I've got a few thoughts on this.

First, its insane to me that someone could read the rules and decide anti-zionist is anti-semitic. That is either someone who doesn't understand words and has no interest in learning them, or is someone actively zionist (and supports genocide, thus the issue with zionism).

Second, I've got my complaints about what I'm seeing from the flotilla/friendly instances.

• Someone saying "Fuck off you piece of trash" getting banned from a community is in no way a surprise.
• The same goes for "You'll get the wall"
• Same for "kys"
• Same for calling someone a Nazi for what I assume is a supportive comment about the war in Ukraine. Just to note, don't bother trying to respond to me with anything about Russia being in the right on this one. I'll just block.

Third, there are quite a few comments there that are completely appropriate (support for Israel is support for genocide, etc), the thread about quokk.au is utterly nonsensical to me, as are the discussions in MoG (which shouldn't really be a surprise).

To sum up my thoughts.... At no point do I regret voting in support of rule 8. I am really disappointed by some of the comments I'm seeing being used as support for de-federating though, some of those are just disgusting.

Overall, I'm in support of dropping the comms due to the blatant zionist posts that go on there.

Edit: formatting fuckup, and a whole word.

Just defed them.

My opinion is more or less that we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from big communities if their theme is not centered on endorsing crimes and if they’re not a community solely for whitewashing them / spreading disinfo.

I think a lot of German speaking users are people who have been exposed to only a narrow view of the world and that they can be valuable allies in the long run. Our instance has been relatively successful at bridging many gaps, I think it would be a shame to defederate entirely.

I’ve seen some questionable takes in places like YUROP but it’s no worse than a large enough .world thread or shjw thread.

My thoughts are unchanged since January. Strikes system for external users promoting imperialism (and the lebensrauming of me, I’m in Lebanon!) on our instance, a special text in German because of how prevalent this issue is among German people. And banning Zionists from signing up to the instance. I’m sure a fellow Arabic speaker could imagine a similar situation for antisemitism. It’s the socialism of fools after all. Surely concern trolling about women’s rights in Gaza is a sort of (subtly imperialist) feminism of fools?

I want the tent to be as big as possible. I want those who excuse these crimes to be exposed to as much common sense as possible. I don’t want them to feel like they have the mainstream opinion anymore.

Ban anyone trying to foster a purely pro Zionist point of view

I forgot about that instance after they did their "compliance" requirement against free speech lol.

Sure, ban those communities. But, out of curiosity, what does an instance wide community ban achieves that my own block list cannot? I already have a sizeable feddit.org presence on said list, so I doubt I would personally see any difference.

Not a big fan of instance banning though, unless there's serious evidence of wrongdoing on our instance from their users. I'm not a wallflower that needs protecting from opinions, I can make my own mind and choose what to read and what to engage with. See: personal blocklist.

I am not a member of your server, but I think it's amongst the top 4 best servers on the threadiverse. I have a great deal of respect for your server and the communities that have come to be on it. I would advise that when dealing with a -----bar on the fediverse, be that a nazi-bar, a zionist-bar, or any other kind of authoritarian-bar, the smaller concern isn't if there's things on it your users will miss (with the threadiverse, those things are communities) and the bigger concern is how the problem figures that have coagulated in that bar act and behave when they engage with the things originating on your server. I commend the desire to do this gracefully, but if you're going to limit yourselves to blocking communities (which will ultimately limit your own users more than feddit.org's users, though I'm not sure your users will be bothered or that their users will notice), I think you ABSOLUTELY MUST plan a period of time to revisit this. I'd probably say 1 month. If next month you feel that what you're seeing on your server is improved in the way you want it to, then leave it be, and if not then de-federate.

Otherwise, I would recommend immediate defederation if this is a recurring problem. These fediverse servers all act as garden parties. Blocking communities at other garden parties is less effective at combating bad behavior than not letting people through the gate in your garden. If this path is followed, I'd recommend maintaining channels of communication between the admins of both instances for 6 months to see if and how things change.

Again. I am not a member here. More of an outside observer with a ton of respect with a little bit of input after years of being in online spaces and having very little tolerance for bad faith behavior. You can take or reject these observations depending on how you align with them. Hell, I may even be full of shit. But one of us leftists' greatest weaknesses and greatest strength is our tolerance. The strength is in that it helps us build coalitions and confront our own biases. The weakness is that bad faith actors exploit this to string us along and keep making our spaces worse on purpose, so I tend to support a relatively strict federation/defederation policy and to let users find the admin teams that align best to their own desired defederation policy.

I don't get it, what does banning communities on other instances achieve? Does that mean that we won't see them?

