Comment on Why is programming.dev federated with exploding heads?

Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I wish there were a way to block entire instances per user.

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  • targetx@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It is an option in Sync for Lemmy at least.

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    • awwwyissss@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Also Connect.

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  • silas@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is actively being discussed too

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  • astral_avocado@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah it should be a per user decision…

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    • tastysnacks@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Server runners should be able to make their own decisions too.

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      • FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        this is not mutually exclusive

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  • aport@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This would make my life so much easier

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• Shikadi@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you’re participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It’s no different for disinformation campaigns.

  It’s not like they’re just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they’re taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it’s very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.

  I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn’t mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.

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  • Zalack@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our world get used.

    It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.

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    • Lucky@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      How would a formal licensing system work for software engineering? How would they keep up with the rapid evolution in this industry?

      I believe in better education in this field, but the standard “engineer” programs from other fields don’t translate to software. Having the government codify today’s standards would stunt the industry as a whole and kill innovation. Imagine if they had done that in the 90s and said all programming must be waterfall, monolithic, relational dbs, and using c/Fortran/Cobol.

      Maybe I just don’t understand how other countries handle it though. I know my country would absolutely screw it up

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      • shagie@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Its not about knowing the current frameworks available, but rather the “if a civil engineer knowingly designs a bridge that fails there are serious repercussions.”

        www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

        As to staying on top of things, every licensed engineer in the US is required by their state’s licensing board to have about a week’s worth of continuing education every year.

        njspe.org/…/continuing-education-credits-for-prof…

        The thing is that the title of software engineer has been applied to people who lack licensure and thus weakened the importance of the title in terms of expected knowledge and professional responsibility.

        As to the NSPE licensing software engineer - nspe.org/…/ncees-ends-software-engineering-pe-exa…

        They tried doing it for a few years, though few people were interested in taking the test and so it was dropped. I did look into it, however the strong math and physics requirement for the FE exam (the prerequisite for the PE) went beyond what I took in college.

        NCEES Director of Exam Services Tim Miller, P.E., says there was a lot of discussion about the exam’s impact, including how many people with software engineering degrees were taking the FE exam. “If they’re not even taking the FE exam, they’re probably not going to take the PE exam,” he says. “In addition, if the boards aren’t regulating the [software engineering profession], it’s tough to get people to take the exam.”

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      • Zalack@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic like how to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

        How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers. How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software.

        How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue, especially in critical systems like a plane, and guard against them doing the wrong thing. I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was try grab the yoke and pull up, but that caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque.

        When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code?

        None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using.

        Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility.

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  • Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, the goal is mainly to get everyone in the fediverse able to participate in the coding chats as long as they’re respectful about it rather than being a free speech absolutism instance. An ideal scenario would be allowing users to participate in here while limiting the posts in their communities to not show up

    Decision should be pushed out soon, just making sure we getting everything hammered out and been a bit slower due to vacations

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    • Shikadi@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s much more reasonable than I expected =D I’d argue they can make an account on another instance if they want to participate

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      • Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah thats why defederation isn’t as bad of a decision currently while things get coded. It ruins a bit of the fediverse mechanics though of only needing one account to interact with different sites which is why having them interact in the instance communities while their outside posts are hidden is ideal

        The main sorts used in the instance are local new, local active, and subs which is what we are mainly optimizing for. Default sort when people make an account is local active which is a bit different from some other sites that default to all

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  • parpol@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    False information is a global problem, but arguing against free speech absolutism sounds more dangerous to me.

    I hear people say free speech absolutism is dangerous because it can lead to loud extremist voices overwhelm the more “moderate” ones, often referencing Nazi Germany and the success of their propaganda. However, any limiting of free speech can lead to censorship of voices falsely labeled extreme and fake. The entity regulating speech would need to be absolutely immune to corruption, which just isn’t possible.

    Extremists voices often reach further because of how radical they are, but sometimes the radical ideas are the right ones, even if at the moment the general public disagree with them. After all, we have no idea of knowing that what we really hear is the general public opinion or bots deployed by a currently dominant entity, and the general public is not always correct. For example, in certain countries the general public still believe homosexuality is sinful and should be banned, which is horrible. In these places we need radical voices. If there is a regulatory system of speech, it could be skewing and mislabeling what is considered public opinion, and what is considered extreme views.

    My views do not align with the right, but I am a strong advocate for free speech and privacy, especially on the internet. Free speech and privacy must be absolute, or it isn’t free speech or privacy.

