After years of reddit/twitter/facebook propping up fascism/bigotry with algorithms & bots I’m honestly surprised and relieved to be in an online space that clearly rejects their ideology.
They can have reddit/facebook/twitter. AFAIC the only way to reach some of these people is to leave them alone long enough to realize on their own.
Lemmy.world admins are doing an amazing job dealing with everything. Their recent decision to defederate from exploding heads (or whatever its called) really goes to show that they’re in it for the right reasons. > https://lemmy.world/post/694810?scrollToComments=true
The biggest difference I’ve experienced between the fediverse and Reddit is how infrequently I come across outright bigotry in the comments. I didn’t expect that, and I certainly didn’t expect that to feel as refreshing as it did. I had gotten to the point where I was just numb to the racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, etc. Not having to put up with it to nearly the same degree in my first few weeks over here was amazing.
Now that I’ve (a) seen that a community can exist with a minimum of people calling me slurs, and (b) realized how much those comments were actually affecting me (I’m not so tough after all), I am very aggressive about protecting this space while it’s still possible to stem the tide.
I suspect a lot of other Reddit migrants feel something similar. We’ve been forced to put up with these chuds for years, to the point where we’ve just started treating them as an inevitable, natural forces, like shitty weather or beach seagulls. Over the last four years, particularly, we’ve very clearly seen the result of allowing these fuckfaces to take root and grow their communities. Now that we have a chance to make something different, a place where that doesn’t happen, we’re (pretty collectively) jumping at the chance to actually fight against them. Trying to fight them on Reddit was like trying to fight a snowstorm, or fire ants, or the just the fucking tide. Here? There’s a chance.
The unilateral rejection of right wing antics gives me hope for humanity. Not just that lemmy admins are willing to take a stand… but that the entire community here is downvoting them and not letting them thrive anywhere.
When I joined a week ago, the founder of c/conservative had already been run out of his own community and created c/conservativesonly… which he was subsequently run out of a second time and forced to make a new account to mod it.
In a weird way… lemmy might be the proof of concept we needed that democracy can beat fascism.
Well said
Well, I have good news and I have bad news.
Bad news first - I think a lot of the reason this doesn’t exist on federated services is largely because those services are in their infancy and principled people or at least people with slightly more than lukewarm IQs are more likely to seek them out.
Good news - the capitalist nature of corporate social media means that at scale you have to tolerate a certain number of nazis and bigots. See also: the recall scene from Fight Club. The fediverse largely doesn’t have that problem. We don’t have to say “we have to keep this account on the network because they’re boosting the ad numbers” we can just fucking ban them.
In the short term for the fediverse, it’s a little security by obscurity. In the longer term, it’s really more of a moderation problem, but even there I’m optimistic. Over on reddit, there were/are a few subs where if you blocked every user subscribed, you’d lose no value even in other subs. instances are going to be similar, I bet.