Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?

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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If that counts as gene therapy, then the term becomes meaningless as the majority of medicine is now counted as gene therapy. They use it in this way to make it sound scary and dangerous. All medicine has side-affects and risks, but the vague use of scary language is the point.
Sure, I'm not the thought police and I'm never going to claim to be always right, all the time. That way leads to a complete and utter inability to engage with new information that challenges worldviews. Where that ends for me is judging people based on parentage and ethnicity. I have no interest talking to a person like that.
Debating a racist isn't normally a productive experience. You can't logic your way out of a position that you started believing for emotional reasons. Also, they normally don't treat words and arguments with the same care as their interlocutors. Consequently, if somebody wants to go engage with them and try and convince them they're wrong, I wish them all the luck in the world, I just think it's a waste of time most of the time. For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don't think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
- For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don't think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.
  Wholeheartedly agreed! And that is the point from where we can look at things we have in common despite, maybe, some opposing views:
  We both want to read, share and comment on interesting stuff we expect to find here on Lemmy in the Fediverse.
  It also seems that we're both interested in civilised exchange of views and arguments.
  The only key difference I see, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that you wouldn't want to see/engage stuff you define as bigoted/racist or hateful, correct?
  Which I can understand and even agree upon. The only thing that makes me doubt is: Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
  A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
  What do you think?
  
  Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.
  There's a key difference with email: that's opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It's opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven't blocked.
  An admin, attempting to make the kind of user that they want to see on their instance feel welcome, does have a duty to curate it. If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the community and move on, or decide that this instance isn't the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
  Curation determines userbase which determines content. I know which side of the coin I fall on there.
  
  There's a key difference with email: that's opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It's opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven't blocked.
  Good point!
  If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the instance and move on, or decide that this instance isn't the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.
  And here I disagree with you. The world is a horrible, dangerous, wonderful, exciting , murderous, funny, sad, depressing, manic place. Hiding that some people hate gays will not change the fact that some people hate gays. It will also not make these people disappear. Isn't it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?
  
  I think that this has been a surprisingly productive debate. I may not agree with you on this, but I do understand where you're coming from and can respect it. I think I'll answer this and leave it at that:
  Isn’t it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?
  I don't need to read hateful things to know that hateful people exist. I've had plenty of people say far worse to my face IRL. I don't come to Lemmy and didn't go to Reddit to get into shouting matches with people who think me or my friends are less-than. My goal here is not changing the world, it's entertainment and discussion. Neither am I seeking some safe space with a strict blocklist and careful vetting of each user. All I want is a medium place where I can have good conversations without someone questioning my right to exist.
  
  I think that this has been a surprisingly productive debate.
  Thank you and likewise.
  I don't need to read hateful things to know that hateful people exist. I've had plenty of people say far worse to my face IRL. I don't come to Lemmy and didn't go to Reddit to get into shouting matches with people who think me or my friends are less-than. My goal here is not changing the world, it's entertainment and discussion. Neither am I seeking some safe space with a strict blocklist and careful vetting of each user. All I want is a medium place where I can have good conversations without someone questioning my right to exist.
  Questioning your right to exist sound quite stupid, you obviously exist (Let's not go full Descartes now) and that settles any discussion in my POV.
  As you just said: I can see where you come from and I can respect that, however I don't fully agree with it.
  Nonetheless it has been a great pleasure to disagree with you and learn about your POV, thanks for stepping up to the task and giving me food for thought.
  
  It's not questioning their existence, it's questioning their right to do so in the way they choose.
  Thus the "to" in right to exist. It's a different argument entirely and you're casually merging it the same way you did the vaccines are gene therapy nonsense.
  
  Thus the "to" in right to exist. It's a different argument entirely and you're casually merging it the same way you did the vaccines are gene therapy nonsense
  Where was I wrong with my, simplified, explanation? Because you're just shouting "Fake News!" without providing any argument.
  
  I provided my argument. There is a difference between "someone exists" and "allowing someone to exist as they are". By conflating the two you ignore all the people that are determined to prevent the second from happening while allowing for the first within a set limit. Usually those limits may be sound (no pedophiles, no murderers, etc), but a significant (alt right/religious/conservative) group are pushing that a subset of people aren't allowed the second because it goes against their morals for whatever reason. Accepting that there are hateful communities in the lemmyverse and allowing them access under terms (no brigading, no hatespeech on other instances) is the first option while defederating from hateful communities is the second option, if you needed an example of the difference.
  The only difference between lemmyverse and the real world in this case is that defederating doesn't remove anyone's right to exist as they are in their own space, whereas many of these hateful groups want to eliminate the right for people to exist as they are anywhere.
  
