Note: Judging by the comments, a lot of people are obviously not reading the post and are instead assuming we are calling for defederation of lemmy.world. That is not the case, and in fact the opposite is true. LW already temporarily defederated anarchist.nexus once, and the evidence suggests Mr Kaplan is now pushing for full defederation of all the FAF instances. We are trying to build a coalition of instances that will agree to defederate from lemmy.world IF Kaplan goes ahead with the defederation. Apologies if you weren’t aware of the context.

🏴‍☠️ Hoist the Black Flag: Pledge to Boycott Lemmy World!

… if Lemmy World dares to defederate from any ship in the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla - https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/, https://anarchist.nexus/, and https://quokk.au/.

Mateys, we can’t let a mega‑instance captain bully the rest of the fleet just because their ship’s bigger. If Lemmy World tries to throw the FAF overboard, we’re calling for a show of solidarity: a fediverse blockade of Lemmy World in response, until the landlubbers see reason (i.e., there is an acceptable change in their leadership and/or this policy).

This is about mutual aid, not mutiny - standing together so no single admin gets to rule the seas unchallenged. A united armada of smaller instances can absolutely blunt Lemmy World’s outsized influence (and, let’s be honest, their ego).

☠️ A word to the captains: before hoisting colours or locking in a course, we ask ye to let your crew have their say. Run a poll, open the deck for discussion, and listen to the voices aboard your vessel. These seas belong to all of us, and decisions that shape our fediverse should be made together, not from the captain’s quarters alone.

If other captains be keen to chart this course with us, drop anchor and make the pledge public in the comments. The more hands on deck, the harder it is to sink any one of us. Let us know if you are holding a vote!

dbzer0 and AN members can vote on this pledge in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and quokk.au will be holding their own vote.

🏴‍☠️ Solidarity forever, and fair winds to the Flotilla!

governance type: sense check

This is a FAF defederation vote for !multiverse.soulism.net. Note that I have tried to summarize views both for and against this proposal, rather than pushing a particular view. Please feel free to comment if you want to contribute your own thoughts and experiences.

The reason for this vote is that admins have been getting a lot of reports about Grail and Their instance from our users lately, but tbh I am not sure whether the reports warrant a ban or not. While most cases are more clear-cut, I wanted some more admin & community feedback on this one.

For context, the soulism instance is (for all practical purposes) a personal instance run by infamous fediverse “personality”, Grail. Grail is suspected to be a recent alt of DroneRights aka HardlightCereal aka Exocrinous aka Dragon Rider aka Drag.

• Grail
• DroneRights
• HardlightCereal
• Exocrinous
• Dragon Rider

Grail, the current incarnation, is (imo) a liberal progressive masquerading as a leftist (a self-described “Anarcho-Antireal theorist” whatever the fuck that is). And I really don’t think this qualifies as a “No true Scotsman” situation where it’s arguable either way - it’s immediately obvious from reading Their comment history.

I don’t really want to rehash the extensive history of this user and Their alts in detail here, however I’m pretty sure long-term Lemmy users will be aware of at least some of these previous alt accounts, which have been almost universally banned. I’ll try my best to summarize the issues below.

The case for defederation

Here’s some recent examples/summaries of why the user is so problematic:

• Concise summary of past trolling behavior: .
• Recent YPTB post: Banned for Nuttin’
• Recent example of Grail’s electoralism and criticism of c/flipanarchy rules, including a claim that pugjesus isn’t a turbolib 😂 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63720883
• More blue MAGA electoralism demonstrating that the user is about as “leftist” as Joe Biden

Recent examples of hating on / agitating against our instance:

The case against defederation

• Grail is neurodivergent (trans and NPD afaik), so we should be willing to make some accommodations for Their behaviour
• While some folks (including myself at the time, unfortunately) took the “DroneRights” account as an attempt to troll transgender folk with the “my gender is an attack helicopter” line, it could also have been a genuine attempt to advocate for xenogenders. There’s no way to know 100% for sure what Their intentions truly were, but on reflection and with the benefit of time, I think it could be reasonably argued They should have been given the benefit of the doubt on that topic.
• Just because this user seems to have a grudge against our instance and bad-jackets anyone to their left as politically “right wing” doesn’t mean we should ban them. They are still entitled to express their opinion.
• Given Grail’s unique personality, is there anywhere else They would potentially fit in other than the Fediverse? Maybe we should cut Them some slack and just let users block Them individually.

Warning

Please do not attempt to re-litigate the topic of xenogenders in this post. Such comments will be removed as off-topic. As an instance, our policy is to respect personal pronouns, whatever they are. This is not a referendum on the validity of xenogenders. The topic of the post is clear - whether or not we should defederate from the multiverse.soulism.net instance. If you want to bring your own experiences into the comments that is fine, but please keep them pertinent to whether or not we should defederate from this instance / user on the basis of Their problematic behaviours, not on the basis of Their identity or pronouns.

