Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:
- Don’t like their content
- Dont like their political leaning
- Dont like their free speech approach
- General feeling of being offended
- I want a safe space!
- This instance if hurting vulnerable people
I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148
Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!
Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?
Yes, it is. We ran this experiment with 8chan already. I consider Frederick Brennans opinion on internet moderation pretty well-tested by reality, unlike the ‘free speech absolutists’ I meet. Musk is a classic poster boy for that mindset and the instant he was given power his convictions really amounted to ‘hide the stuff I don’t like, boost the stuff I do’. So I think we should all be suspicious of people who claim this at this point.
8chan exists, as do lots of deeper, darker unmoderated boards. If they are superior, why aren’t the majority of people there? Why are they almost universally despised and shamed?
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
No, humanity lives in reality where thoughts lead to actions and pretending like there’s a firewall between the two is unrealistic. 8chan is routinely linked to mass shootings, and NOT JUST IN THE USA
So your conclusion is: “Dear admins, defederate from everything I deem offensive?”
No, how silly. Where did you get that idea?
I had that impression from your initial response, but I might have misunderstood.
I still disagree that thought and speech lead deterministically to action which is a thing you actually stated. Your argument is the same as the one used against POV shooters and there’s no evidence for this claim.
Yes, my stance is far from ‘ban everything I dont like’. But you need to understand that ‘ban nothing at all’ (which is what free speech absolutists argue for) is on the other extreme of the moderation spectrum. I like to think I fall somewhere in the middle.
it’s hardly a binary choice between the 2 so I was thrown when you instantly assumed that.
There’s plenty of evidence that 8chan leads to mass shootings as many of the shooters leave vast manifestos on the site itself referencing beliefs they learned on the site. It has nothing to do with video games. If you want to claim that ‘words and beliefs never lead to actions’ that’s fine but I think that’s obviously false. In fact I’d say all actions are the result of our beliefs.
its fine for us to disagree here.
I definitely tend to agree with you in terms of being in the middle. But the middle is such a vast, grey area that is hard to pinpoint exactly where the middle is.
Is there no way to block a particular instance for the individual (I’ve never tried)? I feel like if there is a way for individuals to do so, why not put it in their hands? And if not, is it possible to make it so they can? Kind of removes the need for an entire instance to make any calls in the first place.
But I’m very much new to the federation universe and incredibly dumb in terms of computer/internet workings.
Kind of removes the need for an entire instance to make any calls in the first place.
Not really. When some instance is federated, the home instance is literally hosting and serving the content from that instance: comments and posts. (Only if one or more home instance users subscribe to a community on the other instance) If the users and/or admins think the content is that bad, or the users are that bad, then why host them at all? Defedetate them and keep the content off the server entirely. Why help lies and hateful content spread, even in that minor way?
Well, considering we were defederated from beehaw, and I don’t find our instance particularly negative or hateful in much of the content and users I’ve personally seen - I think it’s hard to paint a whole community with one brush stroke. Not that it’s not possible or even useful to do in some cases, but it’s not something that should be done willy-nilly. And I guess I like the idea of a more individualistic approach. That’s just my thoughts.
But the beauty of it is there are plenty of instances to try out; the fedi-universe is certainly an interesting concept I’m starting to wrap my head around.
I would really advise you to go read Frederick Brennan’s thoughts and watch his interviews etc. I think he will address a lot of your questions. He is also the perfect person to make the arguments because:
- he was a handicapped youth who HATED having others protect him from content, he wanted to know what people REALLY thought, would have agreed with the most extreme people here 100% in his youth
- he actually undertook making the idea real, while fully wanting it to succeed
- as a result, he was forced to engage with the reality of these ideas most of us just discuss
- his first person experience taught him lessons about this that we can all learn from, without repeating the same mistakes
I’m not sure I disagree here. I don’t see 8chan or 4chan or any other webforum with lack of moderation as comparable with lemmy and the Fediverse.
Can you expand on where you see similarities?
- They are forums
- With open registration
- Hosted online
- Where a wide variety of people post and comment
The only difference I see is their moderation stance in fact. So that would suggest that their (lack of) moderation is why it has become a haven of hate, and not some other aspect.
Agreed to all points.
While:
- Lemmy is federated and not run on one central site (not like Reddit or any webforum)
- Lemmy has instances with different stance on administration and moderation but all of them are moderated to some extent
- AFAIK you can’t block, mute, or filter on most image board-like forums as a user. While on Lemmy you can filter and block users and communities (and probably soon even whole instances, it’s not that hard to do that client side)
Given the above I think we have severely different scenarios and as such a completely different use case and type of user.
