(e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
Not everyone is required to do so. You just need to find a server that aligns with your values. Communities always censor content, one way or another. Call it moderation. Otherwise, you end up a piling piece of burning trash.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.
If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
If that’s genuinely the way it works, it seems really dumb.
Fetch data from instances you’re trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…
You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…
If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
I’m worried about that.
And every time, they either mention nazis as an excuse, or suggest creating your own instance.
I think fragmentation of users and content is only going to promote centralized platforms.
Everyone here says to run your own server, as if that’s the mindset that’s going to bring in users and increase the popularity of federation. A little short-sighted.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the popularity at the moment. I think it’s manage the chaos. The fediverse has had a massive increase over the past few days and you kind of need to use the emergency tools that are part of federations to manage that growth.
I mean I’m just one person but I’m here to stay and if it shrinks or grows I don’t really care I just know I don’t want to go back to Reddit. I also like the ability to defederate as I’ve seen that reddit has had a long history of allowing bad actors to go untouched because they’ve never broken an actual rule.
Now imagine that chaos, but everyone is running their own server. There are already posts and replies that won’t accept my votes.
Who’s a bad actor? Liberals? Conservatives? Who gets to decide who the bad actor is?
Lemmy needs to allow Server-managers to defederate other servers due to obviously illegal material. And Lemmy needs to allow Users to block or ignore servers just due to any number of reasons. But the decision should be left to the user.
I’m 100% anti-censorship, and if a Server is going to be run that way there needs to be a way for existing users and new users to know that. And that’s the problem because a lot of new users are already stressed at picking a server.
Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole? If it was turning into what you said we’d be seeing a far greater amount of servers than we are.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization. That means if you have a predominant rigid viewpoint you can find an instance that shares that view. I don’t think at the current state of development that the fediverse can have a dominating instance that connects everything. It’s up to you to create a community you feel is missing on the instance you’ve settled in if no other federated instances have that community.
We’ve proven through Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter that we suck at communicating across groups on social media and are more interested in insulting whoever disagrees with us than communicatimg effectively.
That being said the Fediverse is young. Things aren’t perfect. It’s still less censored than almost any other social media platforms aside from 4chan and I’d urge you to use that if you are looking for anti-censorship.
For myself, I’ve picked out a dozen instances and I drift between them all while I figure this out. I treat it just like my half dozen alt accounts I had on RiF.
There’s a big difference between opposing censorship and insisting that private individuals must platform whatever speech you say they should. The difference is so great it is hard to believe you are arguing in good faith.
No, they say that IF you want to have control over what instances yours federates with, then fucking put up, pay for the server, and make those decisions. Otherwise, pay an admin to do it for you, or be happy with what you get.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren’t “just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard”
Not contributing to the debate necessarily, I’d just like to take a moment to say:
Tbf, if you don’t like “Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel,” then you’ll want to be on an instance that defederates lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Before the reddit exodus this place was almost entirely genocide denialiasts who support Cuba, China, Russia (incl. the current invasion and simping for the USSR), and who want to literally murder all small business owners and landlords even if they only rent out their spare room or an old townhouse from before they got married for some extra income to help pay for meds in retirement, but no matter, “bourgeoisie.”
The only reason they aren’t so prominent today is the flood drowned them out a bit, they’re still very much here, and they’re no better than the Nazis, and the kicker is they both think they’re the good guys lol.
Edit: Hehe downvotes mean nothing here, but I can see I upset a few of those genocide denialists and that makes me happy.
Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
Besides that Nazis were just one extreme example, even there you can make the case that not everything people there care about is nazi stuff.
It’s like looking at a specifically Christian instance you wouldn’t expect their users to only ever post or comment about God or Jesus.
Users of such an instance can very well comment on instances like gaming or technology that have nothing to do with their particular instance world view and you wouldn’t know they are nazis and it also wouldn’t matter, instead their comments would benefit the thread just as much as any other comments.
By defederating the instance, you’ll also block interactions like this.
Lets take a tech community on a regular instance as an example. I make a post because I have a problem that needs quick help. Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis? No because that has nothing to do with the thread. If he can help my with my problem I would want to see his post.
Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis?
I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid interactions with people who literally want to commit genocide. I’m willing to risk having to wait five minutes longer for assistance with my computer problem.
@Taxxor@Tvkan, No, there are principles that cannot be crossed due to ethics, at least for me it is a no go. There may be contributions that may be of interest, but this does not justify an interaction with Nazis. There are also contributions of interest in other groups, probably even more. If I’m in an instance where I’ve seen Nazi garbage, xeno- or homophobic comments, the next automatic step is to block this instance, I don’t want this shit to appear on my timeline.
Nazis aren’t the point. Censorship is. Hard to see how a community that requires an individual federated server for everyone to avoid censorship is going to eventually come close to the popularity of Reddit.
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You’re not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
What “third party”? There is only one party that decides how their server is run and moderated and that’s the server owner… If you want to see Nazi content, you can go visit the Nazi server, nobody is stopping you from doing that except maybe your government… Nobody should be forced to host Nazi content on their servers against their will…
So go make that choice and host your own instance… What gives you the right to choose how to run an instance you don’t own? I could understand if you have no other choice, but you do have the choice. The code is available for free…
Doesn’t that exactly imply what I said? It’s the same thing, man. You’re trying to play hockey with a lacrosse stick and getting pissed off at lacrosse. Go play hockey if that’s what you’re into, the same rules don’t make sense here.
First, you can opt to follow that instance still, but I don’t know why you would want to hang out with a bunch of Nazis.
Second, I liken it to cutting out a cancerous growth. If you have an instance infested with Nazis and those Nazis are not being stopped due to a lack of admin and/or mods or worse actively being promoted by an admin then defederate them to keep the Nazis from spreading.
Look at the incel and redpill movements that happened on Reddit. Failure to act quick enough helped the movements grow. They were vitriolic to most people but most of them didn’t break any rules. They were destructive in nature and validated misogyny but Reddit didn’t act until it was a very vocal and well established community on its platform. Now, even after closing down their major subreddits, those users who weren’t the most extreme still actively espouse the values of those communities and have created new subreddits.
Or in this case Beehaw has some very progressive ideals, with rules that require a lot more active moderation, they can’t handle the influx of everyone jumping ship from Reddit. Instead of leaving the gate open for people who will ignore the rules it’s better to shut it and open a smaller “apply to join” door creating a protective barrier from individuals that may be Nazis.
In closing, I’ve both been a shitty redditor and seen shitty redditors and I appreciate that the fediverse has tools to decouple and recouple as needed. And again, if you like hanging out with Nazis that instance still exists and you can willingly hang out with Nazis.
Except there are many users who get banned by the Beehaw admins because they dared disagree with the admins. Beehaw’s adminstration has an extensive history of this sort of behaviour, silencing any critics they can.
Well before the reddit blackout wave, they literally had a “no sources” rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current “rule set” states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
Truth is they were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they have to deal with. Instead they spend most of their time on discord.
I was a victim of their abuse – I personally got banned because I got into an argument with the admin there. They wrongly assumed that I was American and made a claim to counter my argument. I then pointed out their mistake that their claim doesn’t apply to my country, and then – Boom, banned, no appeal, no warning, nothing.
I think my “progressive ideals” point covers what you’re saying. Progressivism on the internet has a lot of positive ideas but a lot of authoritarian enforcement if you don’t agree all of the time.
I understand all this but I just don’t personally see it as a problem the same way many others seem to. I constantly read comments I strongly disagree with (for example when discussing this topic) and it’s fine. A racist comment here and there doesn’t bother me much. If it’s written in “good faith” but I disagree with it I’ll either downvote or not engage. If it’s just pure hate with no content I block the user and I don’t need to deal with them ever again. I’m an adult capable of deciding myself what I don’t mind seeing on my feed and what I do. I view it as a kind of a science experiement. I like exposing myself to ideologies even if I strongly disagree with them. I find it interesting when people have a completely different world view to me.
When it comes to stuff that’s illegal it’s a different story. Ofcourse I need to deal with it wether it personally affects me or not.
Also nazis are not the point here. It’s just an extreme example. We could be speaking of flat earthers aswell.
