The instance seems to be mostly right wing trolls. I know defederating is unpopular but I don't think much is to be lost in this case and it can save the mods some headaches.
Edit: the response on exploding-heads.com to my reporting of transphobia. Courtesy of the "second in command"
Not the prettiest instance, but have they caused any real trouble outside of their own instance? Not much of a fediverse if we just defederate from instances that lean different politically. Especially seems like a weird move to go defederating on other instances this early given y'know, that we just got defederated from beehaw because of one misbehaved asshole.
I'm not saying we should immediately defederate, but the reason I originally went to check them out was partially because of this comment and the reply from [email protected]
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/207742
When he made that reply, it got rapidly upvoted to +7, while my comment was also sitting at about +7. This morning, several hours later, when a bunch of actual sh.itjust.works users woke up and read the thread, the ratio of votes changed in my favor.
I fear that we are going to deal with a significant level of brigading from that instance, and unlike reddit we don't really have any tools to combat that.
They also had a good laugh about the troll who posted here about getting us defederated by beehaw. They really don't like beehaw, or gay people in general.
It's whatever but we are already defederated with lemmygrad.ml and I feel like this stuff is on that same tier.
What can I say about brigading other than Exploding Heads having to turn off downvotes for the first time ever due to silent brigading?
How's our federation affecting your instance?
Well for starters, your instance users are pretty much the only ones popping in and complaining that we're defederated from lemmygrad, despite it not affecting you at all.
Y'know, since you're on a different instance and all.
Attempting to exert influence on a different instance seems kinda like the federation attempting to affect this instance, no?
We are bigger than you so you can't really affect us too much. But all I can say is I never downvoted anybody on your instance, I only made comments
If you are bigger than us (by a factor of 100?) and we can't really affect you much, is the fear of substantial downvote brigading perhaps a bit unnecessary?
Don't feel like I'm accusing you of brigading, you seem like the type of person who'd rather have a discussion than just anonymously downvote.
If anything, based on your previous statement about seeking out a different community to rile them up, trolling would be more correct.
I didn't seek them out to rile them up, that's just what ended up happening.
Yeah it's probably a bit unnecessary, but even if the brigading doesn't overly affect the community, it's annoying when people come in to post divisive shit and it gets upvoted to +7 before anyone here notices.
And then when I go over there I get people coming out of the woodwork to hurl slurs at me. I know those aren't necessarily people from your server, but they are part of that whole scene, so I can't just ignore that kind of stuff.
Also by my count you've got 1.2k users and we are closing in on 5k. So not bigger by a factor of 100
1.2k registered users on one of the oldest Lemmy instances.
We had 20 active users today, you had 640. I retract my guesstimate, my argument is that you're only bigger by a factor of 32.
And is it impossible that some of the users from your instance upvoted something they subscribe to, so it must be brigading?
But let's not discuss like we disagree. You all have convinced me to support defederation.
Yeah I suspected that was the case, but you didn't make it super clear that most of your users were afk. You should have put that in the headline.
What was the reason that instance was created and how long ago? I really don't know anything about Lemmy history before I joined.
https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5781
Here's a start. The people who run lemmy.ml and lemmygrad are pro-genocide tankies, that think any critisism of the ccp is orientalism. He's bad enough he was banned from r/socialism
edit: he's also head dev of lemmy