It’s not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It’s defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren’t even controversial in most parts of the world.
Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let’s say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so “popular” by default. The way the mods over there behave, it’s clear that they’re not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won’t just move.
The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.
Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Like in the other comment, it’s not their view on politics what is the problem. Its that they straight up lie. They try to rewrite history and deny well established facts. And if you try to call them out, they lie even more and ban you.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies, too?
Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.
And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.
Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.
But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, and making this whole thing even more confusing for new users.
I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.