Can't we just have a place where we discuss things without bringing in the latest political talking point? Maybe I'm mis-remembering, maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I honestly can't remember it being like this on forums back in the day.
I don't remember _any_ political discuss on the various warez forums I was on (nxsecure anyone?). Flame wars were a thing, no doubt, but it wasn't this already formed opinion where you've picked a side and now anyone on the other side is a bad guy. It is completely bizarre.
I don't think that's all of it. Politics has continually gotten more polarizing over the 20 or so years. I don't think this is the worst it's ever been in the US, but it definitely seems like the Trump era is the worst it's been since mass adoption of the internet. Because of things like 24 hour news networks and social media, we're also reminded of our differences much more frequently than we used to be.
I think politics is just a bigger part of peoples' lives now and we're seeing that play out in real life as well as in internet communities.
I can assure you we had no moderators dealing with the kind of political nonsense we have today back in the days when I was a regular at the Something awful, Fark, Jpopmusic or XDA forums.
People were just out to have a good time, have a laugh or get together over something they loved.
People seemingly don’t seem to be as good at that these days.
> What is unignorable? Politics? I can ignore it just fine when I consider it not an appropriate subject.
It's easier to ignore something that largely ignores you. It becomes impossible to ignore something when half the people in it consider your existence an affront to their sensibilities, and those people are inexplicably being listened to.
> Why does every arena have to be about picking a fight, rather than finding common ground?
There exists no common ground when people think other people shouldn't exist. If all those people stop having any influence on the world, perhaps the rest can successfully seek common ground and have reasonable policy discussions.
Another problem is that nearly everyone's "political" views have been reduced to just talking points and strange dogmatic behavior.
As a counter example consider someone who could no longer exist online even if he, sadly, had not passed: Erik Naggum
Erik certainly expressed political views in many of his comments, but at the same time it's very hard to box his thinking into any mainstream political narrative. I think today he would be both unwelcome on Twitter and HN or any more conservative sites. Erik represents a lot of what I remember and miss about earlier forums: strongly held personal beliefs that don't fit into any one particular bucket.
Individuals having diverse views within their own system of beliefs is what allowed us to have meaningful political discussions in the past because 3 people could talk about 3 different topics and the group could reasonably be split 2 vs 1 on all topics with completely different splits each time.
I think that is also largely colored by the fact that one «side» in modern US politics is objectively literally a collection of «bad guys». It makes it a bit hard to have serious political discourse when one of the sides is seeemingly trying to burn the house down rather than lose.
Also there was a ton of political stuff in the bush era as well. My theory is that you just dont remember it because there was still a solid foundation of political decorum and respect on both sides at that time.
> the fact that one «side» in modern US politics is objectively literally a collection of «bad guys»
None of those emphasised words means what you think they mean.
The fact that some people have been radicalized to believe stuff like this is more likely the root of the problems we’re having today.
In that regard your comment is what I would objectively consider a bad comment on HN (and against the site guidelines too), but it was still useful in the broader sense of the discussion.
> It makes it a bit hard to have serious political discourse when one of the sides is seeemingly trying to burn the house down rather than lose.
Your parent is asking for a place where there is little to no political discussion, not a place to have meaningful political discussion.
With the good old phpBB forums, they'd often dedicate one subforum for political/flamebait content, and it was allowed only in there. As a user, you simply didn't read that subforum if you didn't care for it.
Specifically, on those forums, you had to actively seek those venues to have these discussions. Today it seems you have to work to avoid these discussions.
online forums for piracy given the demographics they tend to attract rarely ever had much political debate. if you've ever attended a CCC thouch or any other anarchist/hacker space they were always political, mostly left leaning.
pretending this is news reminds me of Paul Ryan being shocked that Rage Against the Machine didn't like him. I also will point out that your very own profile page here features a link to a political manifesto
Back in the day was an unusually peaceful time for much of the world... people would instead get in heated battles about stupid bullshit like game consoles and operating systems.
Things were different before, and it seems things are becoming different again.
