I feel the same way. But I wish the arguments brought up by these “anti-american first” people were more balanced. And balanced does not mean less anti-american, but just to also keep a critical view on Russia.
An comparison could be with capitalist companies : I deeply hate Facebook. But if it was contested by a new capitalist tech giant on its own market, I would never mindlessly support this new adversary just because I’m anti-Facebook.
Just as I think anticapitalism should critizise any capitalist power, any country as powerful as the US or Russia should also be criticized for this kind of action.
This really has war propaganda vibes. Either you are with us, or against us.
To me, what is great about federated platforms like Lemmy is that we can think and speak about these issue in a great way !
The way I see it, is that your instance is like an event you organize at your house, or a bar you own. Your place, your rules. Thoses rules depends on your culture, you intents, the people you want to welcome. Like in your house, you could ban anyone, for any reason you like. But like real social circle, if throw out people for no reason, or reasons other people don’t like, those people won’t stay, as they are free to go elsewhere.
And that is great. Because moderation is a difficult and subjective job. You can legitimately want to ban someone for something you deem innacceptable, while the person banned can legitimately think you are suppressing his freedom of speech. Because you could have different values, different cultures.
That is clearly different than the problem concerning centralized media or social network. Facebook for example created a place where everybody is and has to follow their rules. And if you disagree, you cannot leave and go to another instance. So the moderation is a huge issue. You have to protect freedom of speech there because users are stuck there. And alternative social networks like mastodon are not viable alternatives for now since the main interest people have in social network is that most people are there.
So yeah, I don’t have any problem with different choices of moderation in different instances. The only case I would see a legitimate problem would be if you create a place that is dangerous for the rest of society. Exactly like any social place. I’m for a variety of bars and clubs, with specific rules. But I will fight against the existence of a fascist bar because it’s dangerous even for people that do not chose to go there. The same way, it’s not because I promote diversity in instances policies that I think any instances with any rules should be allowed.
This final question of which social place should be allowed and which shouldn’t, that is a purely political question, and I could talk about it for hours, like many people here ! My view here in this : diversity good, fascist bad. Why no fascists allowed in my diversity ? Because they are the ones against this diversity in the first place.
Sorry for the long answer ! <3
I think it is literally a buzzword to justify taking the attention away from Facebook recent very bad press, and turn it towards the new name and other considerations. And it works. Attention being limited, filling it with something push the other subjects out. Look, here on Lemmy, a rather leftist space, and in my social circles, also pretty left and anticapitalist, hi’ve heard much more about the metaverse than about the recent controversies around Facebook knowingly cutting most employees from sensitive informations about the platform pushing forward radicalization and complotist content. This move is impressive in it’s effectiveness.
I’m not sure how interesting it is. I originally fiddled with a raspberry pi, until I was confortable enough to know what I wanted. I finally ended up on a small machine with an small Intel atom processor, 8 GB RAM, SSD for my system and HDD in order to have room, especially for music and maybe eventually backups of other machines.
I host a variety of services for me and the people I live with, for example : -Nextcloud -Syncthing -Navidrome (a music server) -XMPP -Matrix -other things
What details would you want ?
I don’t know tbh. You can make two copies of essentially the same community around the same interests/subjects with different names, underscore or no underscore. I think “mechanically” solving a problem like that is not a great idea, and that defining if two community should be merge fall into the hands of admins and administrators, not developers. If you are a mod of a community, or admin of an instance, chances are you know that such “clones” exist, and you either think you should merge and do it, or think you have a valid reason to stay apart and are free to do so.
Love the overall tone of your post, thanks for bringing an atmosphere of cooperative work instead of religious wars.
I think there is a balance between being friendly, open-minded, and pragmatic on one hand, while still being able to keep high expectations to keep pushing the projects we love and support in the right direction.
A simple example of what I mean is my position is of course Signal. I have many reasons to heavily criticize it, the first one for me being their obsession with centralization, refusing any federated model. To my eyes, this is a massive concern. But still, when I am asked advises on which messaging app to use for a group of friend, that are a little mindful about their privacy, while not being tech savvy at all, I talk about Signal (alongside Matrix or XMPP). Does that mean I am absolutely sold to it ? No ! Does it mean I will recommend matrix forever no matter what ? Of course not !
The context matters. If the whole world was on Signal, I would actively fight against it. But the thing is : the whole world is one Facebook. And I see little reason not to wish they were on Signal instead !
