Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?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

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.
- I think your idea of ten ~~thousand~~ million small instances is what the fediverse was meant to be, but if you don't have the resources to run your very own instance and you have multiple small interests instead of one life-consuming one, it's a severe problem. Do I join the instance dedicated to bullet journaling, or the instance dedicated to Final Fantasy XIV, or the instance dedicated to Tolkien? Which instance will tolerate me posting on a debate instance and posting in a language other than English?
  It's much easier to join a generalist instance that will tolerate all of that, but that means the generalist instance has to be willing to tolerate the debaters (who will break down into rude squabbling), a Tolkien fan saying that Tolkien probably wouldn't have approved of the new MtG cards, and other things of which censorious progressives disapprove.
  I'm interested in an answer to the problem, because having too many instances to choose from and that choice mattering a fair bit is a big barrier to more people joining the fediverse.
  P.S. This is the third time I've had to restart my comment due to vanishing. Is there a known issue with comments in progress vanishing?
- No taking fringe weirdos seriously from both ends of the spectrum lead to ww2. You know how the NSDAP came to power? Because there was civil unrest instigated by the communists and they promised law and order.
  These things happen because society and the main stream start to ignore the facts and look away, they fester and get bad and the next day you wake up in Stalin Russia, Mussolini Italy or Hitlers Germany.
  Sorry but ww2 didn't happen because Elon Musk bought twitter or because Hitler made the Volksempfänger-Radio available to everyone, it was a little bit more complicated than that and the process started way earlier.
  Also looking away is exactly what Chamberlain decided to do and look how that went.
  
  Oof, bud. I don't have high hopes for this community if your first reply as its creator is going to be to ignore most of a long and thought out response to your controversial opinion to focus on a briefdigression at the end because you thought of a strawman for it. Personally, I'm out. Good luck!
  
  do you want me to respond to it? :3
  
  Pardon? Who pulled Godwin here first? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, you didn't provide any apart from: Cave canem, the Nazis are coming.
  
  Yep, you're reinforcing what I said pretty well there. My apologies though, I had thought your response was literally the first and now several more have loaded for my very new instance. Unfortunately those have confirmed for me that you have a bad habit of latching onto one or two words of a post and trying to make 'gotcha' arguments that ignore the actual point of the post, and I think that's fundamentally incompatible with trying to moderate a community like this, so I'll be sticking with my choice to not participate.

143 comments