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!
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.