this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reporting posts will be seen as breaking the rules of expldoing-heads. Nazism is not allowed, so do not report any posts which you disagree with or I will block the bigoted authoritarian fascist cunts doing this. Bruh
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Your example doesn't fit bc you are trying to use a private space as an example of a public forum. But a man's house is not a place for public discussion. Even for something semi-public like a garage sale, most people implicitly understand that it is not really a public forum and they are merely guests bc the purpose of the event is not for public discussion.
But if you open a place, real or digital, with the express purpose of having freeform or political discussions with large groups of people that you don't personally know, e.g. a public forum/townhall/etc, then you are leaving the man's house example behind. And at that point, allowing some to talk while simultaneously suppressing the free speech of those you dislike, is at best short-sighted, intolerant, and an abuse of power. If you paid for the costs yourself, then you have the right to be those things. But having the right and exercising it, does not change those facts.
Many of those complaining about EH are just focusing on memes or comments that contain language they dislike. No matter the intent behind that language. I would argue that suppressing that kind of language in mainstream society rather than allowing them to be vented actually makes things much worse in the long run as for many, it can sometimes add a layer of resentment for the suppression that would not exist otherwise. It also causes those you are unused to hearing it to focus solely on the words and not look at the intent. There's a big difference between a 12yo saying the "N" word bc he's trying to push the boundaries, it being casually used in a joke, a victim of black violence using it to curse their attackers, and someone with a bald head and swastika tattoos saying it with contempt towards an innocent person who happens to have a darker tan than them. But mainstream media and sites want to collapse all of that and take away nuance. Most of the stuff that I've seen here on EH that is "slurs" and such, is usually just memes and such without any serious hate behind it. But mainstream sites equate this same stuff as serious hate crimes, despite there being no calls to violence, etc.
But ofc there are also plenty of those that want to suppress based not on language but merely bc these place allows people with an opposing view the ability to speak. This is a problem both on lemmy, on reddit, and many other places. This problem is much much more serious than simple language issues in my opinion.
But it's not a public forum, at the end of the day it is a private space.. The server is rented by somebody, that somebody is paying for that server and that somebody can choose to do with that server whatever they want.. If somebody choose to host a private lemmy server where only they themselves are allowed, that's their right.
But that's not even remotely what lemmy.world is supposed to be.. They choose to allow anyone who follows the rules, but they are very very clear that they are not "a free speech zone." and the rules are very strict, much stricter than twitter, reddit or most other social media sites, so I seriously don't understand how you can make the argument that lemmy.world is supposed to be a "townhall"..
Nobody is suppressing your language.. You are free to say whatever you want on instances that support it.. Nobody is shutting down exploding-heads, but you can't expect somebody else to host content that they don't want to host on their servers, just as they cannot force this sites' admin to host content they don't want...
You have an argument when it comes to centralized social media, such as twitter, reddit, etc. where you are dependent on the company that runs the site. But with lemmy, you have free access to the code and are free to run your own server however you choose.
Maybe this is a language semantic thing. Would it be better if I called it a 'privately-owned townhall'? The idea is that, yes, there is private ownership but they are inviting the public at large. It's not restricted to family members, people who are in a certain line of work, people who have been screened, etc and the purpose is explicitly for them gathering in sub-forums to talk about whatever they want. My thought is to describe that as a townhall but I wasn't trying to imply public ownership, only that the public is able to use it and talk there.
I don't think comparing it to a person's home is accurate either (only covers the ownership aspect but not the purpose or the crowd), nor is comparing to a business (covers ownership+crowd, but not purpose).
But even if privately owned, the express purpose is public speaking / discussion (e.g. public forum/townhall). However, due to the nature of private ownership, they are allowed to ban/censor as they see fit. If you see my previous, I even said that is their right.
