fiat_lux

Moved to @fiat_lux@lemmy.zip (04-2026)

Gates Foundation launches external review of ties to Jeffrey Epstein

1mon 25d ago in news@lemmings.world from www.independent.co.uk

I welcome the word "external", but with caution about how external or objective that is in reality. It wouldn't be the first external review that commissioned a sympathetic organization or one headed up by a family or friend.

thirsty

1mon 26d ago in cat from infosec.exchange

Just when I think I've seen every strange thing a cat might do, the Internet throws something new at me. This is amazing.

The Nazi symbol laws were one of the ones that came to mind. Strangely, that's not even consistent among European countries - Austria and Germany will strictly enforce swastika display (although they may provide exceptions for limited artistic and educational use?). But as far as I can tell, it's legal in Denmark, Italy and possibly Finland. I suspect that legal status would not be so clear if actively being used to promote hate, understandably.

The laws of my region I'm largely familiar with, so I'm not too concerned about abiding by those. But I noticed many instances have in their Terms of Service or Code of Conduct that the user is responsible for ensuring their content complies with the instance's regional laws - that's what sparked my curiosity. Other instances like lemmy.world have an oddly unbounded position like "Do not post illegal content of any type", but I assume is implicitly scoped to their "governing laws" section which lists Netherlands, Germany and Finland - and I'm unsure which would take precedence if there were conflicting laws.

Edit: Another part of the curiosity came from the recent stories about the US taking Reddit to court to compel turnover of information about the person who criticized ICE.

There's a lot to unpack here. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to assume that what Luminous said was a legitimate call for violence and was therefore not complying with the Lemmy.world code of conduct.

If we assume that, then the Lemmy.world terms say that they can:

  • remove the content and ask a user not to do it again, and/or,
  • (if it's a second time) suspend the account temporarily, and/or,
  • restrict or banish the community, and/or,
  • remove all of that user's content, and/or,
  • permanently ban the user.

I have no idea how many of those had already happened, I'm going to assume for convenience again that some of it did. The site bylaws also say that for community bans and content removal:

  • Bans "should only be used as a last resort for hostile users OR for users that are known bad faith actors."
  • "Any community user ban CAN and SHOULD have a clearly documented reason pointing to explicit rules broken."
  • "any content that they DO remove, they should ideally be able to cite the community rules that were broken."

I note that all of Luminous' content was removed, and while the "Our Rights" section says this can happen, it somewhat contrasts with the guidelines for documenting content removal. But there's still nothing in any of this that suggests defederating from the entire instance is warranted or an appropriate course of action. If community bans are considered a last resort, then it seems logical that defederating has at the bare minimum the same threshold of seriousness.

Let's assume for convenience again that the comments from one admin can be sufficient cause for defederation, and its absence from the ToS is an oversight. If that's the case, then the bylaws and prior defederation examples (eg. lemmygrad) suggest that this should be adequately explained. But that didn't happen, and it's not clear whether the other admins were involved in the decision.

Even if all of the above reactions to Luminous' comment were justified and proper, the actions afterwards by lemmy.world admins / mods don't inspire my confidence. I can see there has been:

  • This refederation announcement, only posted as a regular post (I found it yesterday by chance). It only briefly outlines the events leading up to this.
  • One user in this thread has been temporarily community banned for "Spam, harassment" after three removed posts in the thread, which doesn't seem like spam quantity. Two of those posts cite the reason "this isn't about jordanlund", yet further down in the thread, an admin is litigating the jordanlund situation. Other far more off topic content is in this thread, so if that is a concern, it's not clear why the other comments remain.
  • A few users have been permanently(?) banned from the instance with the reasons "troll" or "calling FHF members nazis". It's unclear whether the removed comments or user histories rose to the level of needing an instance ban.
  • Multiple other users have been temporarily banned from this community for reasons spanning from "uncivil" to "disinformation", to "sealioning and harassment". Many of the removed comments from those users did not seem to meet those descriptions either.
  • Many other removed comments from non-banned users, with varying levels of clear rules broken.
  • One moderator indicating the defederation mostly only targets several "loud" people and the instance size is only 165 people, which undercuts both the reasoning for why defederation was necessary and the justification for including 150 users as collateral (along with anyone who may have wanted to interact with them). Several people can be dealt with using individual bans, and that quantity are unlikely to be negatively impacting lemmy.world at scale.
  • No response from the only person further up the leadership ladder for whether / how Lemmy.world admin are evaluating the original decisions, governance process for defederation, or the bus factor and risks of one person being site admin and top moderator and infra simultaneously. Not even a "I'm alive and considering the issue" acknowledgement, unless done behind the cover of the lwadmin account.
  • Lots of little bits of engagement otherwise from Lemmy.world admin or mods with various tangents in the thread.