I get why you are doing this, and while I can generally relate, this would shut off a huge portion of the fediverse from me. I am austrian and all german speaking and european communities are there. the loss would be significant. Lemmy already has a problem of a limited selection of topics and this would take one away,

Zionism is just a fucked way of thinking. Nothing gives you more right to a home than someone else.

If the admins of this instance think there are clear zionist apologia, and have proof of said zionist apologia, then I will leave it to them to do what is best. I am anti-zionist, but haven't seen these issues with my own eyes in real time.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and hopefully, Feddit can fix the issues described here, but like Flatworm, I don't think it will happen. I don't like defederation, but as a real last resort, I trust in the admins here at db0.

As a not-a-db0-member, thank you for your attention on this matter.

(yes, I get the irony)

I never see pro-Zio stuff on c/buyfromeu. I don't interact much with feddit anyway, but I'm really not sure about this one.

voting to defed the instance, we should not tolerate any instance that actively chooses to harbor fascists, and the admins seem to largely agree with the decisions the mods of these oomms made.

Although I don't have the time to research the communities we're proposing to ban from feddit.org, I'm glad we're targeting communities first based on evidence rather than banning entire instances outright because of our intuitions.

Wholeheartedly agree that we should isolate Zionists though. Fuck em.

As for the future, I agree that we should consider re-federating with these communities if 1) they change their policies to prohibit Zionists and the other points OP mentions, and 2) they show consistent mod logs that adhere to those policies, seeking deplatforming of mods that fail to apply compliance correctly.

Edit: instance-wide policy changes would also go hard, as others have said. It's in our interest to notify anti-Zionist users on Feddit.org that their instance safeguards Zionists because we're looking out for their best interests. Cutting off complete contact can shake things up enough for anti-Zionists to recognize why there is a defederation/ban. If we ban just the communities, then we won't have as wide of an impact.

Curious to have the debate with other db0-ers

Edit 2: we could also consider completely defederating from these communities, then doing temporary protest defederation bursts with Feddit.org overall so normies over there get notified of our reasons for defederating on a frequent basis. Defederating from Feddit.org although one time will have a short term effect of informing the people there. Regular (or irregular) bans for defined periods of time can offer more chances of visibility and lasting impact, while upholding the Fediverse and staving off mass fracturization.

Shore up the yardarms, me hearties. We need to rid ourselves of a few fascists.

If feddit.org is harboring these ass-bags, then they're part of the problem. The issue I see with only banning the communities from showing here is that the users within those communities don't likely know they've been censured.

Playing devil's advocate for my own stance, I should say that the "right" thing to do would be to give them enough rope to hang themselves from the yardarm themselves. In other words, if they're feddit.org user and start spouting Zionist shit on db0, then they're probably someone that should be outright disallowed.

I'll sit out the vote itself, because I don't have enough personal interaction with Reddit to form an unbiased view of their workings.

That being said, I'm pretty cautious towards the idea of defederation; if the issue primarily stems from those communities, I'd prefer targeted bans. Otherwise, we're only shutting ourselves out as dissenting voices, which only leads to more of an echo chamber effect on feddit.

Don't hide from those who need confronting.

Just want to point out that in my experience, outside Germans the "Euro" public are generally against what Israel has been doing in Palestine. Those more politically aware who know what that is are against Zionism explicitly.

The exception is of course for the Far-Right types who, of course, love the whole white-colonialist thing.

IMHO:

Germany has massive issues with still holding hard to the mental framework from the "good old days" were people are just deemed members of etnic groups based on things they were born with, and are treated above all based on the ethnic group they "belong to", rather than Modern Humanism were people's deserved treatment is based on their need and their actions.

Because of this profoundly backwards Prejudiced and Racist foundational element of moral thinking widespread in German, it was a lot easier for the ethno-Fascist Zionists to subvert guilt in Germany into support for Zionism and the Zionist Genocide, as well as cultivating Islamophobia.

The same backwards moral fundational element also explains the ease of expansion of AfD and their ideology in Germany.

Not to say other countries in Europe don't have Prejudice, Racism or even support for 19th century style white-colonialism, just saying that Germany seems to have a far more insidious problem than most in that regards due to this specific foundational piece having been repeatedly reinforced in the broad political discourse in Germany even while in other countries in Europe openly singling out people's ethnicity and demanding ethnically-discriminatory treatment (either "positive" or negative) was frowned upon.

Just want to point out that I don't at all think all Germans are like this.

Not even close.

My point is that this kind of thinking is more widespread and normalized in Germany, were it's constantly pushed by the Press and Politicians of most colors (which is why even the Greens were pro-Israel during the worst of the Genocide in Gaza, unlike any other Green party in Europe)