It was banned on Reddit because it is racist, hatefull and spread Conspiracies.
In my new community I expect the exclution of racist communities. It is easy now with defederation. Nazis can do whatever they want on their instances, but the instances I want to be part of should not amplify their shit and flush it into our timelines.
The instance-admin of !thedonald@sh.itjust.works did not reply to my message. Big instances seem not to defederate with them.
The new TD may not be a success, the point is not to give Nazis a platform like it is happening now. Fans of TD are racists.
Where are the instances that show face against racism?
edit: to contact the admins: @donut @TheDude @smorks
edit2: @TheDude deleted the community :)
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Definitely better to just block the community in other instances instead of total defederation. Admins can do so pretty easily. I know beehaw is usually pretty proactive about this kind of stuff.
And yeah…fuck Donald Trump. He’s fucked up the US so hard and has put our country into such a mess. I hope they nail his ass straight to jail.
Seriously. Defederation should be a last resort against spammers and outright attacks on other instances, not because you dont agree with a single community.
Historically this group has been responsible for an absolute shitload of spam and outright attacks.
I was doxxed by them. They had links to a discord group that included my full name, address, email, and phone number. There was a whole list, it’s one of the first reasons they were quarantined. There was a comment that read “anyone with spare bullets can send them here”.
This is a lot more than “I simply don’t agree with that community”. They are trash who will trash up any platform they can reach.
Defederating from an entire instance for one community seems a bit overblown tbh. Blocking would prob be effective enough. That said, beehaw will likely be most proactive in removing td nonsense from its feed
sh.itjust.works hosts it. They should kick them out.
Hm, is it possible the community was already kicked by the instance? I don’t find it.
The problem isn’t just that community, it’s the people who follow. They’re not the kind of people we should try to attract here.
They’re probably the same people who were active in fatpeoplehate and other malicious subs too, and it’s better not to wait for that to happen. If it doesn’t get handled now, their toxicity will likely spill over into other communities
Everyone keeps repeating that defederation should be a last resort. Fine, but we should also acknowledge that the list of resorts is very short:
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Server admins talk to the admins of the server hosting the offending community, in an attempt to get them to clean their house. If they don’t;
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Defederate.
There really isn’t anything else for server operators to do that isn’t just letting the offending community continue unabated.
Offloading the responsibility to individual users to block users / communities is lazy. Most of us don’t want to spend our limited time playing whack-a-mole.
I suspect we’ll see user accounts shuffling around so that they land on a home server whose defederation policy matches their preferences.
I think instance owners need to be able to block specific communities in other instances instance-wide.
So, if lemmy.ml wants to block c/the Donald!sh.itjust.works they should be able to block that community for all users of lemmy.ml, but not the rest of the sh.itjust works instance.
Best of both worlds IMO
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I think deleting the sub is the right call simply because it’s trying to replace a community that did enough in the past to deserve a ban on any platform.
Tired of all the calls for defederation though.
Nazis shouldn’t be able to do what they want on their own instances either, they should be crushed there as they should in every space
But also blacklisting is a basic first step that everyone should do, so you aren’t wrong there.
In defense of some instance admins, I think they can just literally not know because it’s hard to keep tabs on every instance that gets made, but that also means that, if you use that instance, you should totally DM them to let them know (I’ve had to do this with certain other instances). If the admins persistently ignore those warnings, they should be treated as complicit.
The absolute hypocrisy of sh.itjust.works banning lemmygrad, a communist instance dedicated to the working people of the world and the antithesis of fascism, yet allowing the potential for fascists to find a community on their server.
I wouldn’t de-federate sh.itjust.works for that now. But stuff like this doesn’t look good and the “Just ignore it bro” crowd shows that they never had to deal with organized harassment themselves. The_Donald wasn’t just a harmless sub with a little bit of trolling, it was responsible for extreme radicalization and people died because of it. The reality is that such hate groups never stay in their place and behave everywhere else. They brigade and harass every time. Should the community grow and attract more people, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. People are responsible for their own instance and are free to choose whatever they want but that’s the same for other servers if they should decide to de-federate.
And that was indicated when they migrated to Voat. Nobody else used Voat, it was just them. Also when reddit changed their policies to prevent one sub from appearing on the front page more than once.
The whole point is to be obnoxious in spaces where it isn’t welcome. When they realized they couldn’t do that on a platform that only consisted of them, there was no incentive to engage. The whole point is to shit up a platform enjoyed by others, and that’s exactly what they’ll do here.