There are also instances made to host spam bots (when they host it themselves they can make as many bots as they want and as fast as they want without having to worry about captcha) and instead of blocking each bot manually, our admins have the option to block that bot instance entirely. That’s a pretty powerful moderation tool.
They may of course also use this to block communities with a different ideology than them to avoid conflict. If you don’t want this, you can join an instance that doesn’t do this (that choice is the cool thing about the fediverse) and you could even host your own instance if you have the know how.
He didn’t say anything about spammers though, just dissenting opinions. Obviously if your instance is filled with 99% spam you ban the spam. Nothing to do with the nazis thing he was talking about.
I think the beauty of federation is that each instance can have it’s own moral code, I figure we will see everything-not-illegal-lemmy.com at some point, without any conmunity except meta ones, with admins that just do not de-federate from anything else.
You can be part of any instance that aligns with your values. And each community can decide which instance to live in. If some community wants to live in an instance which allows everything so anyone can comment, then maybe they move or start their own.
And I don’t think only horrible people would want this. I figure some community like suicide watch might want to allow everyone to comment no matter where they are from. Making de-federation the only option would suck, but it’s not. There can be different bubbles, and bubbles which contain them.
Ah but see you’re a well functioning adult with the ability to rationalize and self correct. A lot of people on the internet see a lot of up arrows so they follow the up arrow. If they themselves can’t get a coveted up arrow when they talk but it’s easier to get a down arrow they will get attention that way.
I surround myself with people who don’t share the same views as myself, I try and avoid echo chambers as much as possible but even with being careful I can find myself drawn into groupthink because we’re hardwired to identify with groups. What hope is there for the people who follow the almighty up and down arrows instead of questioning why?
Look on any ballot in the US. The average voter can’t tell if they’re voting a Nazi sympathizer or a Communist enthusiast into office. All they see is two different letters and the option to vote whichever letter their group supports.
When the masses don’t follow groupthink and the majority apply discourse instead of verbal attacks then we can have a social media platform free from censorship. I feel like this is more that we sort of suck as a species when we have no consequences for our actions so we put in consequences for those actions (albeit imperfectly) to make the ones who suck the most not bring down the rest.
If Nazi content is something you don’t want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
I wrestle with this, I really do. Part of the way forward for me and part of the problem at the same time is finding consistency in the application of principles. I can acknowledge change over time in how I see this issue, but that change could be described as hypocrisy. I know when I first heard about and began to really get into Reddit, I was very much in the let the upvotes decide camp and felt it aligned with my generally liberal even leftist views. To begin to apply caveats to this idea should seem then to be a back step and admission that I don’t fully believe in democratic values or equal rights to beliefs and opinions.
But over time I’ve tried to reconcile this with certain emerging realities. Especially those brought about by the nature of the internet in particular. People will often bring up things like Nazis as their go-to example of why you should embrace moderation and intervention in open forums. It’s a pretty good example because they’re a fairly widely held archetype of an intolerable world view that almost everyone agrees they wouldn’t endorse, which is a useful extreme in any discussion on this topic even if a tired one. But one can always ask, “surely then, these Nazis would be a marginal and irrelevant influence? There’s no need to sacrifice the purity of our dedication to open discussion by intervening to banish such views on internet forums, the users and voting systems will do it, and if they don’t, then maybe it’s what ‘the people’ wanted after all?” Well sure, but this theoretical approach ignores realities such as the mechanisms that will be used to push this fringe and near universally reviled set of ideas to the mainstream fore. The machinery of the internet allows for malicious actors not to just put out their views on a virtual speaker’s corner, but infect and flood a forum and artificially distort it in to basically, a nazi forum. They’re not honest idealists trying to sell their relatively unpopular wares in the market of ideas, they’re walking around pushing everyone else’s stalls over or surreptitiously supplanting their own materials in to everyone else’s shop front. In a more literal sense they’ll use bots, they’ll use alts, they’ll brigade, they’ll insert Nazism in to every topic where it’s not relevant, they’ll organise together and purposefully distort voting for posts by automated means or just by a perverse dedication to poisoning the well by consistently voting on ideology rather than interest. They’ll use open hostility to make a place generally unpleasant enough to be around that there’s a disincentive for anyone except those whose only desire is to promote Nazism, to even bother contributing which will further reinforce the distorted influence of this small but dedicated group of bastards dilligently constructing an echo chamber for themselves and they’ll point to that echo chamber and their outsized influence in it and declare it the will of the people for the relative lack of a counter narrative. They’ll cry foul and rail against censorship when attempts are finally made to curtail them as they simultaneously smother anything like free speech themselves through their continuing degradation of it.
