The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they're working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
Are they blocking illegal content (such as content that promotes violence or issues threats) and content against the terms of service (like hateful, trolling, or disrespectful content)?
Or are they banning people based on their political beliefs or who they voted for, even if their content is not political in any way whatsoever?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
No shit. They are not the same thing, they are heavily overlapping adjacent sets of people. You draw the line at alt-right, you are left with less than 20% of Republican voters, but a 100% of MAGA hat-bearers. This distinction is more theoretical than practical.
This is what I suspected. I can get behind blocking actual Neo Nazis and hate groups, and illegal content, but when it becomes "blocking anyone who disagrees with me" that can easily be abused, especially if the people running the list can't tell the difference between Nazis, MAGA, Republicans, Centrists, and Libertarians. Or someone who can't tell the difference between a tankie, a communist, a socialist, a democratic socialist, or an anarchist. Contrary to some people's beliefs, all of these things are not the same.
People are welcome to block whomever they wish and have the power to curate their own feeds, but when someone else does it, and there is no way to opt out of that, then it becomes censorship or suppression of information.
For the time being, it seems like they're primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it's one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn't directly target individual artists.