Back in the day people remembered there were social norms (e.g. the old social rule that in polite society you never raised either religion or politics as topics of discussion).
If you wanted a political discussion, you took it where it was welcome. "young people today" and "get off my lawn" and all that but manners and decorum went out the windows with the original eternal september and we may never see them again.
> but I honestly can't remember it being like this on forums back in the day.
It wasn't like this but then the Internet wasn't still that much widespread as today. Social media boom really opened it to the masses but also bring political polarization which really bloomed in last ~10 years.
Twenty years ago I wouldn't imagine that in the nearest future we'll have communities on the Internet ruled and divided by political views. That we'll need to self-censor what and in what form we want to say to others under the risk of the instant ban. I didn't expect either that we'll need to agree to "codes of conduct" - netiquette and forums rules were enough for most of the time.
Back then I hoped we'll have virtual assistants connected to vast databases, that we'll met in the virtual worlds with photo-realistic avatars, that technology would blend indistinguishably with our environment, and that would connect us into one global village. And instead we got bubbled social networks with yelling influencers and ads, tracking on every corner of the web. Bleh.
>Can't we just have a place where we discuss things without bringing in the latest political talking point?
Not since Arab Spring or rather shortly thereafter. I'm not sure if there was a ramp-up of "active measures" style agitation, "cointelpro" style group antagonism or what the exact mechanism was. But any way you slice it, it has become increasingly impossible for competing groups within the same sphere to communicate much less for their to be a dialog between the left and right.
No one can dialog with anybody else because the people upstairs want it that way!
"Back then" the Internet was disproportionately populated by educated people—college students, academics, engineers, and the professional class. Disenfranchised people were not using the Internet on their phones during their breaks.
You're not misremembering anything. Even as recent as < 2016 people were far less political. There was always politics, but never as a fully defining characteristic of an individual.
It's a great chance to step out of one's filter bubble. Take it as an opportunity to widen perspectives and exchange ideas that normally wouldn't be exchanged.
yep ... I immediately saw about 5 articles that looked like straight up russian propaganda about Ukraine on the front page and was quite challenged about whether I wanted to read them or not.
The problem is that places that cater to a specific political demographic tend to not tolerate exchanges of ideas, even if they are civil. It's very difficult to intentionally create a community that allows for discourse from wildly varying viewpoints where people feel comfortable sharing their point of view.
Right, you're conceptualizing echo chambers as external. I'm conceptualizing them as internal. The hardest echo chamber to tear down exists in our own heads, but they are the most rewarding to dismantle.
The admins are literal marxists (I do mean literal, check the admin profiles), and have designed the technology wanting "to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy." https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
This of course is not necessarily a reason to avoid the underlying technology, but it may be something to consider.
Your comment itself is a slur (this is true by virtue of me saying that it is true (as with your comment), which is how things work here on Planet Earth, 2022), so should rightfully be censored.
> Edit: This comment was written at a time when Lemmy the software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance. At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its different, there are good mod tools, and many different instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0 (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml does).
The comment was edited Nov 2021 to include this new context.
The real Lemmy wouldn't have a rude word filter. He'd let you use the rude word, and if you got punched in the mouth for using it he'd use that as a teachable moment.
(*Reposts are fine after a year or so but a major thread 13 days ago makes the current submission a dupe. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
Not that I think these folks want mainstream appeal, but if you want mainstream appeal, stop federating stuff! Nobody cares about privacy and control over their own information nearly as much as privacy advocates think they do, and if even one thing is slightly harder as a result, people will simply never adopt your tool or technology.
Another conclusion: Federation alone isn't enough of a selling point. Federation must also be a key unlocker of other features. Perhaps more branded/tailored sites for different audience segments but which can feed into each other in meaningful ways might be one way to pitch it. But dropping federation entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I agree that getting rid of federation is not the answer. However, it will be little more than a source of neato developer projects as long as new projects try to get users to think about it, let alone understand it, nevermind actually needing to understand it to use a product to its full potential.
People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior.
The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous.