But even if they are allowed to do that bc they own the instance, that is still censorship, which by definition is restricting free speech. In the context of a venue where the public at large is mostly allowed free speech, if you are restricting free speech of some specific group or individuals just bc you don't like them or their beliefs (e.g. conservatives, americans, whatever), then you're allowed to do so, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still short-sighted and petty. Or that you are only able exert power over them and suppress by virtue of being the owner, not by virtue of being a superior human being.
If you choose to block them over language, for a real world situation, I would probably agree with you whether talking private house/business/clubhouse, bc there's really no way to enforce your rules other than by mutual agreement (which only works if there is some level of mutual trust) or by having them leave.
Online, technology changes that to an extent. Not saying all the functionally exists currently or that kicking them out isn't still an option. Or even that if it did that it would be perfect. But lemmy is open-source and it is certainly within the realm of possibility that for text-based comments/posts/etc, a screening process to disallow words you don't want could be added. Even without that you can get moderation help (btw despite being a privately owned instance, the term 'moderator' originates from public speaking/debates), at least in your local subs, and allow users to block things themselves.
Fair, I'm not claiming that they are breaking laws by restricting free speech or that they are bad people. Just that it is short-sighted and petty to do so if the reasons are political ones.
For language things like slurs, tbh, I get it and don't really disagree with you. But considering user controls exist, I think it is a bit of a control freak move myself. My point was that even language can be a slippery slope.
IMO a lot of the so-called "racist" and "transphobic" (the correct term would be "transmisic") feelings that exist online today are not true hate of minorities but strong annoyance with political correctness and language control. During BLM, people are told that in addition to obvious slurs, they can't say "blacklist" and "whitelist" (despite those terms having nothing to do with race if you study their origins) or "master" and "slave" as in the electronics sense (despite it being a different topic and there being no living African Americans who they themselves were former slaves, slavery not being unique to them, many African slaves having been captured by other Africans back in the day, etc). Trans activists have been even worse IMO in pushing very heavy language control.
Point being, out and out profanity and slurs (e.g. "n word" and similar terms for jews/mexicans/irish/Italians/whites/middle-easterners/Indians/East Asians/etc, cunt, faggot, etc) are long held and well known terms to avoid in polite company. But there's a lot of new ones that either basically slurs by newer groups that are one-sidely NOT censored (terf, cis, I've seen places that allow cracker/honkie allowed but block nword and 50 variants of it). There's also some people that get offended bc you refuse to acknowledge their beliefs (e.g. no injecting hormones and mutilating your body, does NOT make you a woman).
Depending on what you block and how you block it, you might be taking political sides even without intending to. And you will always end up offending someone.
A townhall is a public institution owned publicly. A privately owned townhall is an oxymoron as far as I see it.
But for argument's sake, I could somewhat see twitter, facebook or the internet overall as a privately owned public townhall to a certain extend.
And maybe lemmy or the fediverse overall could be considered somewhat of a townhall too.
But individual lemmy servers are not townhalls, they are more like privately owned pubs.
Well that depends entirely on which lemmy server we are talking about. I'm sure there are lemmy servers that are restricted to family members or people who are in a certain line of work. And there certainly are lemmy servers that only allow people who have been screened.
Fair enough, maybe comparing it to a privately owned bar or pub would be the better analogy. Bars and pubs are privately owned, but in general, anyone who follows the rules can enter them. But if the bar owner feels like you have violated a rule, they can throw you out or even ban you.
Right, but on a positive note, the code to lemmy is not privately owned, it is public. So while servers can control their own server like a dictator, they don't have any control over other servers.
You can certainly see it like that, yes. But I don't see a huge issue with it as long as this is openly stated in the rules of the server and as long as alternatives are allowed to exist.
As far as I see it, the technical aspects seem to be a big obstacle at the moment. I think with better mod tools and block tools, some servers will probably reconsider re-federation. At the moment, the de-federation reflex seems to be chosen more due to practical reasons (they don't want/can't deal with the additional moderation).
