Controversial - the place to discuss controversial topics

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Challenge others opinions and be challenged on your own.

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Hastur

Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated? (self.controversial)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Hastur to c/controversial

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Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:

Don't like their content
Dont like their political leaning
Dont like their free speech approach
General feeling of being offended
I want a safe space!
This instance if hurting vulnerable people

I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148

Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think probably the problem is that people think they can just attach a label to someone and that's actually an argument. "They're Nazis!" No they aren't. I mean, maybe somewhere there are some nazis, but just cause you call someone a thing does not make them that thing. After all, are all trans people groomers just because a lot of people are calling them groomers? (The answer is no)

The most controversial instance on lemmy right now was here long before most of the instances that are complaining about it. They do have critical things to say about a lot of things that are considered sancrosanct. But there is an underlying appreciation of freedom underneath it All. A Nazi website wouldn't have an entire community associated with crony capitalism, corrupt politicians, racism (just using that word implies it's a bad thing).

This doesn't end in the end of the marketplace of ideas. The decentralized nature of the Fediverse means you can have an unlimited diversity of ideas because there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from just spinning up their own instance. Over on Mastodon et al, there are instances that are basically 4chan with usernames, and there are other instances that are locked down to only people with their exact ideological standpoint on anything. Then there are lots of instances that don't act like either of those, but are happy to participate with both. In this sense, it really is a marketplace.

Reddit was one of the groups to come across, but they won't be the last. I expect we're going to see some very spicy instances in the next couple months. There will definitely be more defederation, but there will also be more federation. On a monolithic website such as reddit, you can't really have both these groups of people in the same space, but you can here. Admins on different instances can each pick the level of spice they're okay with for their communities, and users can pick the instances that fit with their level and flavor of spice.

There's a reason why Lemmy world ended up becoming the number one instance despite other instances being bigger to start with. I don't really expect and the spicier instances that show up to put a ding in that. If you go to a restaurant with different flavors of hot wings, the ghost pepper suicide wings sell for some people but they don't sell a lot compared to their other flavors.