Instructions

The proposal is:

We should defederate from the multiverse.soulism.net instance due to an extensive history of trolling by the main admin’s alts, and due to the admin being openly hostile to our instance.

Please upvote this post to vote for defederation. Downvote to remain federated. This proposal will require a 2/3 majority to pass.

P.S., Please be sure to use Grail’s preferred pronouns of “capitalised They/Them”, so we don’t have to remove comments for misgendering.

Edit: This will include banning Grail’s alts as well, for clarity.

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.

Since the New Year is here, what better way to ring it in than with a new Flotilla member and a drink o’ rum?

Over the past couple of days, Qk from Quokk.au reached out to us about the possibility of joining up with the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla. This was really cool news for all of us, and imo they will be a great addition!

What’s the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla and isn’t it a bit of a mouthful?

Yes it is, let’s call it FAF for short. Lol.

For the full deets of what that means exactly, check out db0’s original post on the topic Announcing anarchist.nexus and the launch of the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla.

But in short, it means:

• Same rules - Quokk.au will adopt AN/dbzer0’s existing rules and policies.
• Same staff - We’ll have common Matrix rooms for admin discussions and user appeals, and provide mutual aid to other instances as required (e.g. if someone needs a break).
• Common governance - Likewise, we will share a common federation/defederation list and ban-list. Notably for Quokk.au that also means enabling federation with places like Hexbear.net and Feddit.org, unless as a flotilla we decide that this should change.

Fire away if anyone has any questions, but make sure you read the FAF announcement post first, because it explains a lot!

Voting instructions

• Upvote this post to welcome Quokk.au to the Flotilla
• Downvote this post to fire the cannons

N.B. Quokk.au will be holding its own vote on joining the flotilla at the same time as ours. I’ll add the linked post once they are both posted.

Edit: here’s the Quokk.au post

Happy New Year mateys!

We, the admin team, decry all forms of settler-colonialism, and we recognize that Zionism is a pro-settler-colonialist position.

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

Please upvote for agree, downvote for disagree.

Note: we only count votes by instance members of dbzer0 and anarchist.nexus, plus a few vouched-for external users.

Hi mateys, I’ve kept things simple in the above text, for brevity, but in fact it took the admin team quite a while to get to this stage. We have discussed the policy change extensively, and a variety of different perspectives emerged. I will attempt to sum them up below as best I can:

• The “this isn’t that complicated” school of thought goes something like this: If someone is consistently posting comments that mirror Hasbara talking points (e.g. justifying the genocide in Gaza, consistently painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim), then they should be instance banned. It’s just not acceptable for Zionists to be allowed on our instances.

• The “slippery slope” / “purity test” school of thought is that banning people for having an “unpopular” political opinion would potentially mean banning half the fediverse, if more and more of these policies were enacted over time. To attempt to mitigate this we are keeping the scope of this rule as narrow as possible, and I also don’t think many of our users will be affected. Also, we typically don’t have frequent policy changes, and I have no reason to expect that to change moving forward.

• Another important discussion point was “how do we decide whether someone is pro-Zionist or not?” We can’t always be 100% sure of someone’s true intentions, we can only go on what they have posted and that is subject to interpretation. I don’t feel there is an easy answer to this one, except to say that we would have to be pretty certain before issuing a perma-ban.

• The “geopolitics don’t matter” school of thought is that trying to be on the “correct” side of every issue is kind of pointless because nothing that happens in lemmy chat forums will ever make an ounce of difference in the real world. Don’t bother moderating users over political/ideological differences, just let people argue if they want. While I can totally empathize with this sentiment, I can also see the case for taking a clear stance on this topic in accordance with our values and the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among our users. Personally, I am advocating in favor of the resolution.

Please add your comments below if you want to provide your own thoughts on the topic, or have any questions.

expiry: 7

Hi mateys,

We are currently recruiting for people who are able to volunteer some of their time each day to help out with site admin tasks. You don’t need to have any special skills or technical qualifications, but there are a few other requirements listed below. We’d also prefer applicants who are active posters, and/or who have actively participated in our Matrix channels.

This recruitment drive is to ensure we maintain a good level of admin coverage throughout the day, so that reports and applications can be dealt with quickly.

I would also totally understand if you prefer to apply privately, so you always have the option of sending me or one of the other admins a PM.

