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!
You almost certainly don’t want to read and talk to ‘everybody’…but leaving off the extreme exceptions, federated instance are more like a sewing group and a motorcycle group and a nazi group and a group of geeks talking about linux rather than a ‘platform’ reddit. The sewing group may like getting together with the nazi group and linux guys at times, but they don’t particularly care for motorcycles so joinging the sewing group and then insisting that it’s censorship if they don’t open up the line of communication to the motorcycle group that you think they should have is dumb.
If someone controlled the entire platform that all these groups are on and they blocked the motorcycle group for some reason, that is censorship, but the fact that you can just ‘join’ the motorcycle group directly, or join the nazi group or the linux geeks who both like talking to the motorcycle group demonstrates that the sewing group isn’t censoring the motorcycle group, they just aren’t interested in joining in the conversations, routing the traffic, listening to all the complaints about the motorcycle memes, etc.
Every group on platform, literally every singe one of them, can and will come up with their own rules. That’s the whole point of them being ‘federated’ instead of just ‘on the same platform’. If it’s popular to federate with any and all other groups, there will be groups that do that, join them and enjoy completely uncensored content. If some groups like it a little quieter, maybe a little less drama, maybe less porn and more academic articles, they will federate with just a few well curated other groups and people who enjoy that will join them, and it won’t infringe on your rights the teeniest, tiniest little bit. You joining one of those groups and insisting that it’s the height of communism because they ‘defederated’ with group X for a reason you didn’t feel raised to your level offense is absolutely meaningless. The fact that it happens on a ‘popular’ instance is precisely the same thing.
Honestly I think 90% of this same complain is the fact that people don’t understand the concept of decentralized platforms and feel tricked that they joined a ‘popular’ one and found out that it isn’t the one in control of everything, and that there isn’t some authority to appeal to, or one target to annoy with enough words in order to get their own way after being in the group for 3 days.