“But can’t we do that? What makes them special? If all it takes is dedication to an ideology shouldn’t we just fight with equal zeal?” maybe, but this takes us back to the purpose of the forum, and of the individual instances too. If, on each visit, your time is dedicated to trying to fight bad faith actors deliberately perverting the discourse from either an explicitly stated topic (for a specialised instance) or just general discussion, then you’re really not getting what you wanted or needed out of that place anymore.
The same applies to something less ideologically loaded but working in a similar fashion, ads, shitposting and astro turfing. Those are things you can be pretty sure you won’t miss and we’re all better off without, but similar to insidious fringe political groups, they will work against your idealistic principles to force themselves in to spaces you’d hoped to carve out apart from their malign influence. They’ll fight dirty and use your tolerant policies to help them proliferate. Unchecked, they completely overrun a comment section, they do it at scale, with automation and strategy and often with backing which gives them staying power and an asymmetric ability compared to administrators and general users alike but technically, they’re just sharing ideas, equally as valid as any other. They, like Nazis will also be probing the weaknesses of administrators, they’ll use techniques that render case by case examination of borderline unacceptable behaviour ineffective and impractical and thereby side step moderation that’s not empowered to deal with them at equal scale.
It is the sad nature of humanity and the internet that such things are predictable and inevitable. It means free speech is ironically something that has to be maintained through seemingly antithetical means, it’s part of why it even exists as a concept, otherwise surely all speech would just be free speech by default and there’d be no point giving it a name. It’s something that despite it’s name actually requires careful balancing to make sure it really is actually free for everyone and that that concept not being abused to effectively amplify the speech of small groups at the expense of everyone else. Knowing all this if you are hosting a discussion platform you have a dilemma, do you choose not to act, in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of your principles and commitment to providing a platform for open discussion; only to watch that platform transform from such in to its very antithesis, or do you actively take steps to make sure your speaker’s corner remains such both in theory and in practice.
Youre going to be very disappointed when you find out the Nazis definitely believe they are an authority that 100% want to decide what you read/view/think
Everyone missing the point because the example is “Nazis”. It doesn’t matter what it is, I don’t want someone else deciding what I can see. Unless it causes legal problems for the server, don’t censor me.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
It might not be quick, but it’s probably the only answer. You can’t both have someone else run and be responsible for a server that you use and expect them to do everything exactly like you’d want it. Especially if doing it your way might result in significantly more work for them.
That’s true for Lemmy as it is for Reddit and any other service on the internet that you use, but don’t run yourself. The only difference with federated services like Lemmy is that there’s at least the possibility of just doing it yourself.
Different instances have different ideologies. You can get a user on “everything-conservative” which blocks half if the federation, or you can get into a free for all instance which allows all. Big generic instances like lemmy.world do have a big problem on their hands, they have to make the bubble the common denominator of all users, which is hard to know.
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
I’ll set my own instance… With Blackjack and hookers!
Yes, exactly like Reddit does. How does a federated system manage when everyone is required to run their own server to avoid censorship?
Not everyone is required to do so. You just need to find a server that aligns with your values. Communities always censor content, one way or another. Call it moderation. Otherwise, you end up a piling piece of burning trash.
our worse, like 4chan
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.
If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
How would you do it?
Fetch data from instances you’re trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
That’s exactly what happens. But you have to store the fetched data on your instance if you want to display it there.
Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…
You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…
If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…
Obviously the admins need to deal with content that’s illegal. I’m not talking about that.
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
This whole comment is the reason Lemmy won’t take off
What exactly is the reason? That Nazis are not allowed? You seriously think not allowing Nazis on the platform will kill it?
