I recently noticed this lemmy instance in my all feed. They have an odd premise in their instance sidebar:
We are a down to earth instance who doesn’t get our feelings hurt or offended easily.
And then, on their front page today, there are some links to breitbart and some to russia today. When calling them out on that, I got this comment from their instance:
about as believable as calling trump nazi, you really sound fascistic imo
Is this some kind of right-wing instance? Should we defederate from it?
Yes.
Yes.
Everyone knows what they are, but contrary to other right wing instances, they managed to fly under the radar. Admins usually aren’t that triggerhappy when it comes to defederating and there is a good reason for that. Just give it some time. Like every other right wing “community” in the history of the internet, they will do something incredibly vile which will be the end of them.
Edit: Looks like my instance already defederated from them. LOL
They’ve gone back on their descision, I wonder why, it’s well known to be an Exploding-Heads clone and EH was defederated by Lemmy.world in the past. I mean their users basically admit to it being an EH clone so I don’t understand why it was reversed.
CC LW admins: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Lemmy.world did defederate from exploding-heads, but never defederated from hilariouschaos as far as I know. When hilariouschaos appeared the admin team discussed it and decided to take a wait-and-see approach. First, some of the more problematic exploding-heads users seemed to be gone. Second, by that time Lemmy had more blocking options for users to curate their own feeds, so instance-level defederation seemed less urgent.
We will discuss it again. Personally, it’s been a while since I have peeked over the fence to see what they’re up to over there.
It probably is a good idea to consider it. Something that should be kept in mind is that Instance blocking isn’t an alternative to defederation because of how it works it doesn’t do anything for the most problematic aspects of an instance, its userbase (instance blocks only target communities). Also since blocking is one-way only, it’s really only useful for non-objective or opinionated problems like disagreements, or personal opinions, it’s basically useless in cases of harassment or discrimination since they’ll just back-bite you without your knowledge, possibly even spread lies about you (was a real problem back on Reddit until they revised it to be two-way).
Exactly. I noticed this instance for the first time several months ago and while it was somewhat suspicious, I didn’t feel the need to defederate. I decided to watch the situation for some time. Well, if the instance is really a descendant of Exploding-Heads and that other one (I can’t remember right now), it means defederating.
Thanks. I have been slowly blocking their communities. But I get an occasional chuckle from some of the posts I see, so I have not blocked it on my account yet.
Ayy, hats off, LW admin team.
Looks like they have reversed the decision. I do wonder why though, they know that it’s an Exploding-Heads clone and they’ve defederated EH, why give more LeeWay to hilariouschaos? Because they’re more mild and aren’t blatantly being transphobic bigots like EH? They’re still spreading dangerous ideology that can hurt others or even lead to violence. That’s more than enough reason to axe them.