I personally do see the appeal of a "nice" anti-toxic community, it reminds me of the "good old" internet forum days where your comments were removed for the simplest of reasons, like calling somebody an idiot, or posting in the wrong place, or posting something that has been posted before. Many say people nowadays are too sensitive when it comes to what content is tolerated, which does have some truth to it, but many nowadays are also very sensitive when it comes to moderation where they almost believe that any moderation or censorship is inherently bad.
Now I also enjoy free-speech forums from time to time, but I do see the appeal of a heavily moderated "clean" space if I'm being honest. And I don't see how there cannot be both existing at the same time.
I can certainly understand that, although I also can understand that constantly blocking people can get annoying.
I think a lot of it is people being overwhelmed with how fast things are changing nowadays. 15 years ago, about 50% of the people in the US believed that homosexuality should not be accepted. This has changed very very rapidly, so it's natural that a lot of people have issues with that. I also think that equating "racism" and "transphobia" with "hate" is reductive.
That's just liberals doing liberal things.. They don't want to do actual change, they just want to make PR moves. And I think saying "maybe we shouldn't use terms like master or slave anymore" is not exactly the same thing as saying "you can't use the term master or slave".
Well yeah, when you are convinced that you are a man born in a woman's body, you don't want to constantly be told that you are not a real man. People can disagree if they want, but I understand that people don't want to have this endless debate that will never ever be resolved because those kind of endless debates inevitably end up becoming toxic.
I think this is where my opinion differs to the opinion of many right wingers. Right wingers always think it's about offending people. To me, it's about creating a non-toxic community. In order to do that, you need moderation. This has always been the case, otherwise you end up in a COD MW2 lobby situation where everyone is just screaming insults and slurs into the mic. And I'm not against that because I'm offended by that, I just don't find it appealing as it hinders constructive conversations.
Fair. My fuck up there and I'll own it. That said, I'm not sure if there is a better word or not. Everything else I can think of also fails at some aspect or another. Comparing online things to irl things without losing nuance is hard sometimes.
Certainly fits better than private home, is closer for sure. But it is a business. Its main purpose of a pub is to sell drinks/food. For reddit/twitter, in a way, we could say that their main purpose (at least from the point of view of the board of directors) is to sell ads. But to my thinking that analogy completely falls apart when you have something like lemmy/kdin/mastodon or even private matrix/etc.
Maybe something more like a privately held auditorium that you let the public use free of charge? I'm sure that isn't perfect either but anyway
Fair point as I didn't clarify. I meant those that open the doors to everyone. Obv a "family only" or "private clubhouse" style community doesn't fit the bill for what we're talking about at all (never intended to be wide open to public).
Yup, and kudos to them on that point. I have a lot of respect for them doing that, despite disagreeing with devs on Russia and China in particular.
You're not wrong on the small level (e.g. if you are just considering one server), though in some case I wish that ones that were going for a curated community would not beat around the bush and would just directly come out and say things like "we're a [left/right/center] instance. don't like it, there's the door." - personally, having something like that right up front that you can see before even signing up would be great (some do this more or less but some have very vague language like "don't be an asshole" and everyone can draw the line on that one differently to some extent).
I do think there is a bigger free speech issue when you look at instances collectively though. Essentially, more instances have a liberal lean and strongly push this. I believe that this is bc a higher demographic of liberals get into IT due to colleges tending to be fairly liberal and most formal IT roles requiring a related degree from a college. Could be mistaken. But anyway, when the majority of instances start doing this, it effectively takes away from free speech on the web as a whole, despite each individual instances (fediverse) or site (twitter/reddit/facebook/etc) being privately owned.
I don't know what the right answer is here. Maybe making self hosting easier, cheap, and more anonymous to promote lower tech hurdles for people running instances? Maybe fixing colleges? Maybe something else.
I can see that aspect of it too. I assume you mean things like if instance A is federating with B, then give A the ability to auto-hide content that does not meet their own community rules. Yeah, I think the lack of tools like that definitely contribute to the defederated instances.