I’m worried about that. And every time, they either mention nazis as an excuse, or suggest creating your own instance. I think fragmentation of users and content is only going to promote centralized platforms.
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If you don’t want someone to decide who you can connect with, you can spin your own instance. Otherwise every instance has admins that aren’t you
I don’t think that setting up my own instance is as easy as you make it sound to be and that’s besides the point anyways
Everyone here says to run your own server, as if that’s the mindset that’s going to bring in users and increase the popularity of federation. A little short-sighted.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the popularity at the moment. I think it’s manage the chaos. The fediverse has had a massive increase over the past few days and you kind of need to use the emergency tools that are part of federations to manage that growth.
I mean I’m just one person but I’m here to stay and if it shrinks or grows I don’t really care I just know I don’t want to go back to Reddit. I also like the ability to defederate as I’ve seen that reddit has had a long history of allowing bad actors to go untouched because they’ve never broken an actual rule.
Now imagine that chaos, but everyone is running their own server. There are already posts and replies that won’t accept my votes.
Who’s a bad actor? Liberals? Conservatives? Who gets to decide who the bad actor is?
Lemmy needs to allow Server-managers to defederate other servers due to obviously illegal material. And Lemmy needs to allow Users to block or ignore servers just due to any number of reasons. But the decision should be left to the user.
I’m 100% anti-censorship, and if a Server is going to be run that way there needs to be a way for existing users and new users to know that. And that’s the problem because a lot of new users are already stressed at picking a server.
Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole? If it was turning into what you said we’d be seeing a far greater amount of servers than we are.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization. That means if you have a predominant rigid viewpoint you can find an instance that shares that view. I don’t think at the current state of development that the fediverse can have a dominating instance that connects everything. It’s up to you to create a community you feel is missing on the instance you’ve settled in if no other federated instances have that community.
We’ve proven through Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter that we suck at communicating across groups on social media and are more interested in insulting whoever disagrees with us than communicatimg effectively.
That being said the Fediverse is young. Things aren’t perfect. It’s still less censored than almost any other social media platforms aside from 4chan and I’d urge you to use that if you are looking for anti-censorship.
For myself, I’ve picked out a dozen instances and I drift between them all while I figure this out. I treat it just like my half dozen alt accounts I had on RiF.
There’s a big difference between opposing censorship and insisting that private individuals must platform whatever speech you say they should. The difference is so great it is hard to believe you are arguing in good faith.
No, they say that IF you want to have control over what instances yours federates with, then fucking put up, pay for the server, and make those decisions. Otherwise, pay an admin to do it for you, or be happy with what you get.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren’t “just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard”
Not contributing to the debate necessarily, I’d just like to take a moment to say:
Tbf, if you don’t like “Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel,” then you’ll want to be on an instance that defederates lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Before the reddit exodus this place was almost entirely genocide denialiasts who support Cuba, China, Russia (incl. the current invasion and simping for the USSR), and who want to literally murder all small business owners and landlords even if they only rent out their spare room or an old townhouse from before they got married for some extra income to help pay for meds in retirement, but no matter, “bourgeoisie.”
The only reason they aren’t so prominent today is the flood drowned them out a bit, they’re still very much here, and they’re no better than the Nazis, and the kicker is they both think they’re the good guys lol.
Edit: Hehe downvotes mean nothing here, but I can see I upset a few of those genocide denialists and that makes me happy.
Nice to meet another vegan in the wild.
Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
Nothing prevents people from just creating new accounts on another instance of lemmy - ban evasion is trivial.
If you’re uncomfortable with this feel free to set up your own server.
Besides that Nazis were just one extreme example, even there you can make the case that not everything people there care about is nazi stuff.
It’s like looking at a specifically Christian instance you wouldn’t expect their users to only ever post or comment about God or Jesus.
Users of such an instance can very well comment on instances like gaming or technology that have nothing to do with their particular instance world view and you wouldn’t know they are nazis and it also wouldn’t matter, instead their comments would benefit the thread just as much as any other comments.
By defederating the instance, you’ll also block interactions like this.
