this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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I'm having difficulty yes.
The fediverse is akin to a network, instances join this network and relay content to and from each other.
The internet is a network, networks upon networks, and nodes in the network relay content to and from each other.
If a country decides to block objectionable content on the internet, the news article covering this will use the term censorship. Whether it's porn, anti-religious content, or inconvenient history, they will call cutting off that part of the internet, whether via filtering or total disconnection, censorship. Even though this falls in your example of "you donβt let people into your house", because those countries aren't letting certain packets into their borders, it is still commonly referred to as censorship.
So, if an instance on the fediverse decides to opt out of relaying objectionable content, thus suppressing that content, how does it not meet the criteria for censorship if defederation is analogous to countries performing censorship via blocking internet content?
Except an instance isn't a country. It isn't a government. This instance isn't operated by or for a government. Most instances are owned and operated by a single individual or a small group of people.
If you owned a coffee shop, and you banned someone for standing in a booth screaming racial slurs, that's not censorship. It is irrelevant how that person got to the coffee shop. It isn't even censorship for Starbucks to ban someone from all of their stores.
To make the analogy more complete. Suppose you had two entrances to your shop. Those entrances adjourn to neighboring restaurants/shops. Suppose one of your neighbors screams racial slurs in their own shop. You can't stop them except by asking nicely. Suppose they don't stop. They attract a bunch of people like themselves who scream racial slurs all day. Now, you could ban the people who come in to your shop screaming slurs through that entrance one by one sure... Or you could shut that entrance and lock it. Shutting the door isn't censorship.
You haven't made it illegal for them to scram racial slurs. You haven't imposed on their rights to freely operate their business as they wish. But you not keeping that entrance open isn't censorship.
It would be censorship if the government made it illegal to scream racial slurs. It would be censorship if you locked them out of and prevented them from using something they owned themselves... (It's not censorship for a landlord to kick a tenant out of a building they own for spray painting hate speech on the building for example).
Have we not established that censorship isn't something solely done at the government level? I was using government censorship as an example, but censorship can be performed by companies, groups of people, and individuals.
Also, why are you not addressing the dictionary definition of censorship? Why are you not addressing my example? Why are you ignoring my comparison of a network to a network, and instead trying to compare a network to a shop, apartment, or restaurant?
It's really easy to pretend this isn't censorship is you ignore the literal dictionary definition of the word and direct analogies(a federation list is more akin to a peering list than it is to a restaurant...), and instead supply a convoluted abstract example of your own.
I believe I'm satisfied that the issue at hand is cognitive dissonance on your part, wherein you hold censorship as morally objectionable, but are conflicted because in this instance censorship is a tool you wish(rightly) to be wielded.
Alright, corporate censorship requires that there be the threat of monetary loss or loss of access that will result in loss of money. So this can't be corporate censorship.
It's not self censorship because it's not a person censoring their own work.
That leaves only the possibility for it to be censorship by an organizing body, which requires that the organizing body be the principle body through which all media is distributed or authorized for distribution. Any single instance does not meet this definition. It is arguably possible that if the process by which activitypub was centralized under a single authority body, and that body decided to remove any instance spreading a specific message that could be a form of censorship.
You claim that I am ignoring your examples. It should be immediately obvious that my counter example is your argument reworded to be non technical. I'm sorry that you don't understand this or what it means.
You claim that I am ignoring the dictionary definition. I am not. Once again, you claiming something to be true doesn't make it true. Defederation is not the suppression of anything.
I'm sorry that you don't understand this. I don't know how else to tell you.
I haven't once insulted you in this thread before this but Go fuck yourself.