My point is : between people that care and are passionate about this sort of things, let’s have constructive debate and criticize the different alternatives, each other, and ourselves. But let’s keep in mind that we are in this together with people that won’t want (and legitimately so) to spend that much energy on those debates, and that being elitists assholes won’t help.
P.S. : Privacy is mostly a collective issue. I’m an anti-Facebook purist asshole, with no account. But there are pictures of me, anyway, comments about me and my life probably all around. If you want to be an efficient solo purist, you’d better stop talking to anyone, and doing anything social.
They do not complain about lemmy only denouncing, but putting filter to prevent certain words, which they see as free speech denial. At least I guest, i’m not in their head. To be clear I’m referencing this citation (that I found in another comment on this post) :
And developed by people who hate the fact that you’re alive !
The strong political stance seems to really put them off…
I don’t know, if I believe some comments around here, there are clearly some of them that explicitly explain they would not come here because they feel “hated”, in public, so clearly to deter anyone close to them to come here for these reason. If so, it means it has some positive effect, and it seems plausible to me.
As often in cool debate, I think in the end we mostly agree. I especially agree with you on the point that reclaiming a word is a valid way of using some slur, and that it should not be to a privileged group to choose when a word is ok or not. On this point I have to point out that this is still the case with manual moderation, if most moderator are privileged. So I agree that diversity should be push in all places of power, and all decision are better made (and more legitimate) with a diversity in the group that make them.
But on the automated part, I really think the psychological aspect is strong and should be questioned. You talk about “human interaction” but this definition is really hard non only to define, but also to defend as an efficient way of reaching you goals. I am quite sure that when the devs made their filter, there was quite a lot of human interaction and debate around it, and the simple fact the put one show that they interacted with other people around them. And is a “manual” moderation a human interaction when you don’t see or know the person, don’t know their culture, the context, their tone, etc. Moderation will never be perfect, will always involve bad decisions, errors. When errors are mades “directly” by humans, compassion and empathy help us to try and understand before judging (but judging nonetheless in the end don’t get me wrong). Why is it so different when an automated system (created by an imperfect human) ? Why is an automated error worse than a human one if the consequences are the same ?
Long story short, I don’t like thinking along great principles like “automated moderation is dangerous”, but rather try analyze the situation and think : would this place be better if there was not this automated moderation ? I agree that this is a wide and difficult debate one what is “better” of course, but the focus should always be this one : how to make things better.
Thank you so much for your answer, i’m not used to debate online because I didn’t feel at ease anywhere else before, but I love it and it is thanks to people like you and all the other interesting answers I get that I can enjoy that and think about it so much ! Thank you thank you <3 !!
(edit : typo)
I quite agree with you that moderation is hardly a machine job, and not saying it is the perfect solution. It sure as it’s drawback. I am just arguing that the benefits outweigh them. I would prefer to be in a world where there are not needed, be as of the world today, I admit I prefer having this filter rather than not having it, mostly because of the systemic effects I explained.
I agree that the relevance of he content of the filter can be discussed too, and that banning some words can make it difficult to discuss certain topics. But I think some words are almost always meant to harm, and can be easily replace by more positive or neutral term.
As a direct example : I can talk in this post about homosexuality, and I can event paraphrase to talk about the way some f word is used as a slur for it and how I think allowing it here isn’t a good idea in my opinion. See, I can talk about it, be respectful about it. I just prevent to call you a [insert here whatever banned slur] pretending to use my free speech.
I mostly agree. And I agree that if the platform really grows, it will come down to per instance moderation and instance admins choosing wisely the instances they choose to federate with. But I think the choice is to make sure to give a head start to the people they want to welcome here. With the recent events in the US, imagine lemmy being the next tool used by “some people” the devs wich didn’t come. Then the platform as a whole would be much less attractive to some other people the devs are more interested in helping and interacting with.
So I think we agree, on the long term, if Lemmy grow, someone will come up with a modified version without thoses filter. It will just take more time. Meanwhile, Lemmur gets to be at peace as much as it can ?
Thanks for your answer !
I’m clearly “left-leaning”, so I might be biased, but I don’t agree with your criticism toward the slur filter : the project is open source, and as such people wanting to use these slur can work they way to another version. The devs explain here a clear intention to make this change difficult enough to prevent at least partially the migration of some communities they don’t want to support and/or give a platform to. I think that’s an honest way to do things ?
It also open up the debate on free speech and how saying some things actively attacks fundamental rights of others. In those cases, defending free speech as a “right” becomes irrelevant since both sides of the debate can use this logic to defend opposing actions. Trying to be short here, hope you understand what I mean !
Thank you !