Lets take a tech community on a regular instance as an example. I make a post because I have a problem that needs quick help. Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis? No because that has nothing to do with the thread. If he can help my with my problem I would want to see his post.
I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid interactions with people who literally want to commit genocide. I’m willing to risk having to wait five minutes longer for assistance with my computer problem.
@Taxxor @Tvkan, No, there are principles that cannot be crossed due to ethics, at least for me it is a no go. There may be contributions that may be of interest, but this does not justify an interaction with Nazis. There are also contributions of interest in other groups, probably even more. If I’m in an instance where I’ve seen Nazi garbage, xeno- or homophobic comments, the next automatic step is to block this instance, I don’t want this shit to appear on my timeline.
Nazis aren’t the point. Censorship is. Hard to see how a community that requires an individual federated server for everyone to avoid censorship is going to eventually come close to the popularity of Reddit.
If reddit had had /r/NationalSocialism and /r/ChildPornography and refused to ban them, I don’t think it would’ve become as popular as it is.
It called them /r/jailbait and /r/the_donald.
Still not the point.
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You’re not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
No, I’m saying I dont want a 3rd party pre-selecting the content I’m allowed to see. I want to make the choices myself
Then make an instance yourself, easy peasy
What “third party”? There is only one party that decides how their server is run and moderated and that’s the server owner… If you want to see Nazi content, you can go visit the Nazi server, nobody is stopping you from doing that except maybe your government… Nobody should be forced to host Nazi content on their servers against their will…
So go make that choice and host your own instance… What gives you the right to choose how to run an instance you don’t own? I could understand if you have no other choice, but you do have the choice. The code is available for free…
Doesn’t that exactly imply what I said? It’s the same thing, man. You’re trying to play hockey with a lacrosse stick and getting pissed off at lacrosse. Go play hockey if that’s what you’re into, the same rules don’t make sense here.
Okay well then I’m saying exactly that
Two things.
First, you can opt to follow that instance still, but I don’t know why you would want to hang out with a bunch of Nazis.
Second, I liken it to cutting out a cancerous growth. If you have an instance infested with Nazis and those Nazis are not being stopped due to a lack of admin and/or mods or worse actively being promoted by an admin then defederate them to keep the Nazis from spreading.
Look at the incel and redpill movements that happened on Reddit. Failure to act quick enough helped the movements grow. They were vitriolic to most people but most of them didn’t break any rules. They were destructive in nature and validated misogyny but Reddit didn’t act until it was a very vocal and well established community on its platform. Now, even after closing down their major subreddits, those users who weren’t the most extreme still actively espouse the values of those communities and have created new subreddits.
Or in this case Beehaw has some very progressive ideals, with rules that require a lot more active moderation, they can’t handle the influx of everyone jumping ship from Reddit. Instead of leaving the gate open for people who will ignore the rules it’s better to shut it and open a smaller “apply to join” door creating a protective barrier from individuals that may be Nazis.
In closing, I’ve both been a shitty redditor and seen shitty redditors and I appreciate that the fediverse has tools to decouple and recouple as needed. And again, if you like hanging out with Nazis that instance still exists and you can willingly hang out with Nazis.
Except there are many users who get banned by the Beehaw admins because they dared disagree with the admins. Beehaw’s adminstration has an extensive history of this sort of behaviour, silencing any critics they can.
Well before the reddit blackout wave, they literally had a “no sources” rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current “rule set” states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
Truth is they were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they have to deal with. Instead they spend most of their time on discord.
I was a victim of their abuse – I personally got banned because I got into an argument with the admin there. They wrongly assumed that I was American and made a claim to counter my argument. I then pointed out their mistake that their claim doesn’t apply to my country, and then – Boom, banned, no appeal, no warning, nothing.
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I did. :)
I think my “progressive ideals” point covers what you’re saying. Progressivism on the internet has a lot of positive ideas but a lot of authoritarian enforcement if you don’t agree all of the time.