I’m re-using db0’s previous admin application text below, with just a few edits where needed:

If you are interested, these are the full requirements:

Requirements

• You must be an anarchist, and enthusiastically endorse the instance policies and our anarchist code of conduct. For example this means we also expect you to also be pro-piracy and not hostile to GenAI.
• You must have been on this instance for at least 3 months, to ensure you understand our culture. Hopefully you’ve been a lemmy poster as well as we expect our admins to dogfood our service. If you were already a comm admin, even better!
• We are still prioritizing women and/or PoC to reinforce our team’s diverse perspectives. So please apply if you are even if you think you might not qualify.
• At this point we are prioritizing timezones and countries outside of Europe and the USA to help us get better coverage and better perspectives.
• You must be willing to use matrix as this is where we organize our instance and our real-time admin chat.
• You must be willing to keep an eye on reports and applications throughout the day.

What is expected of you

• We have a fairly chill community around this place, so it’s not too demanding. The time requirements are not too large and we will keep expanding the team to ensure the load per individual admin remains low. So long as using this instance is your primary social media, the “workload”, such as it is, shouldn’t even be noticable.
• Initiative is encouraged. It’s cool enough for people to just want to help us keep this place tidy, but if you have ideas, you will be free to put them into action directly without asking permission all the time, so long as we can rollback easily.
• You should have a anarchist democratic mindframe. We don’t need a voting decision on everything (just do direct action), but you should be willing to be judged on your decisions and roll them back if they are unpopular.
• Remember that while we’re anarchist-flavored, we’re not just for anarchists. So we understand that many of our users might be liberals or otherwise misguided. On top of that, we make a point of welcoming neurodivergent people who don’t always understand social norms and might phrase things in a way that looks really bad when interpreted uncharitably. As such, we want to help people match our values, without turning a misunderstanding into a hostile experience through heavy-handed actions. So a softer hand and charitability is encouraged, while at the same time being firmly against clearly reactionary takes.

Applying

• You can leave your comments here, which can allow other members of this comm to vouch for you.
• Please mention your “credentials” and why you think you would make a good member of the team.
• If you don’t feel comfortable with sharing info, you can reach out to me on matrix or PMs (or another admin you feel more comfortable with).

Spectating

If you’re just watching this governance thread, feel free to upvote applications you feel are worthy, and/or comment on people you want to vouch for. If you’re a supporter, remember you can also vouch for people directly through a threativore PM.

• governance type: sense check
• show all flair

Update: Thanks mateys for participating! Our instance was really split down the middle on this vote - 49% in favour, 51% against.

After reading all the comments, it honestly seems unlikely to me that private voting will ever be a viable option for Lemmy in any meaningful way, because voting data gets federated out all across the fediverse, so I think on balance the best way forward is just to accept that reality and work under the assumption all votes are public. At least then nobody is lulled into a false sense of security.

Having said that there’s an argument to be made for both sides and I don’t think there’s a “right” answer necessarily. Its more down to personal preference about whether you want/expect private (to the users) voting, or you want to embrace public voting. But until Lemmy can guarantee the privacy of user votes then simply pretending they are private seems like the worst of both worlds.

We might revisit the topic of public/private voting again down the road if Lemmy’s developers provide privacy enhancements in that area though.

Cheers, Unruffled.

Hi again mateys!

As most of you are probably aware, since the development of Lemvotes Lemmy votes are no longer private for users.

The way lemvotes works right now afaik, is it uses an admin level account to collect voting data from all federated instances, thus enabling the identification of every voter. This method effectively bypasses the guardrails the developers put in place to keep this info more restricted.

However, the developer of lemvotes has recently developed an “opt out” for instances that don’t want their user data collected in this way. So now we have a choice of whether or not to continue. For total transparency, I asked the developer to create an opt out because I wanted to give our users the option to choose that path without defederating from the lemvotes instance.

I think there are (at least) two schools of thought on this topic, which I will attempt to succinctly summarize below:

1. Votes should be kept private to users as they were only ever meant to be viewable by instance admins. Making votes public to everyone via lemvotes, when users have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to voting, is a betrayal of user trust. It also leads to arguments and a lot of unnecessary drama, caused by users trawling though each others’ vote histories.

2. It’s good that voting is transparent and that users have the same tools available as admins to conduct their own investigations into other users. This creates a level playing field and helps hold everyone accountable for their voting patterns.

So now you have some of the context, I’d like to ask our community what are your thoughts on lemvotes… is it a social good or a bad idea?

Personally, I quite like it from an admin perspective - it’s a handy tool, and a pretty cool project. But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users’ votes should be kept private from other users, so I still think it’s problematic from that perspective.

Proposal: To opt out of lemvotes, so that our users’ voting data is kept (at least somewhat) private.

• To vote FOR the proposal to succeed, upvote the post.
• To vote AGAINST the proposal, downvote the post.

This will be a simple majority vote. Similar to the last governance topic, I have no clue what the instance sentiment is towards lemvotes, so let’s find out! Feel free to add your comments below.

Ahoy mateys!