Wasn’t The Donald originally a subreddit making fun of trump? I saw that TD was created here but my assumption was they wanted to restore the original purpose. I haven’t looked at it since then though.
Edit: Nope. It is in fact a pro trump community.
theres a antifascist placeholder on https://lemmy.world/c/the_donald
I think that’s the one I saw originally.
If you go to your settings, you’ll see “Blocks” at the top. There you can search “donald” on the right side and you can block all three that currently exist. I just found that out a few minutes ago.
I’m not informed enough on Trump to know if “Trump supporter” automatically implies “Nazi”. The r/TD community itself was cancer, I believe. Still - for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend that all Trump supporters are Nazi, and that the comm is about people genuinely supporting Trump.
The main problem here is that you got exactly two subscribers in a rather large instance. From the PoV of other instances, to defederalise shitjustworks is the same as using a nuclear bomb to get rid of a cockroach. At least at this stage, IMO actions in other instances should be towards that community and its users, not the whole instance.
And, within shitjustworks: if the admins have a laissez faire approach, I think that actions are up to the users.
Also I wouldn’t generally link my own blog here, given that I use it mostly to vent, but this might be food for thought for the folks here. I think that analogies between ants in a kitchen and undesired users are specially useful: you don’t want to nuke the kitchen because of a single ant, but you don’t want to leave it do as it pleases either.
If the admins have a laissez faire approach, then they can go fuck themselves. The difference between a nuke and defederation (well, there are many, but the main one here) is that defederation can be undone. If the admins don’t like their instance being isolated, they can fix the problem by getting rid of the comm. If they are that committed to allowing the comm, then it is correct to keep them defederated.
The one caveat I will give is that it would be incumbent on the other instances to follow through on overturning the blacklist – and making sure their peer instances do – if shitjustworks actually does comply eventually.
If the admins have a laissez faire approach, then they can go fuck themselves.
Note that, by laissez faire approach, I don’t mean “do nothing at all”; that’s incompetence, and incompetent admins go fuck themselves, as you said. For me, laissez faire means “keep a close watch on the situation, and intervene if necessary, but otherwise let the userbase handle it”.
And in this case you got a rather engaged community, who’s most likely prone to engage those Nazi, and tell them to fuck off. Is admin intervention necessary in this case?
I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach would be a good approach in this specific case, but it’s generally a good “default” - often people managing communities cause more harm than good when they’re trying to proactively solve issues that didn’t appear yet.
The difference between a nuke and defederation (well, there are many, but the main one here) is that defederation can be undone.
That’s a great point - the reversibility makes the option less drastic. Still annoying for legitimate users and admins of other instances.
Note that, by laissez faire approach, I don’t mean “do nothing at all”; that’s incompetence, and incompetent admins go fuck themselves, as you said. For me, laissez faire means “keep a close watch on the situation, and intervene if necessary, but otherwise let the userbase handle it”.
“If necessary” is doing all of the work there. By your meaningless definition of the word, I agree that’s a good approach, but you’re letting insinuation occupy the entire point in dispute. We both know what “laissez-faire” actually means, and I think the Gilded Age showed us what a shit approach it is.
And in this case you got a rather engaged community, who’s most likely prone to engage those Nazi, and tell them to fuck off. Is admin intervention necessary in this case?
Yes, it is. I am quite familiar with how these dynamics work – I followed r/cth for about a year before it was quarantined. It was probably the most-hated sub of its time outside of literal Nazi subs (remember TD was long-inactive at that point). People complained about it all over the place for a variety of reasons, both good and bad faith. With all the controversy, do you know what it never was before it got quarantined? And honestly not even before it was banned? Neutralized. The vocal hatred against it fed its growth, and the userbase was quite aware of this fact and took advantage of it actively. When it was finally banned, the slide in Reddit’s entire user culture on the popular and political subs was palpable, and that transformation took maybe a month.
Now, unlike the Reddit admins, I won’t equivocate between TD and cth, they were not the same in a pat little horseshoe theory conception because horseshoe theory is horseshit. That said, it nonetheless stands as a glaringly obvious counter example to your flimsy market solution – as does most of Reddit’s history before that, with various places much worse than cth festering quite aggressively until the admins banned it, either for their own reasons – like cth – or external political reasons starting from jailbait to fatpeoplehate through to WatchPeopleDie.
I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach would be a good approach in this specific case, but it’s generally a good “default” - often people managing communities cause more harm than good when they’re trying to proactively solve issues that didn’t appear yet.