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
What a ridiculous question. “Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?”
They’re both hurtful!
We can’t stop physical abuse in the real world by defederating with a hateful instance, but we can stop the hate speech from having an audience here.
Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, “just asking questions”, “just a joke”, etc. Humans are human, and many of us are suggestible. There’s a reason Holocaust denial is literally illegal in Germany. If people hear something often enough, from enough people, it doesn’t matter what it is. They’ll start to wonder if it’s true.
It’s super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance. They believe everything they hear, and it’s very human to hate things and certain people. This doesn’t just go away when they hit the legal age to have an account here. Reddit allows 13 year olds to have an account. (Or is that Facebook? Whichever.) I don’t know what the official policy is of this instance or Lemmy in general, but the fewer 13 year olds we have reading literal hate speech, the better. It’s a black hole that it’s easy to get sucked into.
If every “good” instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That’s a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it’s hard to stumble into.
Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it’s still the admin choosing to do that. If you don’t like that, find a different instance.
Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse - you can join an instance that agrees with you (or host your own).
Some want a haven where everything is allowed, some would not like to see certain content. And both are serviced with a decentralised model.
I’m really starting to like the term ‘defederate’…it’s so much more descriptive and applicable than ‘censorship’ or ‘cancelling’. Me intentionally choosing not associate with you isn’t the same as me actively trying prevent you from speaking. Me choosing a group that is choosing not to associate with you doesn’t infringe on your rights in the slightest. You whining about the fact that no one wants to listen to you is so far away from censorship that it’s almost humorous to listen to folks trying to shoe-horn it into the conversation.
By ‘you’, I obviously (I hope) mean the people whining about being ‘defederated’, not the commenter I’m replying to.
What a ridiculous question. “Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?” They’re both hurtful!
Hyperbolic. Nobody is being shot, people feel offended for more or less valid reasons.
Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, “just asking questions”, “just a joke”, etc
So? The burden of proof that this is hate is on you. Apart from this: Even if it was hateful, it’s not unlawful per se. If it becomes unlawful that’s a whole other topic.
It’s super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance.
Yes, children are children, they’re supposed to be stupid. They will hate another kid because it wears glasses, is fat, nerdy or because it’s Tuesday. You won’t change that, you just add another layer why certain kids will hate others. Hate because of hate. Doesn’t sound like a good plan.
If every “good” instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That’s a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it’s hard to stumble into.
Ah the hear no even, see no evil, speak no evil approach. Yeah that has always worked out pretty well, ask the French about Zemmour and Le Pen, the Germans about the AFD and so on.
Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it’s still the admin choosing to do that. If you don’t like that, find a different instance.
Ah there it is, the leftist authoritarian. Whatever Big Brother decides is good for me.
Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.
Have a look at the state at which the right wing parties are re-emerging in Europe, look at Reassemblement National, Vox, AFD, etc etc.
That is only possible because people like you think that containment and oppression of dissenting discourse and opinion is a good thing. You’re the new Neville Chamberlain and I fear what the result of this new cowardice will be.
Ah there it is, the leftist authoritarian. Whatever Big Brother decides is good for me.
🤦♂️
Dear Lord, you are just grasping here. Go fight your straw man somewhere else. Each instance is run as a charity. The admin makes the rules. If you don’t like the rules, leave. If I don’t like the rules, I’ll leave. Take your techno-libertarian, infinite free speech bullshit somewhere else. Make your own instance where you are the benevolent dictator where your only rule is “Absolute freedom of speech for all”. Fucking christ…
I never said anything against “the admin makes the rules.” This is about users calling for defederation because “someone offended me on the internet.”
Looks like you’re exactly that kind of person and as you’ve proven yourself you’re absolutely incapable of engaging in a civil discussion. Feel free to leave… or participate, but if you do, people will disagree with you, no matter if that hurts your precious feelings or not.
I never said anything against “the admin makes the rules.”
The conversation:
“The admin makes the rules”
“You leftist authoritarian!”
“🤦♂️”
“I never said anything against ‘the admin makes the rules’”
It’s all there, black and white. Defederation is just another admin rule.
You think you’re being civil and you say shit like “There is it” and labeling me with a pejorative political affiliation on the basis of saying nothing more than “the admin makes the rules”. I’m calling you out on your bullshit. That’s not something you say in a civil conversation, and you know it. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain to me how it’s civil. Just stop talking.