We are closing the voting on this topic a couple of days early as the result is already conclusive., Our threshold for passing the motion was for 2/3 of voting members in favor. We have far exceeded that threshold (see below) and have a good number of overall responses, so the proposed policy change has now been approved and takes effect immediately.

Our new policy on Xitter links

1. No Xitter links are to be posted on this instance from the date of this announcement.
2. Workarounds such as link shorteners and alternative front-ends that resolve to Xitter posts are also banned.
3. Screenshots will still be permitted as per the overwhelming number of comments in support of this option.
4. Exception: In rare cases there may be a need to verify the veracity of a Xitter post. If this need arises, then you may post a https://xcancel.com/ or https://archive.is/ version of the link. Please note this option should only be used sparingly and exclusively for fact-checking purposes.

We will begin communicating this instance policy change to all our users today.

Please try to be helpful to anyone who accidentally posts a Xitter link who may not yet be aware of the policy change, and/or feel free to report in the usual way.

N.B.: For the loopholers - by “Xitter links” we mean any links to content hosted on X (formerly Twitter). Alternative Xitter front-ends are also banned under this policy, unless exception #4 applies. Edit: The ban also applies to other Xitter-owned domains such as their photo blobstore (pbs) domain at pbd.twimg.com

Thanks to everyone involved for participating in the vote!

**The final tally is as follows: **

• For: (2), (7), (5), (3), (2), (1)
• Against:
• Local Community: +2.6
• Outsider sentiment: Very Positive
• Total: +22.6
• Percentage: 100.00%

To break this down a little differently:

• Home instance users voted 93% in favor of the proposal (284/307)
• External instance users voted 97% in favor of the proposal (70/72 note: these are not counted, but good to know)
• Donating and vouched for users voted 100% in favor of the proposal (20/20 votes).

UPDATE: Proposal approved, see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36484194 for policy change announcement.

Ahoy me hearties!

We were thinking this might be a good test run topic for instance voting in our !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com community. Please be patient with us if anything breaks or isn’t working properly. Feedback is welcome.

The voting topic

Given the current political backdrop and recent video of Elon Musk performing clearly identifiable Nazi salutes at the Presidential inauguration, some communities have started banning all links to X/Twitter. A couple of examples I noticed yesterday:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36070488
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36080853

The vote is on whether our instance should follow suit and implement an instance-wide ban on X/Twitter links in posts and comments.

I’ve noticed some people suggesting allowing screenshots to still be used (e.g. for memes). Feel free to drop a comment if you have an opinion on that.

How to vote

Simply upvote or downvote this post. The /0 Bot will automatically calculate and update a tally of votes every 15 mins or so according to the voting rules (so don’t expect instant updates). An upvote is counted in favour of the resolution. A downvote is counted as against the resolution.

Note regarding crossposting: please be aware that only votes on the original post in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com will be counted.

When to vote

Voting starts as of now. We’ll close voting once the flow of votes stops - not sure exactly when that will be yet, but I’d like to keep the topic open for at least 2 or 3 days (maybe a week?) to give everyone a chance to vote.

Who can vote

TLDR here is that anyone can vote, but your votes will be weighted differently depending if you are a financial supporter, local instance member or external instance member.

As discussed in the announcement post, the initial plan was that only stakeholders can vote and open threads. That now includes everyone who is supporting us with any monthly donation amount.

Voting rights have also been extended so that votes of other local instance members who otherwise have no voting rights will be accounted at a rate of 1/100 from a random sample of up to 1000 of their votes. This means that a vote can go up to max +/- 10 from local community votes and it’s a fractional count (i.e. +1.1, or -0.7) which should make the local community sentiment an excellent tiebreaker, without overwhelming the people who are directly supporting the instance. Furthermore, I decided to display the “outsider sentiment” which is votes from non-valid-voting users from other instances. The outsider sentiment is only flavour (“Positive”, “Negative” etc) and is disregarded from the total. This is just shown for reference of the outsider sentiment which I think might be useful.

What constitutes a successful vote on a topic?

We are totally open to debate on this. I was thinking for this topic, a 2/3 majority vote would be a good target to aim for so we can be certain the community vote represents a clear majority of our users’ opinions.

My thinking here is that if some topics are split close to 50/50 then achieving a 51% vote for example does not produce a clear mandate and may simply cause unnecessary division.

Having said that, I acknowledge a 2/3 majority is an arbitrary choice, but unless we implement a more complex voting system hopefully it is “good enough” to indicate a clear majority. As mentioned previously, feedback is very welcome and we will review and make adjustments where necessary.

Community participation

I strongly encourage all our instance members as well as subscribers from different instances to vote on this topic. If we only get a small handful of votes it’s not going to be very representative of overall sentiment. This is a test run, so if things don’t work out in terms of participation we will re-assess and perhaps revisit the topic.#