From your home instance, go to search and enter the community like this:

[email protected]

Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community. Defederating such an instance is a basic best practice in the Fediverse.

More importantly for those who wring their hands about not limiting the whole community – failure to defederate from bad actor instances will be factored in when good productive instances with content folks here want to see decide whether to defederate us. (Remember that this place is already defederated by one prominent instance, which is a material detriment to users here.)

It is reasonable and normal to disagree about where the line is drawn in terms of what instances deserve defederation. It’s often ambiguous what’s a normal instance with sloppy moderation and a few bad apples^[1] versus what’s a place that is run by and for bad actors.

There’s a wide range of standards that can be applied. It seems like the general vibe can be broken down into three groups:

• Only defederate spammers and child porn
• Only defederate spammers child porn and tankies
• Defederate spammers child porn, tankies, and rampantly fascist troll farms

I don’t think anyone has really advocated for anything aggressive than that on here (could be wrong)

Because rather than make a decision one way or the other, the instance admin announced an undefined consensus-based decision making process, as a result of which we now have both this thread and this one

The call is coming from inside the house on this one

It’s up to you to come together, discuss, and reach a consensus. If you wish to add, remove, or modify a rule, make a post, garner support from other members, and I’ll implement the change. This invitation extends beyond our immediate community - I welcome input from everyone across the fediverse. Again to be clear, I gave an example of modifying rules but this applies to anything that I have the ability to do on this instance.

@[email protected] what constitutes “consensus”? A majority, a supermajority? 100% buy-in on most important topics is simply not on the table, and setting a bar too high for action is tantamount to predetermining that action will not be taken.

(I have no problem with the tyranny of the admin, either, as long as it’s clear what direction the site is headed in so I know whether to stick around or not.)

You have no right to tell me what I can see and respond to anymore than I have a right to tell you who you can and cannot block.

That’s also not what defederating is. Nobody’s speech or ability to see speech is being restricted, since we are all free to set up accounts on other instances. Users are making a reasonable request to the instance owner for a normal moderation action that is in line with stated community standards and past defederation decisions (i.e., lemmygrad); the instance owner is free to honor it or not.

The basic question, which every fediverse instance has been having to deal with since inception, is how to draw the line on communities that willingly include bad actors. It has to be drawn somewhere, and where you draw it says a lot.

lol, defederating is not anything like jail

• Federating is like sitting at a big table with a bunch of people in a restaurant.
• Blocking is moving a couple seats down from someone who’s being an asshole so you can’t hear them anymore (but meanwhile they’re still harassing your friends, you’re just ignoring it)
• Defederating is separating the group so that you’re no longer at the table with the asshole and their asshole friends

Now, in a tolerant society, we should be tolerant of people who are merely annoying. But not people who are normalizing violence and hate. There are people you fundamentally should not sit at a table with.

It’s important to understand the difference between a good faith disagreement and bad faith propaganda and harassment campaigns, which is what the right wing troll farms deal in.

Nazi instances will proliferate and it benefits nobody else to stay in federation with them. It makes the whole fediverse less usable and more dangerous. And whether you like it or not it sends a message to people who are targeted by them that they are not truly welcome here, regardless of whatever moderation rules are espoused.

And in North America, as in many places, these people are acting as a propaganda arm for a literal violent terror movement. Sometimes under a fig leaf of ”irony” but it makes no material difference whether they’re chuckling when they spew shit to me

I mean, “budget” is always relative. Kingrinder has cheaper models, but OP mentioned $100 as a target.

Good hand grinders range in price up to around $500 (or more if you get into territory like the Helor 106 or the Lyn or Weber HG1s), with the big names clustering mainly in the $200-300 area.

Below a certain price point, grind consistency may drop noticeably, and the build quality may be less robust and parts may be less available to repair and keep the grinder in service. (Relevant since this is being asked on /BuyItForLIfe)

Budget grinder enthusiast go-to recently seems to be Kingrinder, which has had a lot of coupons recently on Amazon. I think you can get the K6 for $100 with coupon for example. Not sure about parts availability for long term repairability.

Arrows

oooh

Mugen: 1:18 usually, V60: 1:16ish. (Light and medium roasts)

Ratio will depend on preference, equipment, and what coffee you’re brewing, as well as the recipe. In my case I use a bit longer ratio on the Mugen compared to the V60 because it has less bypass (less water gets around the coffee by going through the filter too soon). Generally speaking folks use shorter ratios for darker roasts and longer ratios for lighter roasts.

It gets a little more complicated with iced coffee, because what you’re doing with iced coffee is actually brewing a very short ratio and then diluting it, which gives you a concentration that is similar to what you would normally get, but with lower extraction. (Not necessarily a bad thing!)

I want one for tea brewing more than coffee, because I like the idea of experimenting with percolation methods but most tea equipment doesn’t allow that and most coffee equipment wouldn’t work on tea unless you ground the tea.

Most manual coffee grinders should have quite long lifespans in home use. You have to grind a lot of coffee (or, I guess, one rock) to wear out burrs.

1zpresso currently has probably the best rep at the moment among enthusiasts, but Kinu, Comandante are also well-regarded. All of those brands have some ability to get parts replacements if needed down the line, but which specific parts are available may vary.

A major differentiating factor is whether you need to be able to grind for espresso. Some grinders are optimized for espresso, some for pourover, and some are intended to both. Espresso requires more minute adjustments and the ability to grind finer. Traditional espresso benefits from a higher proportion of fines, contributing to the body of the shot, while pourover, especially more modern/third wave style, may benefit from less fines and higher clarity.

Some popular grinders:

• All purpose: 1zpresso K series, Comandante (may need “red clix” upgrade for dialing in espresso)
• Filter only, high clarity: 1zpresso ZP6 (currently back in stock at Rogue Wave in Canada, not sure for how long)
• Espresso: 1zpresso J-Max, Kinu

The Orphan Espresso Lido OG also seems like a good choice for a BIFL all-rounder do to its robust build, BUT it seems like there’s an issue with some of the parts in their adjustment mechanism on the current iteration that they’re working on addressing.

A couple of comprehensive roundup videos:

https://youtu.be/JySL64iigT4

https://youtu.be/MV6awoNQXHU

Note: this is just me synthesizing reviews basically, I’m not a grinder expert. (But I have a ZP6 and a J-Max and could answer questions about those.)

If you’re mainly using the board in one place, a battery switch isn’t ultra critical, although it is a very good to have. If you plan to take the board anywhere, it’s more of a must-have, because there’s no way to put it to sleep such that carrying it in your bag won’t wake it back up

Oh that’s super neat

If all the new trolls are coming from two instances, and defederating those two instances will keep the load manageable for them, why wouldn’t they?

This kind of decision is a big problem for scaling up Lemmy as a reddit replacement and welcoming huge volumes of new users, but I don’t think that’s Beehaw’s goal and certainly not their responsibility.

The tricky bit is figuring out how to set up fediverse-wide communities in places that most (non-troll) users won’t be cut off from them.

Hillsides are great

This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.

It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.

Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.

Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)

In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)

This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?

Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)

Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.

The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.