Of course you are. There’s nothing wrong with defending your beliefs, or advocating for them in the right context. Especially if they have sound arguments to back them up. (Also, I don’t see any indication why that wouldn’t be allowed based on this post, or the rules of conduct)

But pushing your beliefs is different. It’s about foregoing actually convincing people and instead using underhanded tactics such as propaganda, brigading, or botting to make an opinion seem more sound than it really is. (Not saying your opinion necessarily is, by the way.)

I would like to second this. The OP reeks of opinionated bullshit. Being against NATO and a western hegemony in the world is absolutely a legitimate political opinion, whether you agree with it or not.

Now if only everyone would be so quick to defederate preemptively from Nazi instances.

What gives you the right to constrain what other people see? Just go ahead and ban them yourself if they offend you so.

I just created this new account because people like you see in themselves the right to constrain what I see.

Exactly. Freedom of speech != Freedom from social consequences

For example I don’t want to listen to you. Go away. Defederate yourself.

Absolutely mindblowing that this instance ever pretended it was going to play nicely with socialists.

There’s folks from lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml all over in here which is empirical proof that lemmy.world will “play nice” with Socialists. They’ll even play nice with Communists. What they’re objecting too is the Tankie Army assembling over at hexbear and their stated intention of propagandizing every instance in the fediverse.

If you don’t like it that’s cool. Spin up an account on another instance and go on with your day. This isn’t your instance and no one here owes you anything.

Hexbear stated explicitly their intent to [allow only specific narratives (explicitly anti-free speech), they openly stated their intention to engage in content manipulation tactics and pushing propoganda, and they have a delusional take on russia’s aggression and atrocities.

You all talk about this decision being against free speech when hexbear doesn’t even permit it! So hypocritical… Even if most users on hexbear have good intentions, it doesn’t justify the nefarious means that they openly plan to engage in. If hexbear wants open discussion, then they would permit topic criticism of communism; not suppress dissenting information/discussion.

I don’t care if it’s left, right, independent, apolitical… Instances like this create echo-chamers which leads to extreme views and unhealthy communities. They shouldn’t be given an audience to try to gaslight and astroturf. And if you don’t like this decision to defederate, you can join another instance.

Saying lemmy.world is anti-free speech for this is a joke. Lemmy.world doesn’t have rules disallowing criticism of governing styles or specific governments. Hexbear does… If you all want to criticize NATO and capitalism on lemmy.world, go for it! That discussion is healthy. An instance like hexbear which only allows specific narratives and encourages nefarious practices is not a healthy instance…

I have no skin in this game as I run my own instance, but well said. I couldn’t agree more with your counter points. This move, taken with the delay in defederating from fascist instances, has to be a big concern for the leftist community on LW.

I’m shocked by this post. And looking for a new instance.

I wanted an instance that doesn’t defederate based on ideology (except fascist instances) and of a generalist nature. I want to browse the wide fediverse from an instance where I’m allowed to be a socialist, but clearly lemmy.world is not the one for me.

Any recommendations?

Bye Felicia

Granted I only see the cherry picked statements in the post, but these things do not speak from a place of neutrality or at the very least openness. When all those things being bad is stated as close to fact, and them being against western propaganda,. They seem, to me, much less like a place that wants no propaganda and discussion of world organizations, and instead it sounds like a place that wants all of it gone and no place for western/left supportive discussion (which can be labeled propaganda, which may be a negative outlook on my side but any other site saying they do not want propaganda of one side usually isn’t very happy about arguments in favor of said side even when said thing is a fact or at least relevant to the discussion)

There were also comments very much critical of federation here because of some political joke posts. If shit post tier jokes on political figures aren’t ok things will work out. because it’s a Chinese communist it’s about, I’m also extremely sceptical of ho well.

With that said, I’m not completely against the federation, but it would require the mods to be vigilant and see if the federation doesn’t harm the general community over time. That might be a lot to ask for, since I do not know how much time and effort they already put into this already.

“informed rethoric” will be some of the most piss poor arguments you have ever seen in your life.

