There’s a lot to unpack here. For the sake of convenience, I’m going to assume that what Luminous said was a legitimate call for violence and was therefore not complying with the Lemmy.world code of conduct.

If we assume that, then the Lemmy.world terms say that they can:

• remove the content and ask a user not to do it again, and/or,
• (if it’s a second time) suspend the account temporarily, and/or,
• restrict or banish the community, and/or,
• remove all of that user’s content, and/or,
• permanently ban the user.

I have no idea how many of those had already happened, I’m going to assume for convenience again that some of it did. The site bylaws also say that for community bans and content removal:

• Bans “should only be used as a last resort for hostile users OR for users that are known bad faith actors.”
• “Any community user ban CAN and SHOULD have a clearly documented reason pointing to explicit rules broken.”
• “any content that they DO remove, they should ideally be able to cite the community rules that were broken.”

I note that all of Luminous’ content was removed, and while the “Our Rights” section says this can happen, it somewhat contrasts with the guidelines for documenting content removal. But there’s still nothing in any of this that suggests defederating from the entire instance is warranted or an appropriate course of action. If community bans are considered a last resort, then it seems logical that defederating has at the bare minimum the same threshold of seriousness.

Let’s assume for convenience again that the comments from one admin can be sufficient cause for defederation, and its absence from the ToS is an oversight. If that’s the case, then the bylaws and prior defederation examples (eg. lemmygrad) suggest that this should be adequately explained. But that didn’t happen, and it’s not clear whether the other admins were involved in the decision.

Even if all of the above reactions to Luminous’ comment were justified and proper, the actions afterwards by lemmy.world admins / mods don’t inspire my confidence. I can see there has been:

• This refederation announcement, only posted as a regular post (I found it yesterday by chance). It only briefly outlines the events leading up to this.
• One user in this thread has been temporarily community banned for “Spam, harassment” after three removed posts in the thread, which doesn’t seem like spam quantity. Two of those posts cite the reason “this isn’t about jordanlund”, yet further down in the thread, an admin is litigating the jordanlund situation. Other far more off topic content is in this thread, so if that is a concern, it’s not clear why the other comments remain.
• A few users have been permanently(?) banned from the instance with the reasons “troll” or “calling FHF members nazis”. It’s unclear whether the removed comments or user histories rose to the level of needing an instance ban.
• Multiple other users have been temporarily banned from this community for reasons spanning from “uncivil” to “disinformation”, to “sealioning and harassment”. Many of the removed comments from those users did not seem to meet those descriptions either.
• Many other removed comments from non-banned users, with varying levels of clear rules broken.
• One moderator indicating the defederation mostly only targets several “loud” people and the instance size is only 165 people, which undercuts both the reasoning for why defederation was necessary and the justification for including 150 users as collateral (along with anyone who may have wanted to interact with them). Several people can be dealt with using individual bans, and that quantity are unlikely to be negatively impacting lemmy.world at scale.
• No response from the only person further up the leadership ladder for whether / how Lemmy.world admin are evaluating the original decisions, governance process for defederation, or the bus factor and risks of one person being site admin and top moderator and infra simultaneously. Not even a “I’m alive and considering the issue” acknowledgement, unless done behind the cover of the lwadmin account.
• Lots of little bits of engagement otherwise from Lemmy.world admin or mods with various tangents in the thread.

Very little here seems to align with the by laws and expectations for proportionate community moderator conduct.

The situation looks to me like it has been poorly handled, and there is no sign of any compromise or admission that any of the events that up to now could have been handled differently, or a process for how it might be handled in the future. I just don’t see much in the way of community building or good will, but I do see the same patterns that have inspired other lemmy.world drama over the years.

If one admin’s comments or actions aren’t sufficient for justifying defederation, then it’s unclear why dbzer0 is being considered for defederation at all. But, if one admin’s comments or actions are sufficient justification, then the situation in this thread opens the door for other instances to defederate from Lemmy.world.

Honestly, with comments in this thread being removed by mods and the delays and prevarifications over this defederation, I’m starting to think LW is run by children.

Do better.

We are still discussing this matter, but there is currently no point in keeping anarchist.nexus defederated while lemmy.dbzer0.com is federated

This honestly reads like a threat of escalation more than anything else

Hey there, Kaplan.

So, this is quite clearly now just a witch hunt by you.

For anyone else who is curious, this is what happened.

