As someone who has completely replaced Reddit with Lemmy cold turkey since the blackouts, LW is still absolutely massive and federating with them has made me feel much less detached from the ebb and flow of online culture even if it’s filtered through the self-selection bias of people who would actually sign up for Lemmy.

I think this entire fiasco is pissy, utterly unnecessary posturing by their admin. But my bar for whether someone is a full blooded apologist for crimes or just deeply socialized into accepting them is this litmus test: is this person genuinely in favor of me being murdered, or is this person simply German?

I am personally affected by the rapacious ideology that is Zionism. I cannot currently access my familial hometown, even though it’s north of the Litani, it’s unsafe. I am almost certainly in the Palantir repository of “fighting age” males. So I’m not just happy to ignore a distant problem. I don’t want to dox myself but I am a former emergency healthcare volunteer and had to be called in during that Wednesday two weeks ago to help with triaging all the injured. They were all civilians, many who who looked and talked like me, who spoke my exact dialect. I have personally lost four acquaintances in this war, all decent people, all civilians. Some of the beggar kids who I walk past on the street every day are also dead and I fucking cried looking at a cinder block where one of them used to sit. A building I lived next to as a student, three buildings down, in a safe fucking area in the middle of the city, got fucking erased. This is very real to me. I have witnessed a lot of human suffering on that Wednesday, about as much as during the entire hell pandemic + explosion summer.

My opinion is not more important because of my experience but I have had ample reason to examine who I’m willing to talk to and who I’m willing to avoid. Back on Reddit I would openly speak about this very sensitive subject in big threads, intentionally choosing more measured wording, and I would get a lot of positive responses from people who seemed to really not know the situation. Granted this was before the mask off phase of that place.

I think our instances, and Hexbear for that measure, are exemplary on this issue. Nobody is born deserving to be murdered. I also think wider, more conservalib users from the wider Lemmy ecosystem getting to see us unapologetically call crimes crimes, and genocide fans getting downvoted by everyone, including fellow users of their own instances, is very important. This is not an abstract political idea, this is a fucking excellent litmus test. Many of the cooler users eventually migrate to our instance, I think that’s awesome. I think being so willing to federate with mostly everyone above room temperature decency is important, let them see our politics, let them be mad that they have to confront horrible ideologies they have been born into. And if they voice support for this murderous ideology, or any other genocidal belief, in our communities, then our rules are clear. Let them feel confrontation.

That said there is one annoying Zionist user on our own instance constantly pissing in our nice community pool. This person has crossed the German line.

I don’t think we saw that with LW yet. I think nothing I’ve seen so far from their admins crosses the “Is this person evil or just fucking German?” line, specifically. The broader LW userbase is on the libby side but they are broadly well meaning and can learn and be valuable allies and friends. And the large volume of posts provides plenty of opportunity to have good conversations. I have a lot of goodwill for Hexbear, despite also not loving some of what is considered mainstream on there (although I understand it. Critical support is important. Ask ne how I fucking know. I still have a town for a reason.). But Hexbear is very insular. It’s the same 200 users most of the time. A lot of the discussion there is pretty good, and frankly CTH is probably the funniest community anywhere on Lemmy. Some of the most concise and accurate English-language writing on political currents in the Levant I’ve ever seen is on Hexbear. But I think our role as an instance is different. I like that we federate with both. I like that a lot actually. I don’t have one account for shitposts, one for memes, one for saluting the blahaj flag, and one for hanging out with the MLs. This is everything I liked about Reddit back in 2011 and better. As it stands, dbzer0 is the LW of the flotilla. Does that make sense? That might be unpleasant for some people, but I think that’s a strength. The gate is wide fucking open. Solidarity to me also means getting people on board. Genocidal ideologies hurt the people they’re sold to as well, they impoverish the world we share.

Until the LW admins do something much more stupid, I strongly vote Nay. If they do, I’m happy to respond accordingly. But I don’t think it’s hit that point, I hope it doesn’t. I think this is a good initiative but that it’s being deployed too preemptively. I hope this comment isn’t too all over the place, but I really have a lot of thoughts whenever defederation or Zionist Bar problems pop up.

I do think we should try mediating first if they block our sister instances, and only defederate if they become worse about this whole thing.

Sorry decent people of Germany. Not all Germans etc etc