/0 Governance

Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591

This is a simple majority vote. The final tally is as follows:

• For: (5), (4), (1), (1), (2), (2)
• Against:
• Local Community: +2.6
• Outsider sentiment: Supportive
• Total: +14.6
• Percentage: 85.00%

This vote has concluded on 2026-01-02 00:56:51 UTC

Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.

this isn’t that complicated

Couldn't agree more, fascists deserve no quarter. Why should we accept and tolerate them here.

And to all the people here whining about "freeze peach" what fuck are you doing on an anarchist leftist Lemmy instance? You do realize that hateful and dangerous speech is one of the things we fight against right? Tolerating it goes against what we stand for.

I want to focus on the structure of the proposal rather than on defending Israeli state policy, which I oppose in many respects.

As written, the proposal does not clearly define Zionism so much as treat a particular interpretation of it as self-evident, namely that Zionism is inherently a form of settler colonialism. That is a position many people hold, but it is also a contested one, and the policy depends on that premise without unpacking it.

If the core concern is behavior such as genocide denial, dehumanization of Palestinians, or the repetition of propaganda talking points, those are concrete harms and seem like appropriate moderation targets on their own. Framing the rule around an ideological label instead of specific conduct risks conflating belief, state policy, and online behavior, which are not always the same thing even when they overlap.

I also share some of the concern about how “pro-Zionist” would be determined in practice. When enforcement depends on interpreting intent or identity rather than observable actions, it increases the risk of inconsistency and misclassification, even with good faith moderation.

I am not arguing against taking a clear moral stance in support of Palestinians. I am suggesting that the policy would be stronger, clearer, and easier to defend if it focused explicitly on the behaviors and arguments that cause harm, rather than relying on a broad and disputed definition of Zionism to do that work.

How is zionist content even compatible with the golden rules of our instance? To be clear, I'm not against adding it explicitly to the list in rule 4, as it makes for a stronger stance, but I'm surprised this is up for debate.

I'm an outsider to this instance, so my vote doesn't count.

I'm fine with banning Zionist content and users. I'm starting to see them regularly on Bluesky; they make inflammatory claims, but don't back anything up, and immediately resort to ad hominem when challenged. Even if you thought that some of the claims they made might have a degree of validity, they're still disruptive assholes. So far I haven't run across any that are acting in good faith; the accounts I've encountered sound like Israeli psy-ops.

Add a clause stating unambiguously that this does not discriminate against people with the Jewish ethnicity or against followers of Judaism. Just the specific policy of Zionism is affected.

Having a definition of Zionist would probably help?

I think Israel is committing war crimes in Palestine, Netenyahu should be tried by the ICC, and that what is happening in Palestine at present is in fact genocide.

But also, I think Israel should contiue to exist, and should - given the crimes committed against their citizens by Hamas - be entitled to demand that Hamas play no part in governance of a future Palestinian state.

Uncertain whether that counts as a zionist position, or not.

zionism and anarchism are mutually exclusive idealogies. you cannot believe in solidarity for all mankind and also support an ethnocutural supremacist movement.

I support banning zionists from dbzer0 to match them being banned on Anarchist Nexus.

The Paradox of Tolerance says if you tolerate the intolerant, then you yourself become intolerant by defacto excluding those that the other do not tolerate.

It's like the old saying, if you are in a group with 9 Nazis, that's a group with 10 Nazis. Same with Zionists

Palestinian here, just thanking you for trying to do what you can. <3

Zionism is so innately wrong (and has been for 80 years). Anyone still supporting it up to now is too far gone to be convinced by reading comments by some people online.

I AM NOT A DIV0 USER. DO NOT COUNT MY COMMENT AS A VOTE

I'm a tiny bit worried that "zionist" might change over time to "not sufficiently anti-zionist", but... Maybe not, maybe I'm just paranoid.

It's absolutely worth running the experiment, if nothing else.

I would caution against banning accounts for having a particular stance, as that could be a slippery slope.

Forums have a decades-long running history of banning content, possibly for that reason. Having instance rules that forbid pro-zionist content, propaganda, or news with a zionist spin, makes a lot more sense IMO. From there, it's easy to ban accounts for repeated rules violations, which may be more palatable for both users to report and admins to enforce.

Maybe with a warning before banning them because you can't decide what someone's intentions are, but things like dehumanization, justifying genocide, hate speech, intimidation, and actively spreading misinformation, those are areas where you can create relatively clear and objective moderation rules. I'm deffo for that, let's keep this platform smart and fair

Hey, the drones were circling over my fucking Christmas lunch this week. We were cranking up the Bublé to cover the constant buzzing, and the bad/worst part is that the kids seemed used to the sound. The only reason those things were in the air over an area with no militia activity is psychological warfare basically. This was a good 80+ km from the border. People in Santa hats were sticking their heads out of the window and looking up. I struggle to get across how normal we are while discussing what we’re dealing with, and I figure mentioning how it’s affected me filling myself with wine and carving a comically sized bird could help get that across to people who also do this every year, or to who the idea is less foreign than the idea of being constantly surveilled by a hostile expansionist entity. I’m not trying to use my sect to say I’m special and don’t deserve this, I’m just trying to see if it can help bridge a gap to discuss something difficult, to be clear.

