. I commend the desire to do this gracefully, but if you're going to limit yourselves to blocking communities (which will ultimately limit your own users more than feddit.org's users, though I'm not sure your users will be bothered or that their users will notice), I think you ABSOLUTELY MUST plan a period of time to revisit this. I'd probably say 1 month. If next month you feel that what you're seeing on your server is improved in the way you want it to, then leave it be, and if not then de-federate.

Otherwise, I would recommend immediate defederation if this is a recurring problem. These fediverse servers all act as garden parties. Blocking communities at other garden parties is less effective at combating bad behavior than not letting people through the gate in your garden. If this path is followed, I'd recommend maintaining channels of communication between the admins of both instances for 6 months to see if and how things change.

Again. I am not a member here. More of an outside observer with a ton of respect with a little bit of input after years of being in online spaces and having very little tolerance for bad faith behavior. You can take or reject these observations depending on how you align with them. Hell, I may even be full of shit. But one of us leftists' greatest weaknesses and greatest strength is our tolerance. The strength is in that it helps us build coalitions and confront our own biases. The weakness is that bad faith actors exploit this to string us along and keep making our spaces worse on purpose, so I tend to support a relatively strict federation/defederation policy and to let users find the admin teams that align best to their own desired defederation policy.

Im not usually a fan of defederating over differences in moderation. Frankly, I dont pay attention to their communities because they're the next most libbed instance next to .world or piefed.

I guess im alright with it if that's where the vote takes us, but I honestly dont find them threatening. They've backed themselves into a corner by hitching their wagon to Israel, and i think they're so outnumbered here that they've basically ostracized themselves anyway.

I agree the mods are using antisemitism as a bit of a blanket power for abuse, but this whole post just sounds like personal beef.

Their rules look reasonable and most of their mod logs look acceptable. Some of the removed comments are over the top hate.

I never see these posts in my feed but I would disagree with this ban.

I agree that these communities should be blocked, however I am much more in favor of defederating Feddit as a whole and not just banning these communities. This is because it is Feddit as a platform who enables this behavior, and who ultimately is suppressing anti-Zionist and antifascist voices, while making bad faith arguments to defend Zionism. Including threatening and ultimately defederating other instances for calling them out on it as well as their admins coming here to apologize for Zionism.

The problems with Feddit run much deeper than a few communities being run by Zionist apologists. They run as deep as the management of the site itself. So blocking these communities isn't enough. I believe more will spring up in the future, not necessarily to replace them but because their userbase is predominantly Zionists or Zionist apologists.

They are bad news, we don't need them, and they clearly don't want us. Their admin agreeing with a known Zionist troll and implying we wish to cause harm to Israeli citizens just further proves this:

Feddit is bad news, more than just a few communities there, if they don't do serious work to change we shouldn't be connected with them. If anyone here really wants to be a part of Feddit that badly, you can make an account there or a server that federates with it, likewise with any feddit user who wishes to be on dbzer0.

With how big some of those communities are, blocking them is paramount to defederating from the instance itself in terms of losing access to posts unrelated to Israel or Zionism (a quarter of Lemmy monthly active users are subscribed to !europe@feddit.org).

Zionism should be spoken out against, but the repercussions of further Threadiverse fragmentation should also be considered. Just as troubling are extremist posts on lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear. However, if their federation is maintained with the benefit of Threadiverse unity gained (with the user retaining the option of implementing their own blocks), then what amounts to partial defederation with another major instance in this case should also be avoided.

I concur with those calling for full defederation. If they see the error of their ways, we can refederate.

I don't see that happening anytime soon as the instance mods are more than happy to use Germany's bad laws to shield their own racism and fascism.

Yeah ditch em. No space for folks like that.

Shore up the yardarms, me hearties. We need to rid ourselves of a few fascists.

If feddit.org is harboring these ass-bags, then they're part of the problem. The issue I see with only banning the communities from showing here is that the users within those communities don't likely know they've been censured.

Playing devil's advocate for my own stance, I should say that the "right" thing to do would be to give them enough rope to hang themselves from the yardarm themselves. In other words, if they're feddit.org user and start spouting Zionist shit on db0, then they're probably someone that should be outright disallowed.

uh. ok. fuck me, i guess.

Although I don't have the time to research the communities we're proposing to ban from feddit.org, I'm glad we're targeting communities first based on evidence rather than banning entire instances outright because of our intuitions.

Wholeheartedly agree that we should isolate Zionists though. Fuck em.

As for the future, I agree that we should consider re-federating with these communities if 1) they change their policies to prohibit Zionists and the other points OP mentions, and 2) they show consistent mod logs that adhere to those policies, seeking deplatforming of mods that fail to apply compliance correctly.

Edit: instance-wide policy changes would also go hard, as others have said. It's in our interest to notify anti-Zionist users on Feddit.org that their instance safeguards Zionists because we're looking out for their best interests. Cutting off complete contact can shake things up enough for anti-Zionists to recognize why there is a defederation/ban. If we ban just the communities, then we won't have as wide of an impact.

Curious to have the debate with other db0-ers

Edit 2: we could also consider completely defederating from these communities, then doing temporary protest defederation bursts with Feddit.org overall so normies over there get notified of our reasons for defederating on a frequent basis. Defederating from Feddit.org although one time will have a short term effect of informing the people there. Regular (or irregular) bans for defined periods of time can offer more chances of visibility and lasting impact, while upholding the Fediverse and staving off mass fracturization.

Feddit

A little on the nose...

Hope you guys cut em loose.

Ban anyone trying to foster a purely pro Zionist point of view

banning the communities is a no-brainer (yes); we already have a ban on pro-Zionism. (I do wonder how !buyfromeu@feddit.org is involved in all this though; I found absolutely no mentions of "semit" in the federated modlog and I'm too tired to visit the original modlog rn.)

but I'm really unsure about banning the entire instance, as many here seem to suggest. you have convinced me that Emopunker is clueless at best and [REDACTED] at worst, but I would want to see more evidence that this has created a problematic user or moderation culture than some actions of one admin and one mod (plus one user ban without context performed by another mod). three quarters of the screenshots here deal with removal reasons like saying "fuck off you piece of trash" and editing the headline that just happen to be applied to anti-Zionist content. maybe there's some context of discriminatory enforcement i can't see here, but "choice morsels" should really show the best evidence we have.

i think we should make a separate thread with said stronger evidence to decide on the instance ban.

(p.s.: as a Wikipedia editor I am also very fond of the "Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves" argument mentioned)

What would we actually be losing in a full instamcd ban?

Im more interested in getting zionazi users off.

Edit: off my feed, not... Fuck

If we ban then, no one from here can see or refute their bullshit.

Cool infighting. Why does it always go this way? How embarrassing. The butthurt is real.

Oh no, feddit.org don´t allow me to wish death to people because of their origin. /s

I think Feddit.org should probably study and read socialist theory. Seriously! https://redsails.org/