this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Does it really matter? So long as they remain federalized you can still access and interact with those instances.
Federated*
Thanks, language confusion
True, but i think that it could as well come to "if you're from this instance you are a bad person" situation. I don't care like you say, but some people will.
Sounds good to me since there are genuinely bad people on social media, often using it as a platform to groom more reactionaries and extremists.
Corporate social media has always been slow to react to these groups and they often take the stance of "as long as they don't go fully mask off" in order to preserve as many ad impressions as possible.
With the community in control, they can act much faster to limit astro-turfing and hate speech, pushing the far-right back into the obscure shitholes of the internet.
I kind of disagree, not totally, i agree in the fact that freedom breeds assholes, but i have to say as well that freedom breeds freedom and better and more intelligent people as well. I don't think that we need witch hunts or bulllying to build safe instances, just intelligence. Now my opinion about your last point is that there's hate speech everywhere, not just from your right, your left is pretty extremist as well, and pretty full of assholes. Assholes are everywhere. As always, the rule of thumb is think for yourself and don't be an asshole. All that said, this is just my opinion man.
I have no objection to freedom itself, I object to that freedom being used to turn vulnerable people into domestic terrorists.
The reality is that this kind of absolutism simply doesn't work. While on paper it would be wonderful if we could scrap every law to maximise personal freedom, we all know that doing so would just hand society to arseholes.
While it's technically possible that it could turn into a witch hunt or bullying, it's more likely to be used as an excuse by the arseholes.
There's no shortage of people on social media claiming "the left just call everyone who disagrees with them nazis" while simultaneously spouting opinions that perfectly align with the opinions neo-nazis have held for 40 years. Only the vocabulary changes, morphing from "undesirables" to "SJWs" to "woke".
Often, it's not a honest mistake either. One of the most popular topics in far-right Discord channels is "how to redpill people", which involves strategies like obfuscating their actual opinions and playing the victim.
Sure, but let's not pretend they're in the same league.
Tankies can be assholes, but they're pushing communism because they believe it would be a better, fairer society for everyone, despite it usually ending in corruption, starvation and executions.
Meanwhile over on the far-right, genocide is the point. They think that society would be better for them if they could kill and enslave minorities and women. That's a level far beyond calling people names.
Sounds good, doesn't work. That's why COVID saw reactionaries pushing conspiracy theories that could have come straight from Elders of Zion and spitting in peoples faces.
The wider net you let them cast, the more vulnerable people they'll catch.
Unfortunately true!
And, centralization of users and communities to any one instance increases the risks of power grabs and attempts to monetize
Now that you mention it, yeah I can see that happening.
I can imagine other instances defederating from each other over minor or uncontrollable reasons. I'd hate to keep switching to new instances if that were to happen.
That's also a fair point, although I hope most serious instances only consider defederating from another instance as a last resort.