When you call for an authority to get the bad offense banned from your view it’s a clear call for an authority to fix your life, because you’re not able to. This has nothing to do with an admin (team) having transparent rules about what they do or don’t allow on an instance.
On a different topic: Civil discussion and disagreement is encouraged, you’re trying to insult and disparage which is something I as moderator will not allow here. So either you follow the rules or I’ll have to start moderating your contributions here.
Ban me, hypocrite
Do we have a lemmy drama space yet to discuss hilarious goings-on like the ‘pro-free-speech’ controversial topics mod banning the first person to pushback against their name-calling in the very first thread on their new community?
Done.
Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn’t censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It’s just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy’s stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn’t censorship either. It’s only censorship if he isn’t allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.
What it sounds like you want isn’t a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B’s access, and you don’t allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you’re actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.
In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that’s where it becomes censorship to block person B’s access, because then it’s a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.
I think you nailed it. These instances can be started by anyone, for any reason, ran any way you want. Just as it is nazi guys right to be nazis on their instance, it’s everyone elses right to say no. That is not censorship, it’s freedom of speech. The owners of other instances are enacting their freedom of speech by saying “no”, and possibly even “fuck you”. To cry and piss yourself when other people don’t want to talk to you and say “wah wah you want a safe space” is pathetic. If you want a place where you can be as much as a douche you want, go start it! No one’s stopping you!
Exactly, and I think the disconnect here is that moving from the type of platform that is reddit or Twitter where those are practically bordering on being ‘public utilities’, they people don’t quite understand the concept that federation allows for everyone to exercise their own rights and preferences and that joining, or being alienated from, a group of freely associating people is different than being banned from a large centralized online platform. They don’t want the work of finding or creating their own group…or possibly more likely they just don’t understand the environment enough to realize that their complaint doesn’t have the same validity here as it did ‘over there’.
All very good points. I also want to explicitly state that freedom of speech typically ends when it’s causing harm. It sucks having to listen to Nazi propaganda but as soon as they start inciting violence or discrimination (which for them is pretty quick), they can no longer claim freedom of speech. That’s not to say we should preemptively ban communities. Just something to be aware of, so we can figure out the line where preventing direct harm is prioritized over being able to say whatever you want.
It also ends when you force me to pass along the message.
On a public forum it’s unconstitutional for the government to give a platform to one group and not another (within reason).
For a private individual, it’s not ‘anti freedom of speech’ if I refuse to let you use my copier to print your posters and expect me to go around sticking them up in my neighborhood, whether that’s hate speech or your grandma’s cookie recipe, you can’t force or guilt me into helping you publish content. You can still publish it, but if you want me to use my bandwidth or printer ink or even room on my pegboard you have too ask nicely and accept no for an answer, and you don’t get to cry ’freedom of speech’ and expect any reasonable person to accept that as an argument.
Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.
Here’s the thing though: nobody’s mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don’t like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.
This isn’t Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don’t like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.
All of those arguments are not objective, they’re subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that “I like apples” is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is “I like/don’t like this content” any different? To push that a bit farther, how is “I don’t want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don’t want to interact with people who find that ok”? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.
First of all: Thanks for your contributions, I appreciate you participating in this discussion.
While you’re right with the assessment that the final call is for the admin(s) to make let me rephrase it a little bit:
Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled? It looks like centralised platforms like FB and Twitter allowed this mindset to flourish and I’m not really comfortable with this.
Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled?
There’s a big difference between “views are challenged” and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?) or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I’m especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that. There’s so many dog whistles crammed into that unformatted wall of text that I’m surprised my whole neighbourhood isn’t filled with the sound of howling.
There’s a big difference between “views are challenged” and either active misinformation (vaccines = gene therapy?!?
I would first start with the definition of gene-therapy and take it from there to start with, but if we keep in on a layman level:
- mRNA vaccines do contain a genetic program to code a specific protein
- Once the mRNA instructions are processed in your cells they will start to produce the protein encoded in these instructions
- the resulting protein is released and your immune system reacts which ideally leads to immunization against this protein.
The above is current scientific status quo and not controversial at all. So could you call is agend therapy? Yes using the term just bit more broadly this would still fit.
Is it misinformation? Maybe. But don’t we have a right to decide for ourselves what is and isn’t misinformation? Shouldn’t misinformation be challenged and ridiculed when exposed? I’d like to be able to do that but I can’t if it’s behind walls or hidden in dark corners, where it festers and attracts the wrong people.
or rampant bigotry. As a half-jewish person, I’m especially (again, subjectively) keen to avoid interacting with people like that.
