I just don't get it.

Block the c/TheDonald community. That's it. That's all you need to do.

When it gets no visits, no views, and only it's handful of users meme-ing each other, it'll die. One of the big reasons TheDonald took off on Reddit was because of all the attention it got.

So, don't give them attention. Don't feed the trolls.

I'm not saying to tolerate neo-nazis. But running from them isn't exactly a time proven strategy, either. They will exist, and it's up to all of us to remind them that their views are garbage.

I'm out of here if the community stays up. I've already blocked it, but we cannot be tolerant with the intolerant.

They need to go, and other instances would be right to ban. That's the only way this model works.

I'm surprised the admin gives it so much thought. Just delete "the Donald" and be done with it. Who is going to complain that they don't want to give fascists a platform? That's how you handle them, by not giving them a second thought, all this discussion is already giving them way too much publicity.

It does feel that many people here on lemmy are experiencing 1st hand of "feeding the troll". The Donald community created is probably done by less than a handful of people and it drove hundred times more amount of users to turn against each other.

This is why I frown upon the idea of defederation and I blame the users for opening that pandora's box. People, including mods, are too busy getting at each other throats and praising the value of their bubble communities rather than having any sort of planning.

Defederation is not the answer. Honestly, it's such a powerful and destructive tool that I question whether it should exist period.

Users should be treated like adults who are capable of determining by themselves what content they are comfortable with seeing.

If I don't want to see an extremist political community on my feed, I block that community myself. If an instance is full of such communities, I block that instance myself.

I don't want or need some other random on the internet to make judgement calls on what content I can or cannot interact with.

Defederation is a tactical nuke, that if used incorrectly will destroy the freedom, decentralization and openness of Lemmy, and replace it with a far more centralized series of walled gardens.

I fear that people are trying to recreate the reddit model on Lemmy. Lemmy is not reddit, Lemmy is better than reddit. Reddit is top down, Lemmy is bottom up. We don't need more mod control, we need more user control.

I would love to see more features built for user moderation of content. Perhaps I could subscribe to another users blocklist, or follow their 'recommended communities'. Instances themselves could maintain suggested block lists, and users could chose to enable or disable them at their own discretion.

I'm really not sure that defederation has any place at all. Even things like spam and bot instances I think would be better handled by a blocklist (enabled by default even), that users can turn on or off as they see fit.

Allowing hate speech and telling people to decide for themselves what to follow is moderate argumentation that gives more power to fascists. Taking the middle road always gives power to those willing to take it.

Seeing people here pushing back for once against the trigger-happy defederating mindset actually gives me hope in the future of this instance.

oooff didn't know there was TheDonald on this instance. Not very happy about that.

I didn't even know this "community" was even here, mostly because that's just one guy and a half talking to themselves.

1-2 angry contrarians is hardly a community but still,
I'm not a big fan of being associated with that.
Defederation as the one and only step is a bit nuts to me, as there are 6k+ other users here.
By that logic, anyone that ever had a reddit account also supported /r/thedonald back then, which is just not the case.
As for what to do with that troll, I couldn't care less if they get the boot, yet evading a ban on here isn't exactly hard.

Let's just all take a breath. This instance has its rules, and I expect them to be adhered to for content on this instance.

Let's give moderator time to get involved, and the community time to navigate precident setting actions. I think it is cool this instance is being set up to be self governing. But it's just getting set up. And people work and are otherwise not constantly available.

I'm gratified that a lot of the conversations over there seem to point out that you shouldn't defederate entire instances because of a few bad actors. Realistically we can't all move to a new server every time a troll shows up, and the bigger the server the more likelihood of trolls.

I havent seen the donald or exploding heads content. if I was the admin of this instance id probably want to see blatant rule breaking examples to be able to remove them. is there blatant racism and whatnot over there or is it typical stuff meant to trigger liberals?

if there is blatant racism etc, have we reported it?

The server admin removed the community, maybe update your post.

I don't know but it seems that this particular community didn't exist until the dust-up regarding explodingheads and the discussions that have occurred afterward, including the Agora vote.

So, to me it seems that it was started in retaliation to that particular discussion/event.

The active user at the core continually changes their display name, making it more difficult to know that you're replying to the same person unless you're checking the account, as they only mod the one community.

That alone makes it bad faith or trolling, however you want to phrase it, and it seems both the user and the community are at odds with the overall environment that many users came to this instance for.

I think it actively hampers the conversation we were having with beehaw regarding refederation, and don't disagree with their observation in the matter.

Yes, we as users can block them. And?

Call it growing pains call it whatever you'd like but I think that ignoring the larger context behind why it's here and here now is missing the point of why "just block it as a user" isn't the ideal solution.

I've been using this instance more than beehaw cause i wanted a more broad federation view, but i don't want this place to become a Nazi bar. That small sub may grow. If it isn't banned then I'll probably move again and welcome the defedration

Not again...

Instances could also remove, ban & purge that remote community to be done with it 👌🏻

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don't love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone's attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn't caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I'm sure it's something we'll need to address internally, but it's just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

The most important thing people have on Fediverse is freedom of choice and, I hope, of expression. There are countless isolated communities outside of it, corporate or not, which one can use as a safe space when necessary. I really hope this decentralized archipelago will not turn into a) centralized echo chamber, or b) even more decentralized set of very small echo chambers. We need to be able to experience everything that there is, and react to it if/however we like. And for that, we need substantial amount of communities to be federated to everyone else. I hate when some delusional freak praises Mao or Stalin, who literally washed the land with the blood of the innocent and built a new order on their bones. Or when someone writes a trolling(?) post which implies open racism. But I better be able to read those posts than not.

Looks like TheDude@sh.itjust.works likely has a day job. Last commented 15 hours ago... Give it some time.

I think that is a mistake. Plenty of nice folks on this instance people shouldn't jump to conclusions. Also this discourse on that thread is really problematic. The idea of defederating a whole instance over 1 community is terrible. I would understand. If most of that instance was a troll den that is definitely not the case with this instance

As an outsider, I wrote already here my thougths. I'm against de-federating, since it's a nuclear option, but I would lie if I say that I'm okay with this situation. Add to this that this server hasn't de-federated exoloding-heads.com (a far right server that really hates trans people) but has no problem with blocking lemmygrad.ml (an awful Tankie server). But in the end that's your decision 🤷🏻

The trouble with having a federated server containing a lot of users/communities promoting bigotry is that it dirties the name of Lemmy. The dirtying dissuades people from joining. It ultimately helps ONLY the group causing the dirtying and harms the majority.