I think the whole attitude of “oh just block the community and ignore it” really comes from a privilege of not having to deal with the way those communities tend to intersect negatively with vulnerable communities when they were ignored on reddit and the mess that caused. Blocking their biggest communities from your own account does not stop them from giving them the potential to join discussions in bad faith, DMing threats, open up potential doxxings, community brigading, harassment, etc. There comes a point where simply ignoring them does not work as they always try to force their bullshit into communities outside of them and stir trouble if they aren’t cut off preemptively. You aren’t deplatforming them by defederating them, you are taking away their megaphone and potential to cause real harm those exact communities have shown to do time and time again in the past.

I agree, it seems the owner of shit just works is one of those “free speech absolutist” types. It’s a plague here, and the worst part is that they NEVER actually believe in 100% absolute free speech. They almost universally want some leftists speech censored, but never nazis.

Yep. And (obviously) America is going to one day be forced to come to that same understanding that Germany was painfully forced to. I’m just hopeful it doesn’t take a genocide or some sort of dictatorship for a similar reckoning to occur. Germany might not be perfect, but there are many things American society could learn from that exist within modern day German culture especially in regards to cultural reconciliation with historical wrongs. It’s hard to really describe how happy it makes me feel that as a Jewish person I can say I would feel very safe and welcome living in and visiting most places in Germany, but it also makes me sad to an immense degree that I can truthfully say I’d probably feel safer most places there than in the most places in the states right now… :(

Americans who understand the first amendment will tell you that freedom of association is inseparable from freedom of expression. The government (plus its agents) is the only entity constrained by the First Amendment. Everyone else benefits from it, including certain instance owners who don’t want to associate with certain others.

If censorship is the answer, why have years of censorship failed to eradicate undesirable ideologies?

It’s super effective! Humanity hurt itself in its confusion!

They are very much bad too. But christians are the dominant religion in western nations, which are the core audience of social media. Islamic fundamentalist thus simply do not have a similar presence as Christianity does on social media.

Both fundamentalists are crazy bastards but the ones with power and money are more dangerous.

It’s almost like they’re both bad, but one is a more immediate problem. Al Qaeda may have taken down the twin towers, but they never tried to launch a coup and get Roe V Wade overturned.

what about

original, innovative, unprecedented

also, yknow, a complete lie

I bitch about Islam constantly. Almost as much as I bitch about Christianity. Being in the USA, Christianity negatively effects my life far more than Islam does so it’s a higher priority to complain about.

Running your own is the way, and you get to choose. I personally don’t defederate any instances so far, and I think in some way being able to see that content and be aware that it exists is good to not become an echo chamber and remain aware of the gravity of the problem.

Being outside of the US, I wasn’t aware of how bad the alt-right was until they started invading Reddit, which used to be rather welcoming and accepting, as was Twitter many years ago. If we just defederate them, it’s easy to forget it even exists, and end up with essentially two competing echo chambers.

If not already a feature, instances could filter remote communities and drop posts/comments from locally defederated instances so that local users don’t see that content despite the remote instance hosting it. You own the server, you can present the content however you want.

I’m sure in time some of those filtered instances will pop up, if they haven’t already.

I’m strongly considering hosting a KBin instance

I understand that urge, and in my ideal world it would a whole new option of “Suggested” feed rather than a replacement for “All”, like how that other site has a /all but defaults to a more curated selection of content that has broad appeal (and IIRC even some things are excluded from /all over there). For now I’d just take being able to filter the “All” view of the most objectionable stuff that I only want to allow users of my instance to explicitly opt into by seeking out those sorts of places.

Also, unless your instance is purposely seeking out and subscribing to every community in every instance the moment they are created “All” is never going to actually be all posts from everywhere… I imagine larger instances may approach that, but I am certain there is a ton missing from smaller instances like my own.

Yeah, illegal things are sort of an existential threat to any instance, so I will not hesitate to defederate over embracing of and failure to moderate such content at an admin/instance level. That is another one of the rules on my instance.

They don’t? I thought they did? I don’t see it in their banned instance list.

That comment sounds a little bigoted.

Mostly the clothing. And neckbeards.

Oh, fuck that. I’m so tired of that shit.

I’m not pro- or anti- either side, but the_donald were dicks.

Yeah you know what? I’ve had enough of fundies, I’ll leave that thought there.