Again: Dont they have a right to be bigoted?
I understand if you don’t want to be associated with them, this is legit. But shouldn’t other be allowed to debate them, confront them or even partially agree with them?
If you’re hiding or prohibiting open debate you will only get more of it, we can see this over and over, again and again. Prohibited fruits are the interesting ones.
Make it uncool to be a bigoted Nazi and only a marginalized group will associate with them. Demonize and censor them and see them grow exponentially in number, influence and power.
If that counts as gene therapy, then the term becomes meaningless as the majority of medicine is now counted as gene therapy. They use it in this way to make it sound scary and dangerous. All medicine has side-affects and risks, but the vague use of scary language is the point.
Sure, I’m not the thought police and I’m never going to claim to be always right, all the time. That way leads to a complete and utter inability to engage with new information that challenges worldviews. Where that ends for me is judging people based on parentage and ethnicity. I have no interest talking to a person like that.
Debating a racist isn’t normally a productive experience. You can’t logic your way out of a position that you started believing for emotional reasons. Also, they normally don’t treat words and arguments with the same care as their interlocutors. Consequently, if somebody wants to go engage with them and try and convince them they’re wrong, I wish them all the luck in the world, I just think it’s a waste of time most of the time. For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don’t think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don’t think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
Wholeheartedly agreed! And that is the point from where we can look at things we have in common despite, maybe, some opposing views:
We both want to read, share and comment on interesting stuff we expect to find here on Lemmy in the Fediverse.
It also seems that we’re both interested in civilised exchange of views and arguments.
The only key difference I see, and correct me if I’m wrong here, is that you wouldn’t want to see/engage stuff you define as bigoted/racist or hateful, correct?
Which I can understand and even agree upon. The only thing that makes me doubt is: Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
What do you think?
Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
There’s a key difference with email: that’s opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It’s opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven’t blocked.
An admin, attempting to make the kind of user that they want to see on their instance feel welcome, does have a duty to curate it. If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the community and move on, or decide that this instance isn’t the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
Curation determines userbase which determines content. I know which side of the coin I fall on there.
There’s a key difference with email: that’s opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It’s opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven’t blocked.
Good point!
If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the instance and move on, or decide that this instance isn’t the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
And here I disagree with you. The world is a horrible, dangerous, wonderful, exciting , murderous, funny, sad, depressing, manic place. Hiding that some people hate gays will not change the fact that some people hate gays. It will also not make these people disappear. Isn’t it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?
A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
Have you ever run a mail server? If so, have you looked at your logs? The RBL’s on the managed mail gateway for my work turns away 70% of the attempts. This is even before spam scoring kicks in on the 30% initially accepted. A significant percent of that is considered spam. Email has a complex set of automated tools to reject content without even viewing it.
I still think email, even though federated, is a poor analogy to make for Lemmy.
Actually I do have my own mailserver and for obvious reasons I do not longer use most of the big IP based blacklists because they just don’t work well enough, some are basically blackmail+systems with pay-for-removal.
It’s something else when you rely on third party (in my analogy the call for a filtering authority) than you being the one who makes the call and what is being filtered and why.
As with spam filtering: If you rely on someone else to filter out stuff for you, you hand over control about what you get and what you see. The potential for abuse of this power is a greater danger in my opinion that having to do some extra work to set up filters myself.
This is, BTW, the main reason my I deGoogled and set up my very own server.
A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
What are you talking about? Email admins use blacklists (usually in the form of DNS RBLs but there are others) all the time.
Isn’t the immediate call for censorship/defederation as soon as some views are challenged a bit too entitled?
To some extent, YES, but I think it’s a bit more nuanced and comes down to where you draw that line. Everyone is going to draw it in a different place.
I moderated an academic listserv with membership in 5 digits back before the html protocol even existed. That was huge for the time. And, as you would think, in academia at the time the idea of cronterversy, free speech, and engaging in items you disagreed with was pretty comprehensive. Even so, we still had to moderate, primarily for spam and obvious trolling as well as the occasional personal attacks.
I was an active participant in Usenet in the 90’s. Usenet was federated servers hosting posts and comments from participants on that entire federation. I know a server admin could control what Usenet groups they carried. I have no idea what other levels of moderation were available. Discussions were definitely more freewheeling and challenging than you see today, but they also had a higher content level and a greater respect for intellectual argument, even in trolling. Again, I suspect that was because the bulk of the participants were coming from higher ed institutions.
