Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org's explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it's not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] "antisemitic" language, or they might get in trouble.
- 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. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for "Death to Israel" or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I've also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all... mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It's apparently "xenophobic" to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you'd prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that's the better option, then we'll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don't really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
btw, I already block feddit.org so the defederation makes no difference for me. I'm just always surprised by how this generation raised on Twitter is always so fast to treat everyone like children incapable of autonomy and critical thinking ("I know what's better for you" is what I'd expect from the ml instances). The Fediverse is a cool idea, unfortunately it's populated by a bunch of little Mussolinis, and cHaNGe InSTaNCe/HOsT YouR OwN means shit because the Fediverse is ruled by peer pressure and herd mentality. If I were to make an instance and believe the people on my instance are adults responsible for themselves, and as long as they abide by the rules of conduct of my instance so I don't have to host crap, I don't care which instances they interact with or who they talk to because that's none of my business, other instances would defederate from me just because they believe I have to defederate from the instances they don't like. Fucking childish.
It's pretty fucking childish of you to make libertarian demands to server owners because you would prefer unlimited federation and free speech but are unwilling to host or pay for an instance to do that yourself. People are allowed to run servers the way they choose, because you know, property rights (Just like a store owner can kick you out of his shop if you say things he doesn't like and he can refuse partnerships with companies he doesn't want to do business with).
You fash-jacketing people for running their own servers by their own (usually very reasonable) rules because they won't give full libertarian freedom to act like a piece of shit is also pretty shitty, and not in the spirit of our community.
If you find yourself being defederated or banned on mass scale you are doing something very wrong and are probably a shitty person. The very libertarian-esque arguments against defederation disingenuously talk about moderation and "limiting" being bad but they are disingenuous because they cut out what's being moderated from the discussion. Which is typically spam or hateful abuse, things people can't get behind and things that directly hurt spaces and turn them toxic. And yes this does include dogwhistles and polite forms of bigotry and apologia (i.e. "Is it offensive to say a trans woman doesn't have a cervix?" -BBC). And when you include how most servers are moderated and what they don't tolerate it paints a different picture, not just about the landscape of the fediverse but also the people who make libertarian style complaints about defederation.
Anyone who still holds these views about fediverse moderation really should be reconsidering whether they want to be on the Fediverse and not another distributed service like Nostr, which is everything you hope for from what you've been saying in terms of free speech, and the ability to choose what you want to see on your own single account.
One thing that should be made clear about Lemmy, Mastodon, and Fediverse instances in general, is that they aren't simply servers for you to take advantage of, their purpose isn't access to the Fediverse exclusively like what Nostr Relays are for Nostr. Some were but those largely died out due to lack of support or abuse. Their purpose, why their creators created them is that they wish to create their own community of like-minded people. The benefit of the Fediverse is that people don't have to sign up to this forum to post in this forum. But when you look at it that way instead of that the servers are limiting what you can see and do, it makes sense why they are doing it, and it also highlights how shitty yours and other freeze peach types rhetoric complaining about defederation and moderation actually is. These servers aren't here for you specifically, they're here because someone wanted to start their own community and space in the fediverse, and they are allowing you to use it out of the goodness of their hearts essentially.