By your definition anybody who does’t open their home to any travelling neonazi preaching their ideology is “censoring” said neonazis.

The impression that passes is that your black & white absolutist definition of “censorship” is just you just trying to weaponize the word for your own political ends rather than having given it genuine thought.

It’s not a “slippery slope” because it’s not the kind of situation were a little bit of limitation leads innevitably to total limitation: there is an actual point somewhere in the middle where somebody’s right to speech stops and somebody else’s right to not be drowned in the shouts of those they consider abhorrent starts.

No rights are unbound in a society because there are other people who want different things, often contraditory, who have rights too, and its mathematically impossible for everybodys rights to be unbounded, and that applies to the right of Speech as much as it applies to, for example the right of not being insulted or the right to Silence.

Those who are genuinelly trying to be fair about all this are not looking at the Right To Free Speech as an absolute right because any right being an absolute would trample on everybody else’s different but related rights - a situation of maximum unfairness against everybody else - what they’re looking at is were that right ends and other people’s rights start, or in other words the right ballance between everybody’s rights.

Personally, whilst I think Lemmy users should be allowed to, themselves, totally block instances rather than it being delegated to unelected server admins (and yeah, I know that sufficiently technically expert users can set-up their own instances - and I am one such user - but that’s not scalable and discriminates against most people, who have no such expertise), I see this as temporarily acceptable action given the current status of the code since anybody who wants to hear that speech can make an alt on that server.

While this is a valid perspective, it’s important to understand and acknowledge the nuance between our values as ideals and our values as they interact with our other priorities.

There will always be concerns about how inclusivity might be used to silence dissenters. Yes there is a difference between trolling and hate speech vs. legitimate controversial views. But this exists NO MATTER the approach administrators take, or refuse to take. The difference is that admins can be held to account by the community that follows them. But dogpile flamewars that arise organically when there are no limits to free speech ALSO silence dissent. And unlike admins, participants in a gangland comment war cannot be held to account by the community in the same way.

And while you are right that it’s important for individuals to speak their mind without fear of censorship I seriously question whether disconnecting an automated P2P exchange of online posts rises anywhere close to the level of censorship you seem to be so concerned about here. We don’t risk creating a homogenous society from defederation because it’s not censorship, merely categorization and fragmentation.

Did the creation of cable TV risk censorship because people had to flip the channel to watch something different? I would argue the opposite. Comedy gets better when the people actively searching for comedy are it’s audience. Serious discussions are more insightful and productive when people know this is a place where we are comfortable speaking seriously. Creatives feel more open to getting weird and niche when they are in a space where diverse modes of creativity are encouraged.

How is defederation so different from creating more options for the tone or genre of content you’re looking for? There’s nothing to fear about the slippery slope of censorship so long as this community is not a whole entire society that can put limits on your internet browser. This fear seems to hint at a worry that people can’t be trusted to know how a web browser works.

And while censorship can be a slippery slope, we should celebrate how the admins are doing the precise opposite of that. I think it’s important to acknowledge that here we see a case-by-case investigation into whether the Instance is adhering to the agreed upon code of conduct, attempting to understand context prior to defederation. But we always knew there were trolls on the internet, and we always knew some of them would start hosting their own Instances. The function to defederate exists because the developers of the protocol realized this was an inevitable eventuality and that without safeguards, any space could devolve into 4chan.

For all the times I’ve heard this, I’ve yet to actually see it happen. The only people who claim this happened to them turn out to be bigots of some kind.

There’s your line. Bigoted speech is not welcome. Value judgments about born traits are not welcome. You have to be a pretty pathetic person to dislike someone for a trait they were born with.