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The main thing that made Lemmy succeed was structural: no matter how bad an admin team is, you can limit their impact on your experience, by picking another instance.
The main focus of the text is something else though. It’s what I call “the problem of the witches”.
Child-eating witches are bad, but so is witch hunting. People are bound to be falsely labelled as witches and create social paranoia, and somewhere down the road what should be considered witch behaviour will include silly things with barely anything to do with witchcraft - such as planting wheat:
- if you’re planting wheat you’ll harvest it.
- if you harvest wheat you get straw.
- if you get straw you can make a straw broom.
- if you make a straw broom you can fly on the sky
- conclusion: planting wheat is witchcraft activity.
However, once you say “we don’t burn witches here”, you aren’t just protecting the people falsely mislabelled as witches (a moral thing to do). You’re also protecting the actual witches - that’s immoral, and more importantly it’s bound to attract the witches, and make people who don’t want witches to go away.
In other words, no matter how much freedom of speech is important, once you advertise a site based on its freedom of speech you’ll get a handful of free speech idealists, and lots of people who want to use that freedom of speech to say things that shouldn’t be said for a good reason.
That harmed a lot of Reddit alternatives. Specially as Reddit was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (getting rid of witches not due to moral reasons, or thinking about its userbase, but because the witches were bad rep). So you got a bunch of free witches eager to settle in whatever new platform you created.
Well said, then at some point your platform gets labelled “the witch platform” and non-witches will leave.
It happens before the label. When you start seeing a witch flying on your sky every night, you’re already leaving.
Dessalines o7
This is also more or less the case across the fediverse.
In the case of lemmy though, I think there are also other more subtle value at play, like for instance the devs disinterest in running a flag ship instance and motivation in creating a platform to ensure communities not welcome elsewhere can make their own home (which arguably balanced well with the disinterest in fascy free speech rubbish).
Considering the article used “tankie” unironically and referred to a far right instance owner as being “pretty chill” I think it’s safe to guess the political leanings of the author.
Whatever the authors leanings are, they make a good point. Lemmy has followed Karl Popper’s maxim “Tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance.” It’s just that simple.
I mean moderation doesn’t neccesarily support that. You can be tolerant but remove stuff that is far in the fringes. Lemmy has quite a mix. World hates left wing, ml is left wing. Ee is pretty open.
If anything it makes their point even stronger if their ideology is screaming at them not to put communists above fascists in any circumstance.
if their ideology is screaming at them not to put communists above fascists in any circumstance
I really have no idea where you got such an impression
Years of personal experience. Yes, I’m doing the intellectual equivalent of “Source: I made it up” deal with it.
People at Fediverse care too much about the devs. 95% libs on Mastodon, 85% Reps on Soapbox/Pleroma, 70% commies on Lemmy, etc. Never gave a shit about it since nearly all federate with each other.
I mean they were also the admins of the biggest instance for a while
Well that explains a lot of the generally left / communist propaganda de we on lemmy. Here’s the thing, I’ve got nothing against communists in fact I have a few friends who are die hard communists and that’s a perfectly fine, reasonable and interesting way of thinking.
With that said I do have a problem with the gender/identity bullshit people - those who end up yelling to politicians about children not getting free gender conversion therapy and whatnot - because unfortunately they get mixed with communist groups/parties that don’t particularly share their views but agree to “bite the bullet” just for the numbers. Numbers are all fun but this will eventually backfire once those same communist groups became associated with those people and lose all their credibility.
I’ve even got a black friend!
😂 😂 😂 😂
Like all things on the internet, you can safely ignore everything before the “, but”
Yeah, thanks. /s For turning Lemmy into a left wing echo chamber. Because we all know how good echo chambers (right or left) are. 🤦♂️
My favorite line from this is, “There were no vaunted ideals of free speech…”. Because they said the quiet part loud. That was nice of them.
The existence of lemmy.world which you’re part of, proves that lemmy tolerates right-wing instances if you ask me.
Make use of the decentralized nature of lemmy, the devs won’t knock at your door for creating or posting on right-wing instances.
Maybe it’s more that the majority of the fediverse doesn’t tolerate far right bullshit and open racism, unlike the other reddit alternatives.
Nah they are like every other person on the planet, they don’t like to be told they are wrong.
Read through my disaster of a profile. Never a racist statement, never support Trump. But my opinion general differs greatly from the general lemmy population.
Just attacks all day. I said folks shouldn’t be surprised Google doesn’t care that they are pissed at the slow downs, just 30 angry irrelevant rants.
Lemmy is no better than any other social media, you just aren’t seeing it because instances reflect your values.
Great thing about free speech. They can talk and so can you. You can ask them why believe in that stuff and maybe stop them from believing in it. But what’s hard. So just ban them.
Where bigots are welcome, no one else truly is.
If you want a place where bigots are welcome, you have plenty. 4chan, reddit, facebook, youtube comments, exploding-heads, xhitter, etc.
Not everywhere has to be a playground for bigots. There are too many already.
Free speech except the speech that espouses taking away free speech.
Lemmy.world is a right wing instance? Is that what you are saying?
the devs won’t knock at your door for creating or posting on right-wing instances.
True. But they can also lock it. I see federation has a double edged sword.
Oh shut the fuck up with the hand wringing, Lemmy isn’t for you. No one likes you here or in the real world so you gotta make it our problem. Fuckin loser
I’ll admit lemmy is left wing, especially compared to sites like reddit, bluesky, voat, or any one of those fascist twitter clones like parler. But unlike the fascist twitter clones, I’d say many of the more popular instances here aren’t echo chambers, just spaces with larger overton windows.
there were no vaunted ideals of free speech
So? Even as someone who loves free speech (i am literally an anarchist), I recognize that speech has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are getting banned or defederated. This article talks about how not being a free speech absolutist makes a site more appealing by removing fascists, and lemmy’s issue with tankies by being more open to them. The second issue sorted itself out using federation and defederation.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing if people don’t want to see hate speech and wanf moderation. That was the feature that got me to join lemmy at first, beehaw was my first instance and was certainly the least toxic place I have found online.
Echo chambers aren’t as prevalent or as problematic as you think. The biggest echo chamber is actually most likely your own neighborhood. The internet, even small communities, is where you’re most likely exposed to diverse viewpoints. Shit, just yesterday I saw someone saying they were hurt by how we talked about Slavs. Where the heck am I gonna see that in Maryland?
That may be so, but in the other scenario, lemmy wouldn’t exist and we’d all be miserablely sitting in reddit still