Maybe some of it. Some people online definitely take it as almost word of God tho. Like I'm a developer and I've seen some github issues in the past when that stuff was going on and some of it was just full on hysterical idiocy and raving entitlement.
I can partway see your point here. I think lemmy world quoted our main dude here calling someone "trannyfaggot" or something like that as one of there points for justifying the defed. Personally, I remember irl when people would call each other faggot all the time just for the fuck of it. Like you, I'm not offended by that kind of thing in the slightest. But I get what you mean not wanting a COD lobby (or any xbox lobby or pretty much anything with preteens not being actively watched by adults). Sometimes you just don't want the stupid bullshit, especially when something more important is going on and you don't want the distraction.
Anyway, been fun chatting with you. You make some good points and interesting convo. I need to get my ass back to work tho, so catch ya later.
I don't think that matters too much, but we can also use some sort of association, like a book club, a boardgame group, etc. The underlying principle is free association and one of the necessary principles behind free association is that you can freely choose to not associate with somebody.
Politically charged terms like left/right/center are, in the broader context, very vague. To some on the right, somebody like Joe Biden is a extremist leftist. To some on the center he is center to center left. To some on the left, he is a right winger. Similar story with rules such as "respect everyone regardless of identity, gender, race, etc". To some on the right, this would be seen as left wing. To some on the left and center, this is not inherantly political.
So for that reason, I prever servers to just explain their rules and let the users themselves classify those rules as "right-wing" or "left-wing" if they want.
Yeah in my view that would be a bad rule because it's too vague. But something like lemmy.world's rules is pretty clear without the need of placing it left/right:
"Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic."
This is true, with modern social media in general, but especially with lemmy. I think there are multiple reasons for this. One is that lemmy especially is used right now by young western tech enthusiasts, and they tend to be left leaning. I also think another issue is that right-wingers seem to have a very confrontational and uncompromising attitude.
There was a little mini-drama on lemmy.world where some users wanted to create a conservative "free-speech" community. Due to the low numbers of conservatives and due to the stated idea that "everyone should be allowed to participate", the sub was mostly looking like 5 conservatives vs 200 non-conservatives making fun of them. Within hours, the mod turned around and started removing comments (which is understandable) he didn't like at random and basically only allowed posts/memes about how "dumb the left is" (which seems to be 95% of what right-wing memes are about). He was informed that personal attacks were not welcome on the lemmy instance, but he just cried about "free speech" and "censorship" and continued to post the same stuff until he was banned.
This could certainly be one of the reasons. In my country, education is still strongly dependend on non-college education such as apprenticip programs. I work in IT as well, but me and most of my collegues and friends from the field have never been to college. And I do have some right leaning friends, but I would say most are center left to left leaning. But this doesn't just apply to IT, it is just younger people in general tend to lean left.
I believe this is because of the extreme changes that our society has been going through in the past decades and continues to go through. IT especially is a field that is constantly changing and progressing. This is pure speculation, but maybe people with conservative political leaning also tend to be conservative leaning in terms of profession and don't prefer fields that constanly require new approaches.
I don't see that happening as long as there are still enough spaces for free speech to exist. Your freedom of speech is not a freedom to speak to everyone and anyone. People who don't want to listen to your speak don't have to listen.
Well yeah, back in school. But the web isn't a boy's lockerroom, this is supposed to be an internationally active forum. Maybe this is also a cultural issue, but I couldn't imagine hearing a radio talk show or serious TV program where people casually call eachother "faggot". And I don't mean to give an online platform more meaning than it has, but I think basic respect for eachother is at the very least something that a platform host/admin should not have to justify enforcing if he chooses to do so.
Thanks for the conversation, I think I will look around from time to time, conversations with right leaning people is one of the few things I miss from the mainstream instances.
You’re wrong and will always be