I have been looking through a long thread on another instance where a few users have been trying to convince that instance to defederate from Exploding Heads - because they do not want to see the content posted on Exploding Heads.
I have thought long and hard about how to please these people. They do have the option to individually block Exploding Heads communities or users, but they either do not know how to or simply do not want to.
In the end I realized if I ban those specific users requesting defederation from Exploding Heads - they will not see any content from Exploding Heads and therefore will not be offended by it. (Truth be told I am not sure if some of these users have really visited our site or interacted with our users).
So today I have banned those users with the explanation that they have said they do not want to see Exploding Heads content. If any of those users wish to be unbanned in the future, all they have to do is say so and I will happily unban them.
These users are not being banned in order to censor them, but to help them achieve what they have been requesting - to not see Exploding Heads content.
I hope you all find this a fair and reasonable action - if not let me know.
What I am seeing is any opposition no matter how reasonable instantly gets equated to fascist/nazi/whatever and exiled. This results in the people that subscribe to these views being siloed in an echochamber themselves. I want to see good faith discussions that aren’t cut short by mods or admins because they are too intolerant of what they consider to be “intolerance”.
And having them in an echo chamber reduces their numbers in the long run because they have less space to post their ideas and to convince others to adhere to them.
Let’s not pretend what we can see in the screenshots in the other thread is “reasonable opposition”.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888
Good faith discussions with extremists/those who subscribe to conspiracy theories doesn’t work and all experts agree with that hence why they don’t debate them in the first place.
So you literally just want to control the narrative presented to naive viewers? I thought this was universally agreed upon to be bad joojoo.
Just let people select what they want to see themselves, out of the entirety of fediverse.
Of course you’ll get that if you select the worst of the worst. Surely you could find innocuous conversation there as well.
I mean, way too many non-cooky “conspiracy theories” end up being the actual truth. Some select cases in point: mass NSA spying (thanks Snowden), operation northwoods (thanks JFK), tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Questioning authority and the narrative authority supports should be commonplace.
People are still free to subscribe to that instance if that’s what they want to see, taking a neutral stance towards it is still encouraging it.
If you think you’re better than actual scientists and experts to bring arguments to convince them then by all means, create an account over there and talk them out of their delusions. We’re not a support group, we have no obligations to entertain people that want to live in a parallel reality.