That said, my opinion might still come off as a bit too lenient to some of you and I think I should write it out. But I am from and live in Lebanon, and I am directly affected by these crimes.

I’ve got a lot of users (I think literally every single one on German instances lmfao) tagged in my client as “Zionist”. I think most of them just pop into a few threads naturally and make a few reality-denying comments from force of habit. I see them in other places and they fit the typical description of internet dude with opinions on Rust and Linux making interesting comments about random stuff. They’re mostly well-behaved outside of beliefs that are upstream of me being chucked into a concentration camp so the US military’s contractors can make my home a parking lot at an exorbitant cost. When I catch them in a thread about solar panels or something, I’ll even find them making comments that I want to read. Normal people with good insight.

The average person in the West has been fed such a blatantly false narrative that I find myself not blaming a few of the milder opinions. It’s on par for me with progressives talking up and down the potential greatness of the American experiment. I think Zionism is one thing that people can learn about and understand and clearly see that the status quo is not normal or natural or inevitable or even self-sustaining.

This might all be downstream of me moderating the way I have tended to handle this stuff on Reddit, my old online home which I’ve spent well over a decade.

Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.

My opinion is a two sided thing because I don’t know if this means blocking users from other instances from federating, blocking them from posting or voting on our instance’s posts and comments, or blocking them from signing up.

I think blocking them from signup is very reasonable. Probably morally necessary.

I think blocking them as external users, regardless of the extent of it, might be heavy handed if it’s a one-off comment by a normal human being, often German, who has been propagandized since birth that Jews will all immediately die if Arabs aren’t treated like cattle. I think these people can learn. OTOH there are what seems like dedicated Hasbara accounts that have an RSS feed of every post with “Israel” or Palestine and have to respond to every single one with a comment that would immediately get you banned from literally any webpage with a text box if you swapped the words Jewish and Muslim. If we can block those outright nothing will be lost.

What I propose is a three/five strikes system for external users with a relatively gentle warning message with some good links like someone already proposed here. Probably a little thing in German to get the attention of those with Nazi baggage who are completely delusional and intentionally ignoring reality.

Personally if I was the one writing it I’d also include that, as a Westerner, believing that Jewish people may inherently leave the West for a colonial frontier far away from you is literally anti-Semitism if you think about it for 20 seconds. Nothing says ancestral homeland like having to rename towns and treat the local population like inconveniently located bags of blood.

I’m also in favor of extending the window since a lot of people are not going to be online much this time of year. I hope, at least. For their own sake.

Happy New Year everyone; I hope Natenyahu lets me and all of us see the untold horrors that await us in 2026.

I like it. I think it does really limit the scope and maintains a clear focus.

It avoids the religious BS - there are plenty of Zionists who aren't Jewish and plenty of Jews who aren't Zionists.

If you're a Zionist, then you don't beling here; it's the same with Nazis, white supremacists, et aliīs.

Edit: removed an incomplete sentence.

There is probably a better way to avoid interacting with Zionists than banning any account potentially associated with Zionism. I personally oppose Zionism, so this does not affect me yet, but it could easily turn into a slippery slope. If someone does not oppose Zionism in the “correct” way, perhaps in an anti-hierarchy, anarchist, left-libertarian fashion, they could end up being instantly banned.

Policies like this risk turning the platform into yet another echo chamber, similar to Gettr or Bluesky. I honestly do not think there is any need to ban Zionists, since their ideas are easy to refute in the marketplace of ideas. That said, this may simply reflect my own (maybe) culturally liberal outlook, which does not align with this site’s apparent bias.

Generally support this rule, but I'm a bit wary as a Jew ~~who's been accused of being zionist (I'm not) solely for reminding people that 'globalize the intifada' means calling for a global genocide against Jews and shouldn't be used in support of Palestinians~~ (I was misinformed about the meaning of intifada). A lot of people, especially on the internet, don't seem to understand that not all Jews support zionism/the Israeli government. As long as there's a reasonable attempt to ensure that we're not just promoting anti-semitism (not to be confused with calling out zionist propaganda), I'm for this rule in the same way I support a rule blocking any sort of bigotry.

Unbelievably based. Zionists, like Nazis, shouldn't be platformed.

I will say: on the topic of banning Zionists, I think it would be helpful if someone from db0 or maybe a bot would reply to the comment that caused the ban with the Wikipedia entries for the Nakba, pogroms, and just the entire history of Palestine's enslavement to Israel. Kinda like how YouTube links the Climate Change Wikipedia entry for videos that deal with that topic, or like Twitter community notes.

Free Palestine

Zionism is giving yourself permission to kill/oppress people who don’t have the same religious beliefs that you do. That’s bullshit.

Deeply mixed. Pileons online happen for stupid reasons, tone and nuance is hard to convey, purity tests are common, and education is often sidelined in favour of berating.

Otoh lemmy is kinda dogshit and riddled with fucking freaks repeating straight up genocide denial. Opposing state backed mass murder is like a baseline requirement for admission into human civilisation so...