I understand all this but I just don’t personally see it as a problem the same way many others seem to. I constantly read comments I strongly disagree with (for example when discussing this topic) and it’s fine. A racist comment here and there doesn’t bother me much. If it’s written in “good faith” but I disagree with it I’ll either downvote or not engage. If it’s just pure hate with no content I block the user and I don’t need to deal with them ever again. I’m an adult capable of deciding myself what I don’t mind seeing on my feed and what I do. I view it as a kind of a science experiement. I like exposing myself to ideologies even if I strongly disagree with them. I find it interesting when people have a completely different world view to me.
When it comes to stuff that’s illegal it’s a different story. Ofcourse I need to deal with it wether it personally affects me or not.
Also nazis are not the point here. It’s just an extreme example. We could be speaking of flat earthers aswell.
There are also instances made to host spam bots (when they host it themselves they can make as many bots as they want and as fast as they want without having to worry about captcha) and instead of blocking each bot manually, our admins have the option to block that bot instance entirely. That’s a pretty powerful moderation tool. They may of course also use this to block communities with a different ideology than them to avoid conflict. If you don’t want this, you can join an instance that doesn’t do this (that choice is the cool thing about the fediverse) and you could even host your own instance if you have the know how.
He didn’t say anything about spammers though, just dissenting opinions. Obviously if your instance is filled with 99% spam you ban the spam. Nothing to do with the nazis thing he was talking about.
For what it’s worth, i agree with you.
It seems we are a minority though, everyone is talking about safe spaces.
I suspect what they really want is a leftist echo chamber.
I think the beauty of federation is that each instance can have it’s own moral code, I figure we will see everything-not-illegal-lemmy.com at some point, without any conmunity except meta ones, with admins that just do not de-federate from anything else.
You can be part of any instance that aligns with your values. And each community can decide which instance to live in. If some community wants to live in an instance which allows everything so anyone can comment, then maybe they move or start their own.
And I don’t think only horrible people would want this. I figure some community like suicide watch might want to allow everyone to comment no matter where they are from. Making de-federation the only option would suck, but it’s not. There can be different bubbles, and bubbles which contain them.
And when that instance is created, it will get defederated from immediately
Ah but see you’re a well functioning adult with the ability to rationalize and self correct. A lot of people on the internet see a lot of up arrows so they follow the up arrow. If they themselves can’t get a coveted up arrow when they talk but it’s easier to get a down arrow they will get attention that way.
I surround myself with people who don’t share the same views as myself, I try and avoid echo chambers as much as possible but even with being careful I can find myself drawn into groupthink because we’re hardwired to identify with groups. What hope is there for the people who follow the almighty up and down arrows instead of questioning why?
Look on any ballot in the US. The average voter can’t tell if they’re voting a Nazi sympathizer or a Communist enthusiast into office. All they see is two different letters and the option to vote whichever letter their group supports.
When the masses don’t follow groupthink and the majority apply discourse instead of verbal attacks then we can have a social media platform free from censorship. I feel like this is more that we sort of suck as a species when we have no consequences for our actions so we put in consequences for those actions (albeit imperfectly) to make the ones who suck the most not bring down the rest.
If Nazi content is something you don’t want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
I wrestle with this, I really do. Part of the way forward for me and part of the problem at the same time is finding consistency in the application of principles. I can acknowledge change over time in how I see this issue, but that change could be described as hypocrisy. I know when I first heard about and began to really get into Reddit, I was very much in the let the upvotes decide camp and felt it aligned with my generally liberal even leftist views. To begin to apply caveats to this idea should seem then to be a back step and admission that I don’t fully believe in democratic values or equal rights to beliefs and opinions.
