Dank memes

A townhall is a public institution owned publicly. A privately owned townhall is an oxymoron as far as I see it.

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.

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.

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

Well that depends entirely on which lemmy server we are talking about

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

the technical aspects seem to be a big obstacle at the moment. I

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.

That’s just liberals doing liberal things… They don’t want to do actual change, they just want to make PR moves.

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 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.

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.