This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
How do you feel about extreme right-wing instances like the late Wolfballs using Lemmy to promote and spread hate?
I hope they’re not too against it. I know they’re extremely left wing, which scared a lot of the centrists on Reddit. If they allow even right wing instances, then it emphasizes the project’s lakc of political bent, and encourages more mainstream people to join. The politics can be up to each individual instance to decide whether to defederate with those other instances or not.
But that’s just my opinion, I’m also curious how the devs will answer.
I’m sure they’re probably not okay with it but also there’s not much they can do about it other than defederate .ml - such is the nature of open source software.
Not that I’m suggesting it, but they could hardcode the defederation of those instances on the code and most admins wouldn’t bother to fork lemmy to remove it. Like in the past they had a hardcoded slur filter, but I think they disabled it because many slurs in English were regular words in other languages
Yeah that’s a very slippery slope
I very much dislike it obviously, and I’m happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they’ve stayed away from Lemmy as “that software made by tankies.”
Outside of making sure that we don’t platform them anywhere, there isn’t much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.
Wolfballs? Was it straight up hate or just run of the mill GOP talking points?
Wasn’t here back when it happened, but from what I know, it was straight up white supremacy shit. It got defed to death.
I think you should be careful with political hate. Its a slippery slope and should not be handled by a developer.
Maybe we could simply focus on having clear rules for each community.
They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.
Not much that can be done to prevent them from using it. Mitigation on the maintainers’ part would be omitting them from suggested instances. The best way to combat it, I think, would be instance admins coordinating defederating from offending instances.