A couple of guys couldn’t handle a few troll messages? Sorry, if we want an independent site, away from the hands of venture capitalists, you’re gonna have to tough it out and deal with a few nasty messages.

No they aren’t. Clearly they don’t have to, as they are in fact shutting the instance.

They’re providing a service, as volunteers, for free, and asking nothing in return. By definition they get to set the terms on which they do that, and it is astonishingly selfish for you to expect them to do so under conditions that are clearly untenable, and blame them for this outcome when they cannot continue.

No. If you want an independent site, away from the hands of venture capitalists, you should’ve stepped up and volunteered to admin when they needed help.

PCCs were a mistake. Never should we have let the ruling class impose a politicised police force upon us. It was inevitable that it would lead to ignorant nonsense like this.

Uh huh, because that’s what they were advocating for. Sure. I’m gonna do you the favour of assuming good faith, so I’m not sure if you just didn’t read the operative word “supposedly” in their comment, but if not: don’t be so naïve.

There are widely documented occasions on which smaller instances have been blacklisted based on entirely spurious and false accusations of “fascism”. All it takes is for one large enough instance to defederate, and others will follow based on their word alone. This results in the affected instance becoming non-viable, due to absence of any visibility amongst the wider fediverse. In one well-known case, an instance was branded as “fascist” and forced to shut down because the admin refused to take censorious actions that would have been illegal in their country.

That is the outcome you are advocating for when you suggest that such instances should be “iced out”. And that outcome is the “toxic community” that we should be most wary of, because it is insidious and cloaks itself in a guise of supposed good intentions.

And before you suggest that these are isolated incidents that don’t reflect the behaviours of communities at large: don’t forget that it was mere days ago that feddit.uk, a rather large instance, was defederated by another large instance based on entirely baseless and spurious claims of transphobia, prompting the instance admin to issue a “guidance” post that basically just reiterated the existing rules… and suddenly this was seen as ok, and not transphobic at all. Imagine if the admin had instead not issued this statement, and pointed out that the existing rules were already sufficient? The instance’s anti-transphobia stance has not changed, but I don’t doubt that other instances would have portrayed such a response as doubling down on transphobia and defederated. So even large instances are not immune!

Defederation should be a last resort for rogue instances that support actual problematic behaviours like fascism. It should never be considered an action of first resort based on any accusation of supposed fascism or communism. Which was OP’s point. Yet it never ceases to shock and amaze me at how openly and readily people are willing to suggest such a thing.

Literally nobody is suggesting that actual fascist instances should not be defederated. Nobody needs to debate what should be done about those, because the answer is obvious, and already widely implemented (i.e. defederate). So why even bring it up, as if it’s a valid rebuttal to OP’s point? It’s not, and it’s disappointing how so many discussions on this subject devolve to comments with an absolutist stance that has a feelgood vibe, without actually analysing it for cogency to the actual discussion at hand.

What an absurd comment. As if defederation were ever a suggestion? As if it were even possibility? I’m struggling to understand what point you were even trying to convey here.

Did the previous lack of transphobia-specific guidance somehow negate the fact that abuse and bigotry, including transphobic bigotry, was already against the rules and banworthy in this instance? Do we constantly having our finger hovering over the ‘defederate’ button, just in case an instance is not deemed ideologically pure enough?

Well apparently, yes! In spite of the fact that this guidance takes a very sensibly neutral tone, it is precisely that neutral tone (predating this specific guidance, but as a response to the same neutrality that it embodies) that has directly resulted in this instance being defederated by at least one major instance already.

That the fediverse supports defederation does not mean that it’s acceptable for everyone to bring it up at every opportunity, as if it should be the action of first response. Defederation is a last resort for rogue instances, and to bring it up outside of that context is dreadfully gauche.

I never cease to be baffled by the seemingly boundless glee with which Americans will repeat this myth that has no basis outside of Internet cope. Literally nobody born in the last 100 years would read “trump” to mean “fart”. The only meaning of “trump” to British people is the winning suit in a game of cards, or the concept of winning in general. There’s literally a collectible card game in Britain called “Top Trumps”, and let me tell you, it ain’t about huffing farts. Unlike your absurd comment.

And even if people did understand “trump” to mean “fart”, it’s still an astonishing feat of mental gymnastics to claim that “it makes no sense that you would elect someone called that”, because funnily enough, a person’s name is totally unrelated to their ability to do the job, and lots of people have funny-sounding names that go completely unremarked upon, because people understand that a name is just a name.

I absolutely hate the guy, and yet when I see people purporting to make fun of his name based on something that isn’t even true, rather than, y’know, attacking his actual policies and actions, it makes me despair at the pathetic state of American politics. Seriously, your country is going to the dogs, and the best thing you could think of to combat that is to baselessly make fun of a guy’s name?

There was certainly a ‘no-brain’ somewhere in her thought process, I’ll grant her that.

But a tomato isn’t even an actual fruit…

“Actual” refers to the ordinary “plain English” meaning. Under the “plain English” definition, i.e. non-technical, non-domain-specific, a tomato is a vegetable.

It’s a botanical fruit, but an actual vegetable.

That feels like a rather tactless choice of phrasing in the headline, given that there are people literally under fire by Israel right now.