I was active in Internet forums when SCO sued IBM. There were active attacks on communities and successful attempts to splinter communities based in part on what side of the very question you are asking participants came down on. Again, though, there was a strong respect for intellectual engagement. And, I came down strongly with the same opinion you are expressing back then.
I think that strong respect for engagement exists here in the fediverse, particularly when compared to something like FaceBook or Reddit. As the fediverse grows, I think that will go away.
I don’t have much respect for low content trolling, for active attacks via brigading, for manipulation. I think the ability to upvote is important, but I also think the ability for bot accounts to manipulate that is a very difficult thing to combat, particularly in something as young as Lemmy that is experiencing exponential growth.
I also have a much better awareness of how subtle that manipulation can be in influencing individuals and society, including my own views.
I no longer have the absolutist attitude I once had. I agree with your own concerns about echo chambers, because that leads to its own manipulation of views and the splintering of society. However, I’m also more willing to support the idea of not providing a platform for some of the more odious content than my older self would have supported.
I’m probably in a position to piss off nearly everyone. I disagree with your view that there should be almost no lines drawn, but I disagree with the majority that the lines should be drawn where they want it to be.
Thanks, very interesting contribution. I have a fair share of Usenet experience myself and before that FidoNet and other Mailboxes so I’ve seen my fair share of flame wars.
I just want to point out one thing: I’m not at all against moderation or the ability to filter, block, ban or mute individual participants or communities, I was referring to a trend I’ve seen growing more and more: The call for a (central) authority to serve prefiltered, bland content, it should not offend anyone.
And here’s my problem: Offense is more often taken than given.
Boycotts are a feature of an “open marketplace”
Boycotts as individual decisions yes. Boycotts as institutional warfare (top to bottom) are not.
You became part of a server which boycotts other servers when you made the individual decision to create an account here
As far as I’m aware (which doesn’t mean much) I haven’t seen any boycott this instance based on “I dislike opinions expressed elsewhere, let’s defederate them”. If you can provide examples I’m happy to look into it and change my mind.
were i to run an instance, i would never, ever defederate from sh.itjust.works. Reason: we have a very cute lemming face as an icon.
Upvoted because I can’t argue against this.
I think people who feel this is controversial are missing the entire point of federation and should consider going to a platform that doesn’t use it.
Nobody is ‘mandating [an echo chamber] for everyone else’ by defederating from a different instance, as many other instances are open registration. The largest problem here is that, in my opinion, the design is not well suited for overlarge instances such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. We should all be on reasonably small instances that can smoothly choose who to federate/defederate and thus impact only a group of likeminded people. People with differing opinions can then just go to a different instance if they disagree. This is quite a democratic approach to problems like this, as it allows people who feel strongly about these things to ‘shop around’ for an instance that suits their needs and which will react favourably to further recommendations. If particular instances start hosting particularly disgusting opinions, they’ll see a democratic process wherein a large plurality of instances all defederate from them.
In other words, you are seeing it as “defederation allows person X to determine what person Y can read” when in fact it should be “all people who feel the same as X are welcome on server lemmy.x”. This problem is perpetuated not by people wanting instances that suit their needs, but by having a few specific very large instances that did not clearly lay out their philosophies (no fault of theirs I think, we’re all learning this for the first time). They can no longer adapt with any agility due to a very heterogeneous and large user base.
On another note:
Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?
You really should study the lead-up to world war 2 if you think platforming dangerous beliefs is a simple matter of “words will never hurt me”. I don’t intend this as a ‘gotcha’ or anything, it’s both fascinating and disturbing, and something every human should understand. The argument of ‘we should at least let these fringe weirdos say their piece, what harm could it have’ is, without exaggeration, how we wound up with ww2.
I think your idea of ten
thousandmillion small instances is what the fediverse was meant to be, but if you don’t have the resources to run your very own instance and you have multiple small interests instead of one life-consuming one, it’s a severe problem. Do I join the instance dedicated to bullet journaling, or the instance dedicated to Final Fantasy XIV, or the instance dedicated to Tolkien? Which instance will tolerate me posting on a debate instance and posting in a language other than English?It’s much easier to join a generalist instance that will tolerate all of that, but that means the generalist instance has to be willing to tolerate the debaters (who will break down into rude squabbling), a Tolkien fan saying that Tolkien probably wouldn’t have approved of the new MtG cards, and other things of which censorious progressives disapprove.
I’m interested in an answer to the problem, because having too many instances to choose from and that choice mattering a fair bit is a big barrier to more people joining the fediverse.
