[META] Piefed, Mbin, troll communities

I added some rudimentary support for popular communities from Piefed and Mbin instances. Lemmy is still so much more popular, right now, that you’ll still see almost all Lemmy communities. But, as of today, if instances from other software aren’t showing up in the !communities@ponder.cat feed, it’s not because of me. They’re on the list now.

A trickier issue is that some communities are coming up to be posted that in my opinion are troll communities:

I’m not defederated from hexbear or lemmygrad right now, simply because they haven’t done anything to me. I quite like the !art@hexbear.net community, as a matter of fact. They’re defederated in most places not for no reason, however, and I think excluding them from the new community posts will better serve ~100% of the people reading this community.

The whole thing, the trolling on one side and the defederation on the other, bugs me. On the off chance that someone has an issue with not posting things from lemmygrad, I’ll extend the same offer to you that I extended to someone that I gave an individual ban to some time back: Come and talk rationally about what you’re trying to say in these “controversial” communities, defend your point of view in a real discussion, and you can stay. I’m not defederated from anybody right now. If you’re just interested in a one-way exchange, though, knowing that people disagree with you and consequently increasing your volume and aggressiveness and ignoring anything anyone else thinks, people are going to hit the mute button. I can’t see how you would be surprised by that. We can use the slot to post !artdesign@jlai.lu instead and everyone will be happier, I think.

The last community is more interesting. To me, this is also clearly a troll community, and I don’t want to give it airtime. It makes some attempt at showing a legit political viewpoint, but the veneer over the steady single-user stream of anti-Ukraine or pro-spoiler-candidate content is laughably thin. There are a few more of these on lemmy.world, which is its own whole separate discussion. Regardless, I don’t plan to include this community or any of the others. I’ll make the same offer, that if someone wants to demonstrate good faith by having a real discussion about these topics, I’ll welcome it and won’t try to silence you. But bottom line, this looks like propaganda, and removing it looks like good stewardship.

I’m not sure if anyone cares about these things to this extent of hand-wringing, but that’s what I think about it.