I forgot to mention, if you haven’t already realized, that the upgrade was successful!

There was an issue with object storage. This was to test that it was working again!

Hi @DecaturNature@yall.theatl.social - apologies for the slight delay. Work and some other stuff kept my dance card more full than expected this past week.

How do we unblock any instance that got on Oliphant tier 0 but are later removed? Is that something that will be checked for?

I’d like to have a users council or other group-type decision for block/unblocking going forward. If I was put on the spot for my own personal thoughts, I’d say that unless an instance is primarily dedicated towards illegal, hateful, malicious, or otherwise disruptive activities, I’m inclined to not defederate. My own personal differences with the speech or opinions of another instance have ever been a factor in that decision. So, if there was an instance that needs to be unblocked that was blocked on Oliphant, then let’s unblock it!

how does blocking and silencing affect the new search system? I guess blocking is obvious…but does silence block search?

Yeah, blocking/defederating would prevent search, so agreed that we need to be a bit more careful with who we block or not.

This is super cool. Thanks for sharing! I’ll take a closer look soon

This is part of the dehumanization process. Making gays the “other” signals to the community, and the students, that gay people (or well, probably any adjacent minority category) are not worthy of any respect of decency.

And then there’s bullying, violence, or even worse. And when there is bullying or violence, there is no defense against it - because why would that be a bad thing when the community says gays are bad people?

And for gay/lesbian/trans/queer kids, it is just another dagger into the self-respect and self-worth. Having grown up in this shitty milleu in Cobb County, I can say it takes many years of personal work and therapy to purge oneself of internalized hatred.

Hey Y’all!

I wanted to circle back on this discussion thread. Things got a bit busy with the instance upgrade (which is now upgraded to 4.1.6).

• With regards to Tier 0 Oliphant, I had initially thought that the list was primarily bottom-of-the-barrel sort of sites, but on closer look, there were sites included that well, people on the instance utilize - such as newsie.social. I thought that our discussion on our Lemmy server, plus DMs and feedback from the Mastodon side figured out which sites we wanted to exclude from the domain block list. All that being said, my objective with the blocks was to remove the known sources of abusive, illegal, or malicious (e.g., spam, malware) content.
• And then that leaves us in the gray zone. There are instances where 98% of the users are great Fediverse citizens, and then 2% are horrible trolls. There are instances where teams of moderators are carefully watching posts, and others were moderators only step in during extreme situations. And there are instances that are for-profit, non-profit, from different countries and contexts, and so on. I don’t have any straightforward answer as to where the line is located in this grey area, with regards to if a domain should be defederated or not.
• @DecaturNature had a great point regarding what if theATL.social becomes either a target or source of disinformation. A group of users (real or actual) could create accounts on the instance in a coordinated fashion, and turn over the apple cart of our existing community posting disinformation and slander. It would seem the line would be clear that those individuals would not be welcome, but if someone is being a jerk or insincere, is that enough justification to ban them?

Final Thoughts

I’m going to chew through the above points. Obviously other err…large social networks have figured something out. And smaller Mastodon servers have done the same. It is quite likely that the current server rules are not satisfactory to cover all the potential issues, situations, and possibilities of human (or bot) behavior of theATL.social users, or content that is federated to theATL.social. If you have any additional thoughts, please feel free to include below. I don’t have a timeline on changes for server rules, but when there are changes (if you wanted to propose changes), I would prefer if that was a collaborative exercise with the core group of users on this instance.

Thanks again for all your comments and feedback!

I wanted to thank you for your comment! I’m out of time (and steam) for today, but I will follow up on thoughts on your points tomorrow. (I’m in general agreement with what you wrote)

Duly noted! Thank you for your comment!

Agreed - that report is what drove the urgency to implement this. It is one thing if “bad stuff” ended up on the server after reasonable steps were taken to prevent. However, if reasonable steps were not taken to prevent and bad stuff showed up…well, I don’t want to be in that position!

Duly noted! Thank you

Agreed - that instance was not blocjed.

Thank you, @DecaturNature - earlier this evening, I conducted a careful review of reading the domain names of the blocked Tier 0 instances. Many instances’ names were self-describing the type of content hosted, and those descriptions were suffiicent criteria for exclusion. Others, as you mentioned, were banned for unclear or highly subjective reasons. The instanced that you mentioned were automatically not blocked or silenced because people on theATL.social were already following/engaged with them.

With regards to auto-updating the Tier 0 list, I am in agreement that an automatic update procedure is not ideal, as instances may be again be blocked without cause.

Perhaps it best, now that the worst of the worst are now blocked, to have a better documented review process for any future additions to the block list.

And I know that we did have a moderation council before from our earlier meetings with Andy, but coordination with that council fell apart a bit - which I’ll take the blame for. Perhaps re-grouping that group would be helpful going forward.

Likewise, I can confirm that they were not blocked, and have no reason why they should be.

Agreed. I can confirm that they were not blocked, and I do not see any reason why they should be blocked.

Thank you all for your comments. I will be responding to each point in the next day or so. However, I do see from the comments that there is an immediate need to implement the Tier 0 Oliphant block list, which has now occured.

Information on this block is available here: https://yall.theatl.social/post/55833

Note that there were some domains for which theATL.social users currently engage. I am giving a 2-week grace period for anyone who wants to keep those domains, otherwise the remaining domains will be blocked after that point.

Thank you all for your comments and contributions to making this instance a good place to be.

To correct my initial post, @DecaturNature is correct. There are ~5 domains currently blocked, not 2. And, I’m in agreement thus far that a “light” approach to blocked domains is no longer appropriate. I’m looking forward to thoughts and feedback on this thread to inform the next steps on policy related to future domain blocks! Thank you for your time contributing to this discussion.

Glad to do so! Appreciate the questions and glad everything was sorted out.

The market is next to the “Beacon” development, at the end of Grant Ave (https://goo.gl/maps/9zcdhhq3u5Ca7vNX7) - super easy to bike to, but there’s only one bike rack, so people sort of just lock bikes together, or to random objects. On the other hand, driving and parking there appears always looks like a shitshow, so biking/walking is the best transportation method in any event.

So, all updated - the issue is that Lemmy (currently) does not pull older posts or other metadata from a community from another server until a subscription is made to that community/server.

So when you join a community from another server, you’re not going to see a lot, until that server “pushes” new posts to yall.theatl.social

That behavior may change with software changes, but it is what it is for now. The same issue occurs on Mastodon too. If you are on a larger server, you won’t have this issue, because it’s likely that larger server has been receiving posts all along.

I’ve reviewed the logs and it appears the issue is that some instances (such as the ones you were attemping to view) are using a newer version of Lemmy than the official release. The latest tag for Lemmy software is 0.18.2, while the last release is 0.18.1. I try releases and not tags, so perhaps dev forgot to do so.

I’ll update, and presume that things will federate properly afterwards.