Market solutions rarely work except for the rich and their lackeys, and the people who propose relying on them without any specific evidence should be regarded with suspicion. I’ve heard these libertarian spiels a thousand times before and, well, the only mistake I’ve ever made with libertarian ideology is not having enough contempt for it – which I say having never respected it to begin with.
That’s a great point - the reversibility makes the option less drastic. Still annoying for legitimate users and admins of other instances.
Oh, it’s annoying is it? That’s such a shame, that it’s annoying. I’ll be sure to tell the minorities pushed out of the Nazi bar that preventative measures are possible but really should not be implemented because they would be annoying.
Please, give a stronger tell that you don’t give a shit for the people this more gravely impacts that you acknowledge how reversible this is and yet think that it’s still too much of a hassle because it’s annoying.
Relevant details: 1) the community was removed already, so I’ll discuss the implications if it wasn’t; 2) I’ll quote things out of order; 3) there’s a TL;DR: near the end.
By your meaningless definition of the word […]
We both know what “laissez-faire” actually means
By “laissez faire” I do not mean the economic approach. I was using the expression more literally; roughly “let them handle it”, or “you let do”. This is clear by context, since the topic does not revolve around macroeconomics¹ (“market” this, “market” there). Context, use it.
The definition is not useless, as it’s also clear that we were assigning different values to the expression. Words and expressions don’t have “actual” (intrinsic, well-defined and immutable) meanings, they change per person and sometimes per utterance². Learn to handle this.
That said: onwards I’ll call it OIAN (Only Intervene As Necessary), to avoid ambiguity, since you struggle with this sort of thing. The underlying reasoning stays the same no matter which words are used to convey it, be it laissez faire or OIAN or wug or waka-waka or gkfdshjs.
and I think the Gilded Age showed us what a shit approach it is.
After a quick check in Wikipedia: why do you assume that I know random historical events from random countries across the globe? I’m not from USA. Stop trying to build a digital wall, e-Trump style³.
With that out of the way:
“If necessary” is doing all of the work there.
Yet another assumption: that “all the work” won’t change from instance to instance, and that you know exactly what is supposed to be.
Under an OIAN approach, confronting a Nazi who’s “playing along” (for now) should be up to the community. If it’s OIAN for the Nazi, it’s OIAN for everyone else. Three things might happen:
- The Nazi leaves on his own. Problem solved.
- The Nazi starts breaking the rules of the place (including “don’t promote hate”). They do it often when confronted enough. Then admin intervention is deserved and necessary (as non-admins can’t ban.)
- The Nazi neither leaves, nor break the local rules. He won’t be able to bring new Nazi into the table, with the community battering him.
Under an “it’s up to the admins to tie the shoes of the baby users” approach, the admins themselves should dictate the following:
- That Donald support = hate, thus against the rules; or
- That wearing a clear provocative username = trolling, thus against the rules⁴;
- etc.
This kind of “we dictate this, we dictate that” piles up over time, leading to abuse of a strict approach. Plenty examples of that from Reddit⁵: user got a problem? “MODS, SOLVE IT FOR ME”. Mod got a problem? “ADMINS, SOLVE IT FOR ME”. It leads into powermods, rogue admins, huge lists of rules that got broken all the time (each to address a new tiny issue) and opening even more grey areas for selective enforcement. And guess what, you’re empowering the admins in detriment of the users by that.
Yes, it is. I am quite familiar with how these dynamics work – I followed r/cth for about a year before it was quarantined. […] and that transformation took maybe a month.
Emphasis mine - even if we disregard that this is a big “chrust me” (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you’re just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote), there’s a second issue here: it disregards that r/chapotraphouse was an already established community, full of people reinforcing each other’s behaviour. The TD @ shitjustworks however had literally one active user.
If we got an actual gathering of people in TD @ shitjustworks, then perhaps the dynamic would be similar. Perhaps. I’m not too eager to be an assumer.
Now, unlike the Reddit admins, I won’t equivocate between TD and cth […]
I believe that I get what you mean by mentioning CTH - it’s an example for the dynamic. I won’t assume crap like “than u think dat TD = CTH? lol”
If I had to take a guess, I think that the admins in Reddit didn’t really equate TD=CTH. They banned CTH to throw a bone to the right-wing users, because they still wanted those users in their platform; they just didn’t want that content due to the advertisers not liking it. That should not happen in the Lemmyverse, as those users themselves are undesirable.
Oh, it’s annoying is it? That’s such a shame, that it’s annoying. I’ll be sure to tell the minorities pushed out of the Nazi bar that preventative measures are possible but really should not be implemented because they would be annoying.