Very little here seems to align with the by laws and expectations for proportionate community moderator conduct.

The situation looks to me like it has been poorly handled, and there is no sign of any compromise or admission that any of the events that up to now could have been handled differently, or a process for how it might be handled in the future. I just don't see much in the way of community building or good will, but I do see the same patterns that have inspired other lemmy.world drama over the years.

If one admin's comments or actions aren't sufficient for justifying defederation, then it's unclear why dbzer0 is being considered for defederation at all. But, if one admin's comments or actions are sufficient justification, then the situation in this thread opens the door for other instances to defederate from Lemmy.world.

How does this platform work?

1mon 27d ago in asklemmy

There are, and the rules for each community (subreddit) differ, but there are also the instance (server) rules, so it can get a bit complex. The community rules are usually posted in the "sidebar" for that community, eg. https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy,the instance rules you'll usually find in the "sidebar" for the servers home page, eg. https://lemmy.world/.you can tell what instance a community is in by the community name, if it doesn't have a "@" in it, it's on the same instance you are.

Just have a quick look at both sets of rules before you post something and you're probably fine. Even if you get banned from one community or instance, there are likely similar communities and instances elsewhere you can go. The biggest difference will usually be how active they are. You can also set up your own community, and if you're tech oriented, your own instance.

Crack a cold one while you drop a dookie

1mon 28d ago in badrealestate@feddit.uk

I assumed it was for insulin, which needs to be refrigerated.

His girlfriend in Canada has it. Along with the proof of aliens. Fuck off, Patel.

Indian food is saving so many lives

1mon 28d ago in vegetarian from media.piefed.social

Interestingly India has lower vegetable consumption levels than you might think.

Image description: line chart showing the average annual vegetable consumption per capita in kilograms for China, India, USA, UK, Italy, Mexico and Russia between 1961 and 2023. China has roughly 4 times the levels of the other countries. Mexico has the least, and India second least.

Source: Vegetable consumption per capita, 1961 to 2023, for China, India, USA, UK, Italy, Mexico and Russia

They were the only neighbors I've ever had to do this with after many years of apartment living. I am fine with normal sounds, but their noise far exceeded normal constantly, and I have an expectation that shared living needs to come with a level of consideration for others. I know it wasn't just my problem either, there were multiple complaints made to the property managers by other apartments, to no effect.

I chose this approach intentionally to avoid confrontation with obviously aggressive and unreasonable people. They had a reputation for regularly screaming obscenities at each other and anyone else who displeased them. Knowing the exact content of all their arguments, I knew that normal human interaction was likely to direct their aggressive behavior towards me, which would not achieve my goal of sleeping at night.

The message was just "you can hear me" which I hoped would then logically translate to "therefore I can also hear you". The normal kinds of sound just didn't get the message across for some reason so I added the awkward element - it allowed for longer sound duration than briefly coughing or laughing, and made it more difficult to ignore. I'm pretty sure they thought I was just doing my thing.

It's definitely a very oblique and passive aggressive approach to the problem, but it worked well enough that I didn't have to go for something more confrontational, which would have been the next step.

World’s oldest tortoise caught in viral crypto death scam

2mon 16d ago in world@quokk.au from www.theguardian.com

Depeche Mode - Barrel of a Gun [1997]

3mon 26d ago in 90smusic from inv.nadeko.net

Why you shouldn't annoy the butler

3mon 26d ago in lemmyshitpost