cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/641633
I was never extremely active on Mastodon until recently but I followed it’s development relatively closely from its infancy. And I will say that it’s really strange to watch lemmy face nearly identical issues that Mastodon did when it was in a similar development stages. (Though, some of the drama thus far have been essentially a speedrun of what mastodon went thru over a gradual amount of time.)
The fediverse as a whole is essentially a return to the Internets roots, and with that comes new problems that OG internet communities did not have to grapple with due to the changes the internet has faced in the past few years alone. When building communities, most large internet communities have been largely corporate since the rapid centralization of the internet of the mid 2000s. There is truly no blueprint for this, and the volunteers that are making these communities from scratch are going to make mistakes (as we have already witnessed more than once, even this week alone.)
A large issue that has resulted from the corporate centralization of the internet that is really hard to break from is the expectation of an extremely smooth streamlined experience on emerging platforms like lemmy from new users. And you aren’t going to get that in these early days. You just aren’t. Things are going to be messy, we are just getting our feet on the ground. And this results in a lot of frustration and just generally a feeling of walking on thin ice with a user base that has been largely built initially from the exodus of an already established platform. To many regular lemmy users there’s this expectation that tends to be “well, if other social media platforms can do it, why can’t we?” and to admins and those building these communities it can be frustrating and feel like the users are being entitled to things that just aren’t possible from volunteers at this time.
With recent drama and inter community issues, the honeymoon phase of this place is officially ending and how we move forward is entirely dependent on how we respond as a community as well as what people using this platform as a whole want from it. You get what you put in.
I don’t say this to discount the drama that lemmy has faced these past few weeks but if you honestly think that this place has been toxic so far, the early days of Mastodon would have seemed like pure hell in comparison. Early Mastodon drama was like, doxxings, entire instance admins quite literally being chasing off their own sites over petty nonsense, things like that. It was bad. Really bad. And despite the existence of fedidrama, that stuff has stabilized. Why? Because the community stabilized and gradually formed their own cultures and the community volunteers building communities learned from their mistakes. People moved to smaller communities and stopped being hostile to decentralization. The necessity of defederation was embraced by most who began to understand its importance.
Some of the biggest issues lemmy has right now aren’t easy to solve, but we have a blueprint to what solutions worked and what didn’t from Mastodon. There’s also the issue with lemmy having a generally different culture from Mastodon, and that’s OK. We want our own community identity, not the same as Reddit or Mastodon or Twitter. In many ways that is already being built as well.
Right now, the biggest thing is just sticking with this place and persevering the growing pains. It is so easy to get burnt out, and the Mastodon instances that got too big for the admins to actually deal with are clear examples of that. I know it’s easy to look at recent events and feel disappointment as well as feel that just generally the most toxic Redditors migrated over, but doing that is just giving up before we even began. If you used Mastodon in it’s early days, it fucking sucked so bad. We have a leg up here that it’s overall easier to navigate communities and discussions out of the box (and with the current development, it’s only going to get better.)
Why uneasiness? This is federation working exactly how it’s supposed to. People are free to spout whatever garbage they want, and no one else is obligated to listen to them if they don’t want to.
No one is infringing on hexbears so-called “free speech”. They’re still free to shout into their megaphone. But the rest of us can close the damn door on them if we don’t want to listen. That’s quite literally the best of both worlds.
The only people that are “uneasy” are the people who think that “free speech” means being able to force people to have to listen to their bullshit. It’s not. Never has been. Never will be.
I for one love how federation tends to sort itself out without stripping away anyone’s right to free expression. Hexbear, or whatever instance happens to be controversial at the moment, can still say whatever they want. No one is shutting them down. No one is censoring them. No one is stepping on their rights. The rest of us just have the power to not have to listen to them. It’s a great system working exactly as designed and it’s absolutely how the future of social media has to be.
Aye, the right to free speech does not mean the right to an audience.
You’re describing this like we all, individually, are blocking Hexbear users. That isn’t what happened. They were defederated by a handful of individuals. They were censored. An authority blocking your words from reaching others is censorship.
Now, I agree with the defederation, don’t get me wrong, but you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. This is an obvious case where defederation makes perfect sense, because the instance’s admin was not controlling and banning users or stopping them from brigading other intances. That whole instance was an almost explicit raiding ship pulling up to the rest of Lemmy. Defederation makes sense.
But that doesn’t mean it is always going to play out this way. There are countless ways for defederation to be used as a weapon by admins, and just like we saw with the piracy change, communities can be vanished without defederation. Basiclly, there are so many tools available to admins of every instance to create invisible walls through the fediverse for any reason they like, and users will not be able to get around all of them, and more importantly, they may not even know about them. They may not be aware of what they’re not seeing. That creates a lot of avenues for manipulation and censorship, in both direct and indirect ways. That’s absolutely concerning, especially when there isn’t some unified standard admins have commited to.
Like, if this is the fediverse working as intended, then people need to stop advocating for this place as a reddit alternative, because it will never be. Reddit would never have gotten to be what it is if subreddit moderators could manipulate the visibility of others subreddits.
They were not censored, they are undoubtedly still active and able to say what they want. We just can’t hear it. You can choose to hear it by joining a instant federated with them.
Dafuq are you on about censorship?
Just becuase you can see something if you change perspective doesn’t make it not censorship if you attempt to block it from view. I’m not getting into a semantics argument; the point is really simple: those with the ability to frame the appearance of Lemmy to visitors using that ability to hide things from certain POVs. Regardless of what Hexbear was, that ability, unchecked, is going to harm the federation’s ability to grow naturally.
That is what federation is and that is the natural growth of a federation.
If not for exclusion and inclusion it would not be a federation.
It’s puzzling that you think this is semantics.
Anyway, this isn’t a productive exchange and I choose not to continue it, hope you don’t think I’m censoring you.
No it most certainly is not. Not by any legal definition of the word. Preventing people from speaking is censorship. that’s all. “forcing people to listen to you” isn’t free speech. And I’m not even going to bother going into the fact that free speech is quite LITERALLY in regards to government’s and have absolutely nothing to do with private servers like Lemmy instances.
As someone has already mentioned, the right to free speech is NOT the right to an audience. Just because you don’t agree with that statement doesn’t make it not true. Facts don’t give a shit about your opinion.
I never said anything about rights. I’m not suggesting anyone should be forced to host anything. I don’t care what each instance opts to block, they’re within their rights too. And I don’t care what the legal definitions are, restricting the visibility of certain things is censoring them. But “censor” is not a dirty word. Blocking childporn is censorship, and I’d say that’s pretty good. I can already feel an argument about semantics coming and I genuinely don’t care. Whatever you want to call it, just fill it in there.
My point is that without some central authority or doctorine to which all admins adhere to, these tools will be absused for far less dramatic shit as Hexbear, and it will break the fediverse apart at best, or at worst, be used to shape it in dishonest ways. I support Lemmy because I hoped it would be an alternative for reddit, but it can’t be as long as this fracturing and curating is allowed to break the shared reality of the platform.