OK, now you’re just distorting what I said, for the sake of yet other three fallacies: appeal to emotion, extended analogy, and strawman.
I’m not saying “don’t kick out the Nazi”. I’m saying “letting the users kick out the Nazi might be an option”. Is the difference clear?
Think on the differences between the RL bar and a Lemmy instance, not just the similarities. I’ll list three for you:
- A bar is not a collective effort. It’s a business, with a specific group of people being responsible for it. A lemmy instance however should not be seen as the admin’s business, but as a collective effort.
- The barman likely knew far better how his clients would [not] behave towards the Nazi, to decide that the action was actually necessary, after years working there. How old is the instance in question?
- Someone can (and should) politicise an instance to not put up with Nazi. A bar cannot politicise its customers to do the same.
And there’s a potential fourth difference that I brushed off in the other comment, but might as well address here: given that I give as many craps about USA internal politics as I do for the Mongolian ones - for the same reason - you gotta convince me that “TD supporter → certainly a Nazi”. Otherwise we’re dealing with a heuristic, not a confirmed fact⁶.
Please, give a stronger tell that you don’t give a shit for the people this more gravely impacts that you acknowledge how reversible this is and yet think that it’s still too much of a hassle because it’s annoying.
Please give me a stronger tell that I’m not dealing with a context-illiterate and an assumer, who’s eager to churn out fallacies like there was no tomorrow, and eager to disingenuously (or worse, idiotically) assume words onto the others’ mouths, as you consistently did across your comment.
Anyway, answering your request: the impact of that “community” with its sole active user posting crap there would be close to zero, even to the marginalised groups. There’s a bigger issue in his username than the community itself, as that username would be seen outside the community. The actual concern would be if the user brought others like him there. That would only happen if nobody confronted him.
I hope that the above is already enough to show that I’m actually considering the impact on those people, when I’m saying that defederation and admin action might be unnecessary. Past that, your “prove that you aren’t guilty of siding with the ants” is irrelevant.
TL;DR:
The admins are not your parents. “ADMINS, I CAN’T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF” is not support to marginalised groups, it’s to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says “MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!”; the adult crushes it.
Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were “fragile little things, who can’t defend themselves unless big admin patronises them”. That’s perverse incentive - you’re disempowering them. You might have “good intentions” doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.
If you don’t want to be a burden in online communities, and a fucking waste of time for the other posters, then learn how to take context into account when interpreting what others say, and stop
Learn how to take context into account when interpreting what other people say, like a decent person would, and unlike a redditor.
- Nota bene: given that I follow Marxian economy I do not agree with “laissez faire economy”.
- I can go further than that using Pragmatics and Semantics, but it would be off-topic and… frankly I don’t think that you’re able to follow it.
- That’s one of the few things that I remember from that guy. It sounded so unfeasible that I don’t really know if his supporters actually backed the idea up.
- Note that the only active poster there had an username mocking the left.
- Be careful with my conclusion here - there’s an issue on the data that I’m using to back it up. Find which.
- The shitty consequences of dealing with people through heuristics should be rather obvious.
Footnotes first:
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It’s hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms you display there. Would you like to tell me what sect you identify with? I’m just fascinated to find out, since your line of reasoning is completely against ML ideology. Are you one of Richard Wolff’s spawn, maybe?
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I’m sure you feel like a big boy but I’m familiar with the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate, don’t worry
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What the hell are you talking about here? The Gilded Age was a ~30 year period in America following the Civil War where the government went full classical liberal on its non-regulation of the economy, which produced all the famous robber barons like JP Morgan, from which we inherit the classic image of such figures, which went on to inform basically every political cartoon ever along with the mascot of Monopoly. It spawned or popularized immensely infamous practices such as “company towns” and “scrip”, along with its own genre of literature (see Stephen Crane). It’s fine to not be educated on such matters but it’s literally the most well-known era in American history other than the Great Depression or a war (back when America’s domestic society was even culturally involved in wars).
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N/A
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Whoops, no citation, not even a name. Don’t give a shit. CTH moderated itself pretty well, the admins just hated it (and the neoliberal userbase of broader Reddit).
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I never called TD people Nazis. This is an irrelevant tangent, what I was talking about was the nature of reactionary cesspits in general, not Nazis specifically. I don’t care what flavor of reactionary someone is, I don’t like any of them.