  I provided my argument. There is a difference between "someone exists" and "allowing someone to exist as they are".
  That's a non-argument. Just because someone says: "Being gay is a sin" this doesn't deny any gay person the right to be gay or the right to exist. Unless you go to Iran or Dubai and try be be openly gay there, there you can for sure experiments how denial of existence looks like in reality.
  I also asked you to disprove my simplify explanations of why an argument could me made about mRNA COVID vaccines being genetic treatments. You haven't said a word about that apart from: This is wrong. Well prove me wrong, please. Where did I fail?
  The only difference between lemmyverse and the real world in this case is that defederating doesn't remove anyone's right to exist as they are in their own space, whereas many of these hateful groups want to eliminate the right for people to exist as they are anywhere.
  That's a bold claim, do you have bold evidence to substantiate that?
  
  "These vaccines do not enter the nucleus of the cell where our DNA (genetic material) is located, so it cannot change or influence our genes."
  From the cdc website.
  All the mRNA vaccine does is feed a blueprint in to the cells protein synthesizer (not modify the genes or add new genes, or interact with them in any way). This new protein is similar to the protein on the surface of the targeted virus and triggers an immune response that will then give the immune system a memory for the targeted virus. It's like feeding a template into a 3d printer. The new template doesn't change or alter the printer in any way.
  
  A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
  Have you ever run a mail server? If so, have you looked at your logs? The RBL’s on the managed mail gateway for my work turns away 70% of the attempts. This is even before spam scoring kicks in on the 30% initially accepted. A significant percent of that is considered spam. Email has a complex set of automated tools to reject content without even viewing it.
  I still think email, even though federated, is a poor analogy to make for Lemmy.
  
  Actually I do have my own mailserver and for obvious reasons I do not longer use most of the big IP based blacklists because they just don't work well enough, some are basically blackmail+systems with pay-for-removal.
  It's something else when you rely on third party (in my analogy the call for a filtering authority) than you being the one who makes the call and what is being filtered and why.
  As with spam filtering: If you rely on someone else to filter out stuff for you, you hand over control about what you get and what you see. The potential for abuse of this power is a greater danger in my opinion that having to do some extra work to set up filters myself.
  This is, BTW, the main reason my I deGoogled and set up my very own server.
  
  Yep, my personal domains have always been on my own mail server. My IP has been on the UCE-Protect blocklist for years. I believe it’s now up to an IPv4 /17. Luckily no one reputable uses them since it’s one of the biggest fake pay-to-remove out there.
  Like you, I want that full control and don’t want to trust (or pay) a big player.
  At work, where we have thousands of mailboxes, interacting with people on all continents, I’d much rather outsource that. It’s cheaper in the long run and takes up less of my time.
  If you want to get backs to email as a analogy for the fediverse, and I already think it’s a bad analogy, someone running their own mail server has the full right to block anyone, including all AWS ip address space if they want. Why shouldn’t someone running a Lemmy server have that same right?
  
  Somebody running (!) or administrating an email sever can of course make this call! I expect a lemmy admin to make reasonable decisions.
  But let's keep that analogy: You're an email sever admin and one of your users asks you to block everything coming from Amazon/AWS and affiliates, because they dislike how this company is run. Would you block the traffic or tell the user how to use filters at his disposal?
  
  See, you’ve got another false choice here. /s
  What I’d do is ignore them and not engage, which is what I’d expect most Lemmy admins to do for most degeneration requests. By the same token if a user shows me clear evidence that the only content we’ve gotten from another mail server is spam or phishing that’s making it through our filters, I’d probably block it. Of course, no mail user is going to do that.
  
  I’d expect most Lemmy admins to do for most degeneration requests
  Apologies, I make enough mistakes to not shame anyone but your typo made my day and I had a good laugh at it. Thanks! I will keep "degeneration request" in my list of favourite quotes.
  Seems that we don't disagree that much. Thanks for engaging and joining in!
  
  A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.
  What are you talking about? Email admins use blacklists (usually in the form of DNS RBLs but there are others) all the time.

143 comments