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    • Shikadi@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’m a very strong supporter of free speech. But free speech absolutism where you go out of your way to make all voices heard is not what free speech is about. It’s about the government not interfering. Just like people have a right to a gun, but Walmart has the right to kick you out for bringing one, rammy.site users have the right to say whatever they want, and other instances have the right to defederate.

      If a teacher goes against the curriculum and teaches children that black people are all out to get them, I sure as hell hope the school would step in and stop or remove them.

      That’s not a violation of free speech, but in your opinion above it would be.

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      • parpol@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Honestly, yeah I think it would be in my opinion.

        I would argue that an instance is like a governing body for many communities, and defederation is censoring people of other nations. “If you don’t like it, you can leave” is not as simple anymore because you cannot just migrate to a different instance (at least not fully)

        Guns at Walmart is different, because you can’t just block a gun on a personal level, but on Lemmy you can block communities on a user level. (Blocking entire instances on a user level would be even better ). And guns pose a physical threat, while radical instances are more or less opinions people don’t agree with.

        If a teacher has radical ideas, as long as he has overwhelming evidence, he should be allowed in my opinion. " Black people are out to get you" is very hard to agree with, but “gays shouldn’t be hanged” in a country like Iran isn’t.

        Admins of course have a right to do whatever they want with their instance, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed, but I personally don’t agree with it and I’m voicing my opinion against it.

        I have some instances in the fediverse that come to mind that I personally wouldn’t want to be defederated from but know that many others do. For example the mastodon instance pawoo where my favorite artists reside.

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• 8ace40@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I understand the reasoning but I think it’s not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent. Exploding heads is just violent propaganda. I hope you defederate.

  What about hexbear? Is programming.dev federated with them? Or are they intentionally defederated with everyone?

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  • masterofballs@exploding-heads.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I understand the reasoning but I think it’s not the same situation as lemmygrad, which I feel is a normal instance with an ideological bent.

    Lemmy grad actively denies Genocides. Lemmygrad says that that Tienanmen Square was fabricated by the U.S.

    Lemmygrad consistently host antiwhite racism and then defends it by saying something like it’s not racist because white people aren’t real or something

    Exploding-heads will poke fun at gender dysphoria in two communities, dank memes and dank taco.

    EH is morally superior to lemmygrad in every way.

    Finally,

    You all should be using nostr where admins can’t take your voice away or your right to hear opposing opinions.

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  • parpol@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Looks like a typical right wing instance to me. I personally don’t feel like propaganda is enough of a reason to defederate. You have propaganda everywhere, even from official news outlets.

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    • lemann@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Their interactions in threads were unpleasant, and a small group of them were persistently provoking lemmyworld users.

      If you search exploding-heads you might come across some examples, if they haven’t been nuked from that instance.

      Aside from that, I find Hexbear users really pleasant, and I’ve never seen a lemmygrad user provoke anyone 🤷‍♂️

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    • Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The content that occasionally ended up in my All feed was mostly Hate against trans people (I.e. being happy about people’s suicide), or complete nonsense conspiracies.

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  • Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    hexbear split off and has been running their own fork for awhile separate from the rest of lemmy (so they couldnt federate with lemmy instances). They are coming back now though so lemmy instances will start to be able to interact with them soon

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    • JackBruh@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Hexbear is already federated. They’re fine when interacting with other instances.

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      • Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Ah yeah just checked and looks like I see can see their communites, didnt realize they already joined in. So yes we are federated with them atm, just if a community hasnt been subscribed to yet by anyone the posts from it wont show up in the feeds

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      • lukini@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Not getting what I’ve seen. They filled up 90% of a thread about China/Taiwan with hundreds of comments supporting the CCP. Quite a few were just troll messages, too.

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    • 8ace40@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thanks for the info.

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• cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  FWIW, I (single user instance) defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad, but not exploding heads. Not because I think nazis are better than authoritarian fascists, but because hexbear and lemmygrad users are everywhere, while the nazis never seem to comment on anything.

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• natecox@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I am not a fan of reaching for defederation often; I actually came here from beehaw because I felt like they just pulled that trigger too fast and too frequently.

  However, I do think that we should defederate from exploding-heads and hexbear. I don’t go looking for chances to be offended, but I do notice that when I see something truly distasteful on All it is almost exclusively from one of those two lately, and at this point removing them from All would make my lemmy experience just a bit more friendly.

  It’s not even worth reporting content about them because when you do it seems like a common theme is that they just tag you so they can harass you. I tested this myself recently by reporting obvious misinformation/propaganda and the next time I logged in there were indeed items waiting in my inbox calling me a coward, etc.

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