Controversial - the place to discuss controversial topics

Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?

Yes, it is. We ran this experiment with 8chan already. I consider Frederick Brennans opinion on internet moderation pretty well-tested by reality, unlike the 'free speech absolutists' I meet. Musk is a classic poster boy for that mindset and the instant he was given power his convictions really amounted to 'hide the stuff I don't like, boost the stuff I do'. So I think we should all be suspicious of people who claim this at this point.

8chan exists, as do lots of deeper, darker unmoderated boards. If they are superior, why aren't the majority of people there? Why are they almost universally despised and shamed?

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

No, humanity lives in reality where thoughts lead to actions and pretending like there's a firewall between the two is unrealistic. 8chan is routinely linked to mass shootings, and NOT JUST IN THE USA

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

What a ridiculous question. "Is a stabbing really more hurtful than a gunshot?"

They're both hurtful!

We can't stop physical abuse in the real world by defederating with a hateful instance, but we can stop the hate speech from having an audience here.

Hateful content is routinely disguised as memes, "just asking questions", "just a joke", etc. Humans are human, and many of us are suggestible. There's a reason Holocaust denial is literally illegal in Germany. If people hear something often enough, from enough people, it doesn't matter what it is. They'll start to wonder if it's true.

It's super easy to teach a child to hate, for instance. They believe everything they hear, and it's very human to hate things and certain people. This doesn't just go away when they hit the legal age to have an account here. Reddit allows 13 year olds to have an account. (Or is that Facebook? Whichever.) I don't know what the official policy is of this instance or Lemmy in general, but the fewer 13 year olds we have reading literal hate speech, the better. It's a black hole that it's easy to get sucked into.

If every "good" instance blocks the hateful ones, then no one will see their content unless they go out of their way to sign up for that specific instance. That's a good thing. It keeps the hate locked away where it's hard to stumble into.

Now, what counts as hate? Whatever the admin decides. If the admin chooses to delegate that decision to the users, it's still the admin choosing to do that. If you don't like that, find a different instance.

Fuck hate. Fuck Nazis. Fuck the alt-right. Defederate them.

Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn't censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It's just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy's stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn't censorship either. It's only censorship if he isn't allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.

What it sounds like you want isn't a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B's access, and you don't allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you're actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.

In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that's where it becomes censorship to block person B's access, because then it's a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.

Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

Here's the thing though: nobody's mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don't like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.

This isn't Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don't like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.

All of those arguments are not objective, they're subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that "I like apples" is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is "I like/don't like this content" any different? To push that a bit farther, how is "I don't want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don't want to interact with people who find that ok"? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.

Boycotts are a feature of an "open marketplace"

were i to run an instance, i would never, ever defederate from sh.itjust.works. Reason: we have a very cute lemming face as an icon.

I think people who feel this is controversial are missing the entire point of federation and should consider going to a platform that doesn't use it.

Nobody is 'mandating [an echo chamber] for everyone else' by defederating from a different instance, as many other instances are open registration. The largest problem here is that, in my opinion, the design is not well suited for overlarge instances such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. We should all be on reasonably small instances that can smoothly choose who to federate/defederate and thus impact only a group of likeminded people. People with differing opinions can then just go to a different instance if they disagree. This is quite a democratic approach to problems like this, as it allows people who feel strongly about these things to 'shop around' for an instance that suits their needs and which will react favourably to further recommendations. If particular instances start hosting particularly disgusting opinions, they'll see a democratic process wherein a large plurality of instances all defederate from them.

In other words, you are seeing it as "defederation allows person X to determine what person Y can read" when in fact it should be "all people who feel the same as X are welcome on server lemmy.x". This problem is perpetuated not by people wanting instances that suit their needs, but by having a few specific very large instances that did not clearly lay out their philosophies (no fault of theirs I think, we're all learning this for the first time). They can no longer adapt with any agility due to a very heterogeneous and large user base.

