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.
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:
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.
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.
Thanks, don't shoot the messenger though, I'm just the only admin willing to write these governance posts up. We do discuss these things internally in our admin chat before posting them.
I've defended you on the last one and said similar, that the phrasing led me to assume internal discussion.
And I know we're a cantankerous bunch at best lol, hard to please everyone. But it needs to be clear this isn't the Flatworm show, please, because of how central that is to the premise and organizing principles here. Ya know?
But hey, I don't actually DO anything to help around here. I don't want my perspective to come off entitled, and I deeply appreciate the work you and others do.
Maybe for these governance decisions, a primary post with the main info as is, and one or more top level comments with specific categories of additional info? Maybe a blurb or POV from each admin/mod team contributor, maybe a section with concrete "we want this to improve by doing such", or etc.
As is, it's beginning to ring alarm bells for me and requires too many assumptions.
Edit - to elaborate a little more since I never really manage to be brief, the biggest thing I've liked about this instance from when I first got to know it, is the commitment to transparency around decision-making. I'm just asking for that. If trying to change instance governance, the discussion among y'all should simply be here. I can imagine that poses some challenges.
So if that's deemed unacceptable, and we're to simply receive a condensed and unified blanket POV representing the team - that hasn't actually been done unless that fact is presented and declared, ideally by all parties whose perspective fits under that blanket. Ideally with a dissenting one(s) too, if not all can accommodate the motion into their own actual wishes for the instance. OR we should be seeing varying other proposals (maybe we do?) and not what are apparently effectively committee-produced ones. See what I mean? Evidence of group decision, evidence of differing opinions, etc.
I'm more willing to make charitable assumptions with y'all than just about anywhere, and I'm telling y'all that even with that, this isn't enough. I can't tell how anyone feels but you, and the goals need some guesses too. But again, thank you for being the one willing to take the effort here.
Yes, you called me out directly for what you characterized as a borderline personal vendetta in that previous defense. I am glad that you seem to see some of the same signs and signals that I do. My alarm bells just happened to go off slightly sooner than yours, with more intensity. I believe we are coming from the same place of concern based on what you've said here.
I do take a somewhat less charitable view of how the admin conversations on these topics transpire. My perspective, and please note that this is my own personal imagining of events, is that an admin who has a pet governance topic takes that topic to the rest of the group. They make their case for it, and in the absence of much pushback, they post it for general governance discussion. Regardless of whether or not this is accurate, the plausibility of it based on what we observe directly should give us all pause. Hence, I previously suggested that Flatworm/unruffled should take a hiatus from admin duties.
The optics are off, and it is troubling.
I did, the bigger concern for me at that moment (and also by my view, over a less controversial measure) was concerns about admin burnout and similar.
I supported that governance decision and oppose this one. Your stance on the last one absolutely helped me better see and articulate what's bothering me here, I thank you.
And further, your conduct kept that disagreement from getting unproductive, thanks for granting me the opportunity to disagree without it getting out of hand.
I find your POV more compelling than I did and now require a higher bar. Ultimately this place will not do well (nor function very differently, in practice) if we have to guess and imagine stories for ourselves about how these processes go. That has to change and it's probably worth a governance change proposal on its own. Maybe I can be arsed someday, this is about as far as I get today sadly.