P.S. This is the third time I’ve had to restart my comment due to vanishing. Is there a known issue with comments in progress vanishing?
No taking fringe weirdos seriously from both ends of the spectrum lead to ww2. You know how the NSDAP came to power? Because there was civil unrest instigated by the communists and they promised law and order.
These things happen because society and the main stream start to ignore the facts and look away, they fester and get bad and the next day you wake up in Stalin Russia, Mussolini Italy or Hitlers Germany.
Sorry but ww2 didn’t happen because Elon Musk bought twitter or because Hitler made the Volksempfänger-Radio available to everyone, it was a little bit more complicated than that and the process started way earlier.
Also looking away is exactly what Chamberlain decided to do and look how that went.
Oof, bud. I don’t have high hopes for this community if your first reply as its creator is going to be to ignore most of a long and thought out response to your controversial opinion to focus on a briefdigression at the end because you thought of a strawman for it. Personally, I’m out. Good luck!
do you want me to respond to it? :3
Pardon? Who pulled Godwin here first? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, you didn’t provide any apart from: Cave canem, the Nazis are coming.
Yep, you’re reinforcing what I said pretty well there. My apologies though, I had thought your response was literally the first and now several more have loaded for my very new instance. Unfortunately those have confirmed for me that you have a bad habit of latching onto one or two words of a post and trying to make ‘gotcha’ arguments that ignore the actual point of the post, and I think that’s fundamentally incompatible with trying to moderate a community like this, so I’ll be sticking with my choice to not participate.
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The downvotes suggest that in fact most of us aren’t into your whole hatred towards … *every domain ending in .social? *
Jesus you have been here 5 days and you’re this hateful? Or are you from another server originally?
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I’ve been on the internet for a minute… if you think unmoderated free speech works in a primarily text based medium then I have a bridge in Queens that just popped on the market. Oh look that’s a statement, i should defend that right with logically consistent arguments and citations and draw my conclusions from that and oh my God is anyone still reading this?
The most concise reason I have is that respect is a two-way street, and I haven’t met a lot of folks online who actually understand what it means to respect an argument. The barrier to entry for me is the ability to think critically, and that involves regulating your own speach and not having to rely on others to do it for you.
So let’s see… statement, some bullshit evidence, appeal to critical thinking, one more to go …
This is a falsifiable and testable theory … find me a site that promotes this and I’ll look and see how long it takes for it to fail my one simple criteria.
Your mixing the need for moderation which I don’t dispute with the call for defederation by users who feel offended by lawful freedom of speech.
So if you want to make an argument against what I actually said/wrote: Be my guest.
Defederation is a fancy term for shunning. Which is an appropriate response when a community fails to regulate it’s speech. Differnent communities will have different standards based on but not limited to local social mores, geographical region, language and probably a lot more. I appreciate your effort in defending Freedom of Speech on this platform, but the sad fact remains that most people on the internet have no concept on how Rhetoric, Logic, and Burden of Proof actually work so it just ends up with everyone throwing shit at eachother.
Defederation is a fancy term for shunning. Which is an appropriate response when a community fails to regulate it’s speech.
Partially agree here. Free speech has obviously limits (when it becomes unlawful or it’s weaponized) and moderation/oversight is needed. Every garden needs a gardener, without care and limitations even the most beautiful garden becomes a dangerous jungle (or a desert).
If what you postulated, a community fails to regulate free speech, happens I can see why defederation is considered to contain a growing issue.
However it seems that defederation, or at least the call for defederation, is now becoming a tool for the cancellation-fraction on both ends of the political spectrum so they can all together avoid talking or sewing their believe-system challenged. I see this as a great loss of opportunity on one side and also as a danger to society in the other.
Differnent communities will have different standards based on but not limited to local social mores, geographical region, language and probably a lot more.
Yes! And isn’t that an amazing chance to learn, debate, and grow? Federation can open up a world of new thought and concepts to someone who started his journey on a server in a country were religious laws restrict free speech, sexual liberation, human rights etc.
I appreciate your effort in defending Freedom of Speech on this platform, but the sad fact remains that most people on the internet have no concept on how Rhetoric, Logic, and Burden of Proof actually work so it just ends up with everyone throwing shit at eachother.
When I started this community a day ago I expected everything and was still somewhat pleasantly surprised by some contributions I would learn to understand and respect while still disagreeing on some aspects.
And even if shit is thrown around, it’s worth the effort and maybe I’ll still learn something, even if it is to moderate a bit better or to try to explain myself a little bit better.
