this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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as far as I've heard, they're still up and major instances are still federated with them.
this is a deep misunderstanding of how far-right groups operate. they actively seek connection with the wider community because it presents them a chance to recruit and they're numbers get decimated when they're deplatformed. offering them a base of users to proselytize to only benefits them.
yes precisely
this has a deeper material reason underlying it. it's got more to do with economic decay and the lack of prospects people face than the algorithms. we saw the same thing early last century. far-right ideology explodes in popularity when the left fails to make the case for a more equitable distribution of resources and because our oligarchs fund them to an obscene degree -- minor fascists with a hundred followers on social media will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding (cf Ali Alexander). fascist ideology spreads because it poses scapegoats for the problems in society.
yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won't be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.
I do as me and mine belong to groups they target. if they're allowed to rise to accumulate any power, it will spell death for us. there have already been multiple attempts in the US to organize pograms against trans people, as an example.
however, I'd like to point out that 4chan originally started making memes to mock the fascists -- their use of irony turned over time into unironic fascism and they became a hotbed for neo-fascists.
email is a bad example because it only provides point-to-point communication, unless you join a mailing list. social media is different -- views get broadcast to the wider public on a given platform. federating with nazis allows them to broadcast their views and create a sense that their vision of the world is actually what everyone else believes. exploding-heads is federated with lemmy.world and the consequence is that many users have left lemmy.world specifically to get away from the fascists dumping their disgusting worldview onto the platform.
they actually do have liability under laws like the DMCA, SESTA/FOSTA, and the new slate of laws recently passed to go after sex traffickers (and in reality a wide host of "undesirable" content more generally). but that aside, I'm not talking about legal liability. I'm talking about the responsibility the people running these instances have to not help build fascism. it's an ethical/political responsibility, not a legal one.
You are right about worsening economic conditions leading to the rise of far right movements. I was more speaking to their digital footprint. If you remember early Facebook, it was nothing like what people use today.
If lemmy A is federated w lemmy B (the nazi one), it means:
It does not mean:
So this flooding the feeds scenario, I just don't see it. In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don't show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves. There is no scenario in which Lemmy as a federation provides a good platform for them (outside of their own nazi-friendly instance), because Lemmy doesn't work like other social media works.
I will take this to mean communists make up a soft majority on lemmy given the number of complaints about commie posting keep popping up on the major comms