Yea implying that we don’t have propaganda and narratives on our side of the wall is naive

If we want the truth then an open discussion is the path. There will be arguments in bad faith, sure. But that’s not limited to “them”. It’s a human discussion thing.

Honestly the hardcore tankies initially soured me from joining the fediverse at first, until I understood how the fediverse functioned and realized it was just a loud minority that held extreme views. It’s still disturbing to read genocide denialism while openly supporting things such as authoritarianism and Russian imperialism.

I had enough of people like you, but you don’t see me asking that we defederate you.

Because “critical of western propaganda” is a front for promoting authorianism and intolerance. The “western propaganda” they’re critical of include human rights, inclusiveness, social security etc.

This is not a pissing contest on whose propaganda you like better. The US, Russia & China international politics have all been evil throughout history, and the only reason other nations don’t stand out as much is because they are currently not world powers. You only like NATO because you prefer their propaganda - and possibly because the p.o.s. Putler unknowingly was baited into the greatest NATO PR campaign of all times in Ukraine. Nevertheless, defederating from servers who are making statements against NATO and the western world order is a very brainwashed and dumb move.

Critical thinking is when you believe US antiChina propaganda.

If you want to meet leftist, you will meet people who are against NATO and who know all the evil the USA has done. Those are entities that have spent the last 100 years genociding left leaning people with the help of fascist groups all around the world, so of course we aren’t friendly to them. If you aren’t aware of that, you may be from Europe, so I suggest you research Operation Gladio to have an example of what they did here, to their supposed allied countries.

If you’re not open to those ideas, I really don’t understand why you were hoping to meet leftists.

Your comment’s intent is rather dubious – why post a quote from Lemmygrad, when the original post was talking about Hexbear? I encourage you to state that your quote is from Lemmygrad within the comment itself, instead of hiding it behind a link.

You don’t welcome cancer in to your body because you support all life.

Nazis and Russian trolls are not here to debate or inform. Their sole purpose is to degrade trust in democracy, spread propaganda, and other heinous shit.

Defederation is our only defense and we owe it to users to fight hate and lies.

They specifically said they’re being trolls and going to brigade tbf.

Your desire to “connect with pretty much everyone unless they were particularly problematic” is admirable,. Just remember, please, that the wider the gates are opened, the more idiots wander in and the more work for mods and admins.

After dealing with the first thousand or so idiots, you can smell 'em coming. I’m with the admins on this.

I’m not in favour of pre-emptive defederating.

I agree, though I hesitate to call it “pre-emptive defederating”. But I can see the viewpoint.

To me, pre-emptive defederating is what was done by most Mastodon instances with Threads. Or how mastodon.art defederated from BBC. There was nothing to judge there. There was no content. Nobody could have said what kind of content would be seen on threads or the BBC instance. You could guess, sure. But you had absolutely no way of knowing.

With hexbear, there is plenty content there to judge, and historically federated influence has always been the same as local, that is, the behavior of a fediverse community is not meaningfully different outside of their own instance. As a result, the admins of instance Y can judge what federation with instance X would look like, there is data there to look at.

Pre-emptive to me would mean having no community content to judge at all, like the Threads and BBC examples.

The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become.

I will add that this is in the nature of the fediverse. It is inherently not useful as a replacement to social media centers such as Reddit, because it’s decentralized nature implies the fracturization has to happen, and social media works best when everyone is in one giant garden party for chance meetings and spontaneous interactions.

That’s not necessarily a doom&gloom thing, it just means that by its very nature, software such as Lemmy cannot be useful to users who are seeking to replace Reddit. It can be Lemmy. Which is something else, albeit superficially similar in some regards.

(edit)
However, in general I do agree that they should probably have been allowed to federate and then re-evaluate based on how it works out. If their posts average X% downvotes, if Y% of local users end up filtering them or if a large portions of moderator actions are just from having to manage those users, they can still defederate.
I looked over the instance, and I cannot see anything I’m missing out on, but I can understand why others would want to at least give them one chance.