You seem like good people. Saving Persuasion by Bryan Garsten is an academic attempt to answer the question we’re discussing here and his position is that we need to protect these places, but like everyone else, isn’t exactly clear on how. I’ve been analyzing the problem informally since about 1996 when I first logged into an IRC channel and got banned for trolling. I believe I’ve gotten better about it since, but I am no Watchman, and I haven’t met many who could perform the role well enough to not allow natural bias’ to enter into the common language of the community.
You seem like good people.
There goes my reputation. /s
Saving Persuasion by Bryan Garsten is an academic attempt to answer the question we’re discussing here and his position is that we need to protect these places, but like everyone else, isn’t exactly clear on how.
Thanks, I’ll have a read later. Bookmarked.
I’ve been analyzing the problem informally since about 1996 when I first logged into an IRC channel and got banned for trolling.
I participated in so many Mailbox-Flamewars in the early 90ies, then in the OS-wars (Atari vs Mac vs PC) during Usenet times but i never perceived it as toxic as it is today. Maybe the high entry barrier served as filters?
I believe I’ve gotten better about it since, but I am no Watchman, and I haven’t met many who could perform the role well enough to not allow natural bias’ to enter into the common language of the community.
I don’t know if I’ve gotten better, I want to believe that’s the case but I keep trying.
I participated in so many Mailbox-Flamewars in the early 90ies, then in the OS-wars (Atari vs Mac vs PC) during Usenet times but i never perceived it as toxic as it is > today. Maybe the high entry barrier served as filters?
I personally think the technical barrier ensured that whoever was participating already had a lot of shared characteristics. The userbase was also fractionally smaller so the inbox wars only lasted as long as people paid attention to it. A third factor was that everything was so much more ephemeral back then. You could be raging about who was the better band, Radiohead or Oasis with the passion and conviction of any true Radiohead fan would have and then the next day the Webforum dissappears.
I don’t know if I’ve gotten better, I want to believe that’s the case but I keep trying.
I worry about the ones who have stopped trying because they are relentless, loud, and oftentimes way off the mark.
These are private instances run by private entities. There is no “lawful freedom of speech” because no governments are involved. Furthermore, lemmy is global, not just American.
Lemmy is not private just because instances are owned by individuals. If you post or comment you broadcast which is public and regulated by free speech laws where applicable.
Are you trolling me right now
You seem to have a simply wrong understanding of freedom of speech. Just because it’s the internet, doesn’t make it a right for you to get your voice heard anywhere you want it. Just like people can walk away or plug their ears if you are shouting in a public park, they can choose not to join a group you are in online. If I set up a podcast, I’m not infringing on your rights if I don’t let you on. If I let 100 other people join whenever they want but don’t let you join, I’m not infringing on your rights, I’m exercising my own. Just because an instance becomes popular, that doesn’t magically take away the rights of the person running it to let people on or choose to, or not to, associate with some other group.
Federation is messy, and will have it’s share of bigots and power hungry users and owners, but your ‘freedom of speech’ means the government can’t limit your speech, not that everyone else has to enable it.
I do understand that it’s confusing because centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit and Facebook have grown to the size and scope where they are nearly public utilities and have started approaching the level where freedom of speech may become a consideration(if they have a near monopoly and you are almost effectively silenced by a ban from those platforms) but federated instances are literally the opposite of that. Don’t like how an instance treats you? Join a different one or start your own. But consider each instance as a small club that can let you in or block you, that can join up with any other group that it wants… Not something that is obligated to vote on every decision, or obey the US ten commandments.
Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean I have to listen to it.
Just because you don’t want to listen you’re entitled to prevent others from listening.
We’re back at square 1.
That’s not square one, since ‘my group not joining group B’ isn’t preventing anyone in world from listening to group B, it’s just not helping people to listen to group B.
It may seem like an annoying distinction, but it’s basically the entire point of federation. Admittedly it’s confusing when coming from centralized platforms where banning you or your group really did basically equate to internal censorship… But I’m the world of federation, the concept of forcing one group to directly connect with another group is the ‘violation of rights’…declining to directly connect my group to yours is not a violation of anyone’s rights.
This, if nothing else, is a return to the Usenet days. If your shit was too wild, servers would just stop listing your channel.
Why can’t any user “defederate” themselves?
Why can’t a user block any instance that they don’t like rather than forcing an entire instance to follow their will.Please note: I do not defend the actions of the these other instances and their content.