On another note:

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

You really should study the lead-up to world war 2 if you think platforming dangerous beliefs is a simple matter of "words will never hurt me". I don't intend this as a 'gotcha' or anything, it's both fascinating and disturbing, and something every human should understand. The argument of 'we should at least let these fringe weirdos say their piece, what harm could it have' is, without exaggeration, how we wound up with ww2.

Why can't any user "defederate" themselves?
Why can't a user block any instance that they don't like rather than forcing an entire instance to follow their will.

Please note: I do not defend the actions of the these other instances and their content.

I've been on the internet for a minute... if you think unmoderated free speech works in a primarily text based medium then I have a bridge in Queens that just popped on the market. Oh look that's a statement, i should defend that right with logically consistent arguments and citations and draw my conclusions from that and oh my God is anyone still reading this?

The most concise reason I have is that respect is a two-way street, and I haven't met a lot of folks online who actually understand what it means to respect an argument. The barrier to entry for me is the ability to think critically, and that involves regulating your own speach and not having to rely on others to do it for you.

So let's see... statement, some bullshit evidence, appeal to critical thinking, one more to go ...

This is a falsifiable and testable theory ... find me a site that promotes this and I'll look and see how long it takes for it to fail my one simple criteria.

I just wanted to say, I love how we can see the beauty of Lemmy in-action here.

Seeing both the upvotes & the downvotes, and all the suggestions of going to a different instance.. it's honestly a beautiful thing, and it's like watching a small snippet of how human society works.

"I don't like the way this instance works"

"Go somewhere else then"

"But I don't want to/I don't feel like it's fair"

"But we do like the way it works"

Humans have truly never changed, and it's a privelage to watch this play out in such a format.

Find a new instance of you don't like the admins policy, or start your own? Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I have no problem with banning genuine hate speech or extremism. If you're polite about your point and don't attack people, I'm fine with almost all opinion. If one has opinions I don't like, I want to debate them. I can't do that if they're defederated

1. Make lemmy stupidly easy to prop up an instance
2. Cap users of any instance to 100

This way, no one instance can bloat up to thousands of users and start making a big island.

OG context: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/451211

I agree that it could be easier and personally don't think defederation is the answer (outside of bad actors).

Exploding heads was simple enough since it is like... two people or something lol

However, I'm also not very fond of beehaw which, to me, looks like the opposite extreme to exploding heads, and I'm personally not looking for communities like that.

Do I think this means I should push for instances to defederate beehaw? No. I do think admins with very specific political views turning their instance into an echo chamber of those views is worse than Reddit, however, but I'm also not going to sit and rant at/about admins doing what they want with their own instance. If that's what they want their instance to be, great, just not a place for me.

It was simple to get around beehaw, for the time being, by joining a level-headed instance they defederated, although I know I am missing some good links. This is not a permanent solution (I've been told the beehaw defederation is temporary, but am not following along), and am trying to figure out things like still seeing the good links posted to beehaw without the temptation of commenting things that don't fit in the echo chamber and pissing off the admins further to the point they deem whatever instance I'm on a spam instance and defederate it, ruining it for everyone else on my instance. (I'm a leftist, but apparently not far enough left for beehaw admins)

I'm torn between building tools that allow easier echo chamber like feeds en masse or forcing people to individually think for themselves of what kind of content/communities they do/don't want in their personal feeds.

I don't think it's great to start down a generic "this is the content you should have in your feed (dictated by random person X)" type path (not that you are saying that, I've just been thinking about this topic a lot, and that is what I see both beehaw and exploding heads as).

Push lemmy

Lemmy devs are already working extremely hard. I personally don't like this terminology.

Actively ~~develop~~ contribute ~~in~~to

This is the way. I am learning Rust for this purpose. It takes some time, however, to familiarize with both a language and a large codebase like Lemmy (during personal free time). I'm also semi cheating by learning jerboa code at the same time, but I am a Kotlin dev by trade, so it is a bit easier.

There's no requirement that every site running Lemmy is part of the same network. It's also perfectly fine to use more than one yourself if a certain server doesn't have content you want.