Anyway, most of your post is just listing informal fallacies and I have no interest in entertaining high-school level bullshit when it’s tediously rendered, so I’ll just pick out a few more parts:
Just to clarify, my point of the laissez-faire comparison is not that using that term makes you a libertarian, but that it was interesting how it corresponded to the very libertarian-like ideology you expressed in your arguments. More on that later.
even if we disregard that this is a big “chrust me” (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you’re just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote)
It’s ridiculous to dismiss cth out of hand as an “anecdote” when it represents years of interaction on the website with what was, for a period of a bit more than a year, the largest extremist community on the website and easily, easily the most active. Treating it as a though it were a single data point equivalent to other extremist subreddits would in fact be warping the information available against what would be a reasonable representation of its magnitude. TD is the only stronger example due to how long it was active unless you want to get into the old Reddit Lore of fatpeoplehate or whatever.
The admins are not your parents. “ADMINS, I CAN’T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF” is not support to marginalised groups, it’s to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says “MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!”; the adult crushes it.
Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were “fragile little things, who can’t defend themselves unless big admin patronises them”. That’s perverse incentive - you’re disempowering them. You might have “good intentions” doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.
This – and how you talked about the Nazi bar issue before – is a strange case of equivocation that seems almost deliberately obfuscatory. If I could crush the mosquito myself, I would, but because this is a forum and I am merely a normal user, I cannot and the community cannot ban them. The admins are the only people who have that power, so the best course of action (since a poll would be open to manipulation and those fuckers at beehaw wouldn’t even blink before doing so) is to have admins use their power with the consent of the governed and for the governed to become ungovernable if the admins act unilaterally against the popular consensus.
In a similar way, patrons running the Nazis out of the bar would be illegal on many levels. The owner is the only one who is legally protected in doing so because it is his property, so he can pick up his bat and say in so many words “Leave or I will consider you a trepasser and beat you to a pulp” where a patron would be easily charged with a crime for making such a threat. Now, could the patrons act illegally and take things in their own hands anyway? Sure, but just like the difference between real futball and a Fifa video game, breaking the law in reality is possible while breaking the rules in a “programmed space” generally isn’t. I could hypothetically strike a Nazi with a hammer, cops be damned. I cannot ban a Nazi here if the site does not give me permission, it literally just can’t be done.
I fully support arming minority communities in real life. There is no way to smuggle a banhammer to a non-mod.
Also, the idea that supporting minorities is “babying them” is just asinine. Sitting by as they are attacked is not an example of being an ally, and forcing them to fend for themselves in the interest of what may as well be “protecting their honor as warriors” doesn’t do shit except consign them to miserable lives of fighting in their own defense no matter how successful they are. That is why, in civil society, the main thing social minorities typically fight for are legal protections that make it so they can avoid those fights or make them easier to win! Black people in general don’t seek to repeal the 1968 Civil Rights Act because the concept of a hate crime is “patronizing” to their ability to … what? Go catch racial aggressors on their own? Fuck off with that “the Democrats are the real racists” shit. The Democrats are indeed real racists, but so are Republicans.
By the way:
perverse incentive
Are you really going to tell me you’re not some kind of Hayekian? Between your general lines of reasoning, your sophomoric list of wikipedia fallacies, and turns of phrase like this, you really, really seem to be a libertarian.
It’s hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms
If you genuinely fail to spot the difference between what I said and what someone who [ipsis ungulis] “retains the magnitude liberal brainworms” would say, it means that you’re such a failure at basic reading comprehension that you can be safely ignored as noise. (There’s a second idiocy in the same excerpt, but I’ll leave for the others to catch it.)
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I hope that newcomers to the fediverse come to understand that defederation is a feature, not a bug.
FYI you can block a community. And I’m not a fan of echo-chambers. Whether you like Donald or not, I believe that as long as the content is not illegal, users should just block that community if they don’t wish to see or amplify their posts. You’re merely reinforcing their belief that they’re being “persecuted” on the internet.
If you don’t like something, there is a block feature. It is good that the fediverse gains some diversity instead of staying an echochamber.
diversity shouldn’t include bigots
Hey all,
This community is being reviewed and will likely be a discussion point to in our Agora community where we discuss about issues like this as a community.
Post that are breaking rules will be removed. If its a regular occurrence so will the TheDonald community. Please continue reporting inappropriate posts and its difficult to maintain visibility on everything that is going on at all times.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Reading through the replies and I have to say ya’ll don’t take prisoners here. sheesh.
Anyway, I went through went through the community in question and reviewed not only the posts in the community and the comments made by the mods of the community and they weren’t aligned with the kind of negativity I want to see on the instance. I have since purged the community and the mods.
deleted by creator