But over time I’ve tried to reconcile this with certain emerging realities. Especially those brought about by the nature of the internet in particular. People will often bring up things like Nazis as their go-to example of why you should embrace moderation and intervention in open forums. It’s a pretty good example because they’re a fairly widely held archetype of an intolerable world view that almost everyone agrees they wouldn’t endorse, which is a useful extreme in any discussion on this topic even if a tired one. But one can always ask, “surely then, these Nazis would be a marginal and irrelevant influence? There’s no need to sacrifice the purity of our dedication to open discussion by intervening to banish such views on internet forums, the users and voting systems will do it, and if they don’t, then maybe it’s what ‘the people’ wanted after all?” Well sure, but this theoretical approach ignores realities such as the mechanisms that will be used to push this fringe and near universally reviled set of ideas to the mainstream fore. The machinery of the internet allows for malicious actors not to just put out their views on a virtual speaker’s corner, but infect and flood a forum and artificially distort it in to basically, a nazi forum. They’re not honest idealists trying to sell their relatively unpopular wares in the market of ideas, they’re walking around pushing everyone else’s stalls over or surreptitiously supplanting their own materials in to everyone else’s shop front. In a more literal sense they’ll use bots, they’ll use alts, they’ll brigade, they’ll insert Nazism in to every topic where it’s not relevant, they’ll organise together and purposefully distort voting for posts by automated means or just by a perverse dedication to poisoning the well by consistently voting on ideology rather than interest. They’ll use open hostility to make a place generally unpleasant enough to be around that there’s a disincentive for anyone except those whose only desire is to promote Nazism, to even bother contributing which will further reinforce the distorted influence of this small but dedicated group of bastards dilligently constructing an echo chamber for themselves and they’ll point to that echo chamber and their outsized influence in it and declare it the will of the people for the relative lack of a counter narrative. They’ll cry foul and rail against censorship when attempts are finally made to curtail them as they simultaneously smother anything like free speech themselves through their continuing degradation of it.
“But can’t we do that? What makes them special? If all it takes is dedication to an ideology shouldn’t we just fight with equal zeal?” maybe, but this takes us back to the purpose of the forum, and of the individual instances too. If, on each visit, your time is dedicated to trying to fight bad faith actors deliberately perverting the discourse from either an explicitly stated topic (for a specialised instance) or just general discussion, then you’re really not getting what you wanted or needed out of that place anymore.
The same applies to something less ideologically loaded but working in a similar fashion, ads, shitposting and astro turfing. Those are things you can be pretty sure you won’t miss and we’re all better off without, but similar to insidious fringe political groups, they will work against your idealistic principles to force themselves in to spaces you’d hoped to carve out apart from their malign influence. They’ll fight dirty and use your tolerant policies to help them proliferate. Unchecked, they completely overrun a comment section, they do it at scale, with automation and strategy and often with backing which gives them staying power and an asymmetric ability compared to administrators and general users alike but technically, they’re just sharing ideas, equally as valid as any other. They, like Nazis will also be probing the weaknesses of administrators, they’ll use techniques that render case by case examination of borderline unacceptable behaviour ineffective and impractical and thereby side step moderation that’s not empowered to deal with them at equal scale.
It is the sad nature of humanity and the internet that such things are predictable and inevitable. It means free speech is ironically something that has to be maintained through seemingly antithetical means, it’s part of why it even exists as a concept, otherwise surely all speech would just be free speech by default and there’d be no point giving it a name. It’s something that despite it’s name actually requires careful balancing to make sure it really is actually free for everyone and that that concept not being abused to effectively amplify the speech of small groups at the expense of everyone else. Knowing all this if you are hosting a discussion platform you have a dilemma, do you choose not to act, in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of your principles and commitment to providing a platform for open discussion; only to watch that platform transform from such in to its very antithesis, or do you actively take steps to make sure your speaker’s corner remains such both in theory and in practice.
Youre going to be very disappointed when you find out the Nazis definitely believe they are an authority that 100% want to decide what you read/view/think
Everyone missing the point because the example is “Nazis”. It doesn’t matter what it is, I don’t want someone else deciding what I can see. Unless it causes legal problems for the server, don’t censor me.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
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It might not be quick, but it’s probably the only answer. You can’t both have someone else run and be responsible for a server that you use and expect them to do everything exactly like you’d want it. Especially if doing it your way might result in significantly more work for them.
That’s true for Lemmy as it is for Reddit and any other service on the internet that you use, but don’t run yourself. The only difference with federated services like Lemmy is that there’s at least the possibility of just doing it yourself.
Different instances have different ideologies. You can get a user on “everything-conservative” which blocks half if the federation, or you can get into a free for all instance which allows all. Big generic instances like lemmy.world do have a big problem on their hands, they have to make the bubble the common denominator of all users, which is hard to know.