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Hastur @sh.itjust.works

Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?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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143 comments

  • 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 into

    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.

143 comments