This makes sense as an additional feature, not as a replacement for admins defederating instances. The latter is necessary even just to prevent their instance from caching stuff that is illegal where their instance is hosted/where they are.
Why can’t a user block any instance that they don’t like
Somebody has to code it.
This would be something sensible to do, looks like a good feature, would you submit that to Lemmy’s GitHub?
It’s a good feature I agree. But as the lemmy creators said they currently have too many github issue requests (100s of issues a day for a team of a few developers). Most of which are feature requests They are currently working on fixing bugs and making the whole thing more robust, not implementing features. I think we should give them a few weeks/months to do that before overworking them
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I just wanted to say, I love how we can see the beauty of Lemmy in-action here.
Seeing both the upvotes & the downvotes, and all the suggestions of going to a different instance… it’s honestly a beautiful thing, and it’s like watching a small snippet of how human society works.
“I don’t like the way this instance works”
“Go somewhere else then”
“But I don’t want to/I don’t feel like it’s fair”
“But we do like the way it works”
Humans have truly never changed, and it’s a privelage to watch this play out in such a format.
Exactly, it’s like the argument is that letting people do what they want with their own resources and time somehow infringes on someone else’s rights. It’s almost exactly the entitlement they say they want to fight against.
If I buy a bullhorn, I’m not infringing on your rights by not letting you borrow it if you can literally go buy your own bullhorn. If you do buy your own bullhorn it’s not infringing on your rights if people tend to leave the area you’re blabbing in and gravitate towards someone else, or if they put up sound proof walls to hide behind. It’s not infringing on your rights if I don’t give you equal time on a stage I spent my own time and money setting up.
Love this analogy haha!
Find a new instance of you don’t like the admins policy, or start your own? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Why are you under the posts calling for defederation saying this?
- Make lemmy stupidly easy to prop up an instance
- Cap users of any instance to 100
This way, no one instance can bloat up to thousands of users and start making a big island.
Sounds like a good plan! It makes the Fediverse more diverse, more censorship restitant and more resilient against corporate takeover attempts.
I like it!
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I have no problem with banning genuine hate speech or extremism. If you’re polite about your point and don’t attack people, I’m fine with almost all opinion. If one has opinions I don’t like, I want to debate them. I can’t do that if they’re defederated
I can get behind that.
I think we can go a little further than that and say that as long as you seem genuine in trying to put forth your ideas you should be allowed to exist. Calling somebody names in an argument doesn’t mean you’re not making points otherwise.
OG context: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/451211
I agree that it could be easier and personally don’t think defederation is the answer (outside of bad actors).
Exploding heads was simple enough since it is like… two people or something lol
However, I’m also not very fond of beehaw which, to me, looks like the opposite extreme to exploding heads, and I’m personally not looking for communities like that.
Do I think this means I should push for instances to defederate beehaw? No. I do think admins with very specific political views turning their instance into an echo chamber of those views is worse than Reddit, however, but I’m also not going to sit and rant at/about admins doing what they want with their own instance. If that’s what they want their instance to be, great, just not a place for me.
It was simple to get around beehaw, for the time being, by joining a level-headed instance they defederated, although I know I am missing some good links. This is not a permanent solution (I’ve been told the beehaw defederation is temporary, but am not following along), and am trying to figure out things like still seeing the good links posted to beehaw without the temptation of commenting things that don’t fit in the echo chamber and pissing off the admins further to the point they deem whatever instance I’m on a spam instance and defederate it, ruining it for everyone else on my instance. (I’m a leftist, but apparently not far enough left for beehaw admins)
I’m torn between building tools that allow easier echo chamber like feeds en masse or forcing people to individually think for themselves of what kind of content/communities they do/don’t want in their personal feeds.
I don’t think it’s great to start down a generic “this is the content you should have in your feed (dictated by random person X)” type path (not that you are saying that, I’ve just been thinking about this topic a lot, and that is what I see both beehaw and exploding heads as).
Push lemmy
Lemmy devs are already working extremely hard. I personally don’t like this terminology.
Actively
developcontributeintoThis is the way. I am learning Rust for this purpose. It takes some time, however, to familiarize with both a language and a large codebase like Lemmy (during personal free time). I’m also semi cheating by learning jerboa code at the same time, but I am a Kotlin dev by trade, so it is a bit easier.
Good points, balanced view, have my
axeupvote.
There’s no requirement that every site running Lemmy is part of the same network. It’s also perfectly fine to use more than one yourself if a certain server doesn’t have content you want.