A user by the name of Luminous was an admin on Anarchist.nexus. They banned MrKaplan from a community for posting zionist apologia. Luminous also had ‘Kill all Zionists’ as their display name. MrKaplan took this as a personal death threat. Instead of speaking with any other admin from Anarchist.nexus and reporting the behavior, MrKaplan instantly defederated from Anarchist.nexus.

In the next couple of days, Kaplan messaged other users/admins of Lemmy about the defederation and suggested defederation to others as well.

It was then posted about in the Piefed matrix channel. This led to PugJesus, someone who I abhor, actually saying something I agree with.

The conversation moves elsewhere. One bit of input that stands out is this. It will become important in a second.

In basically every situation, Kaplan is told that they’re wrong or overreacting but Kaplan cannot see past the ‘death threat’ to their own mistake.

So, I messaged Kaplan. Conversation goes on and one thing is made clear

Kaplan never spoke with anyone and ran all of this off of an assumption. There was inconsistencies in how the different people felt because they were different people and not one organism. What was individuality instead came off as obliviousness and Kaplan took it personaly. See what I mean by it became important? Kaplan is talking about a ‘lack of moderation’ over something that Kaplan literally never reported or talked to anyone about and instead just made assumptions over.

@Ruud@lemmy.world, this is what you’re backing. You went out of your way to make an instance that wasn’t going to be reddit and you went ahead and re-created Spez, an admin who personally takes out their own feelings on anyone that they don’t like and is trying to control the narrative of the entirety of the fediverse.

Friendly reminder to everyone. Check back a couple of months ago on this community and look at the post about JordanLund. A moderator who was openly lying to the admins in public but the admins took weeks to decide to do literally nothing. But a single user on another instance meant that MrKaplan was able to defederate it all.

This behavior from Kaplan is, quite literally, the reason that I left lemmy.world.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the last message I sent Kaplan during the Jordan garbage.

Funny. Jordan requires a ton of deliberation, reasons in the TOS, and you’re all ‘working on it’ but a single user says something you don’t like so instant defederation?

Edit: Quick note but every other post on this community has been featured. This one isn’t. So you’re making an announcement but you’re not really announcing it. Any response to this, Kaplan?

Edit 2: Kaplan is just blatantly lying. As demonstrated above, Kaplan has literally zero evidence of this claim other than things “feeling odd”.

Edit 3: Serinus joined the thread 15 minutes ago and now a number of my comments are being removed for ‘misinformation’ despite the comment above proving them to be categorically true.

What action will be taken against rogue admins on world?

Lol, The FAF takes weeks of deliberation, and a public vote to defederate feddit.org and we still get shit about being “authoritarians” or “manipulative”. L.W. just YOLO defederated an anarchist instance on the flimsiest excuse and…crickets.

Honestly a great move from the .world admins to prevent themselves from becoming too big, and I applaud their effort to piss everyone off and make them leave for more community oriented instances lmao

Removed by mod

wow. how about banning zionists instead?

jesus. there is no point to drastic moderation at all. 3-day individual bans implemented at the drop of a hat curbs bad behavior. after a year of those no one is 1) still causing problems or 2) even around.

anything more dramatic than this will cause people to exploit the sybil attack vulnerability of activitypub and you will never stop anyone.

Removed by mod

After getting a better look at the background, this seems like a misstep.

Agreed that Luminous was not exhibiting behavior that seemed becoming of an admin (borrowing the terms of the db0 folks, they appear to be a bit of a “shit stirrer”) but it doesn’t look like there was any direct call to violence towards Kaplan, as this whole debacle seems to imply.

Luminous is no longer an admin, so I don’t see why the defederation of anarchist.nexus needs to continue (given that its initial justification is already questionable). The main takeaway is that the admin team of Lemmy.world (or maybe just Kaplan, I don’t know who all the admins are) seem to be taking criticism of Zionism personally…which to me sounds easily solved by simply not being Zionists.

So, if the LW team are not Zionists, I don’t see why they shouldn’t just come out and say so, but then I guess I don’t see any other reason why someone would take a “death to Zionists” tagline personally.

Lemmy.world not beating the allegations of harboring Zionists

Have you considered raising this with the admin team before defederating?? Or with your userbase?? I don’t wanna hear shit about hexbear is aUtHoRiTaRiAaAaAn when they have a vote before defederation instead of just throwing a tantrum and reflexively defederating a whole-ass instance because of personal drama between two admins.

We’re currently discussing how we will proceed with this situation

Block the mod on your personal list, don’t defederate?