My belief is that toxicity online is like building a six lane highway through a residential neighborhood. If you build the infrastructure to support more cars, and the law allows speeding you're going to get more cars (and more car accidents).
If you build platforms that don't allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you'll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.
We really need to grow beyond the idea that blocking is "censorship". That only (arguably) applies to large centralized platforms. The fediverse allows all voices to speak but it doesn't force everyone else to listen.
The fediverse gives us huge individual and collective power and we can use it to grow beyond the constraints of the old platforms.
I don't buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable. That's the narrative pushed by Reddit/Xitter/Meta because toxicity causes engagement which makes them rich. They don't want to delete it. It's only inevitable if admins allow it to be.
That "rule" don't apply on Fedi where we can simply join an instance that actively bans all the bs.
As you said, decentralization is key. Highly active human moderation is the only known solution to keep communities free and tolerant, and human mods have a relatively low limit as to what they can handle without making it a full time job (or burning it out)
The Lemmy network is still centralized enough that many smaller instances make the calculus that it's better to be federated with the large weakly moderated instances than to lose access to the many small communities on those instances.
But increased decentralization makes more granular defederation possible. A weakly moderated instance can simply be blocked.
"Lemmy" is not a single place, it's software that anyone can use. The phrase "Lemmy as a whole" is a contradiction of terms. If you're looking for a censorship free space, just create your own instance. If you're looking to force your speech upon others, check out Reddit.
Yes exactly. Within the MAGA universe loyalty is paramount. What the do looks strange and contradictory to us, but in the universe where one man decides reality, the more you can make that reality a well, reality, the more valuable you are. Even in defeat.
Swartz's involvement in Reddit is debated. He is considered the co-founder of Reddit by Y Combinator owner Paul Graham as a result of the merger of Swartz's project Infogami and Reddit. With the merger of Infogami and Reddit, Swartz became a co-owner and director of parent company Not A Bug, Inc., along with Reddit cofounders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Ohanian considers Swartz a co-owner of Reddit.
My belief is that toxicity online is like building a six lane highway through a residential neighborhood. If you build the infrastructure to support more cars, and the law allows speeding you're going to get more cars (and more car accidents).
If you build platforms that don't allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you'll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.
Wow that analogy worked pretty well.