To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media."
If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences.
(When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.)
The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.
What's so great about mainstream appeal? These services are designed for folks who do care about those issues, and the folks who are mainstream already have outlets catering to them. I don't see them flocking over if Lemmy is dumbed-down.
As usual when chasing "mass adoption" I think that the target demographic would simply be chased off and the project with wither on the vine.
Not necessarily. Reddit itself changed to cater to a mainstream audience and by billing itself as an alternative the pitch isn't so much to folks who like the changes reddit made but to folks who think reddit was better "before september came". IE folks who want what they remember (right or wrong) as being a small, niche site that was ruined by chasing the mainstream.
or even if you consider what went down on reddit "in the good old days" -yet, I think that's thew view of reddit (real or not) that they're trying to appeal to.
In my experience most of the people that want reddit alternatives can be split into two camps: those that want to be able to say naughty things unchecked by mods or admins, and those that want to go back to the "good ol' days" of early reddit.
I belong to the later camp, and I suspect the grandfather post you're replying to does too.
Tankies are extremely pro-Russia. In fact, the term "tankie" was coined when the Soviet Union rolled tanks on socialist protesters that wanted to leave the USSR because it was clearly just another form of exploitation. Socialist movements in other countries split between pro-Russia, and anti-Russia. Or, more accurately, authoritarian left versus libertarian left.
Russia today is an ethnofascist dictatorship, but most tankies don't care because America Bad.
Most tankies are just LARPing as romanticized version of revolutionistas of the 50s and the 60s. They need a morally simple world view. Completely agree with you.
Genuine question about both this and Mastodon, since both have the same "decentralized, join/start the instance that fits your interests" fundamental principle: isn't this just exacerbating the filter-bubble effect that cranks up polarization?
Like, is it really a great thing for mending societal bridges that folks can choose between a server for leftists or a server for hard-right folks and that split ensures that one never interacts with the other? Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree, to the point that we want to ensure that there's no chance for such conversations ever to happen, even by accident?
It is only possible as long as one side is able to have civil discourse, without labeling/demonizing/name calling and violently attacking their opponents. It’s quite hard to have a debate when people’s views are not only completely entrenched, they are simply not willing to give respect at all.
small correction; it's only possible if both sides are capable and willing to set aside heated rhetoric. At this point in time, I honestly question if any of the sides are capable of honest engagement.
I think civil discourse is possible if reasonable debate is allowed. Unfortunately, for one side, it appears that reason itself is problematic for them and they refuse it.
That can describe both the left and the right. I'd be very surprised if you weren't alluding to SJWs; but at the same time you're describing Qanon folks as well.
...and that's why we can't have discourse. No one can agree on what constitutes "reasonable debate".
Well, you’re conflating a fringe movement of radical conspiracy theorists with the average person who doesn’t go along with the woke agenda. That in itself is an example of what I’m talking about.
The “woke agenda” is a mainstream political shorthand. But I find it telling that you were able to infer that I was speaking about the left when I mentioned opposition to reason.
"woke agenda" is not a mainstream political term, and the fact you state it is demonstrates both your own position (to the far right) and inability to step outside of that viewpoint and discuss issues from a genuinely detached viewpoint.
I hope that, like me, you enjoy the rest of your day.
Well, it’s a rather convenient shorthand to describe the set of views and positions (largely emotive and inconsistent) that characterize leftist thinking.
But that's a large part of the problem, reducing everything to a simplistic "left-vs-right" dichotomy – everything is either "left" or "right", and everyone who is good/sane/rational/decent/etc belongs to one of them and everyone who belongs to the other is irrational/insane/wicked/etc
Yeah, IMO "left" and "right" are just two different flavors of neo-liberalism factioned off like sports teams; and the mentality and self-awareness of those who back either one tend to be similar in nature to the point of being indistinguishable.
If someone is pro-war (to any degree), anti-worker/union or pro-capitalism I have a hard time taking them serious as a leftist; that's more of a liberal bag.
Complaints about "woke"/"wokeness" aren't confined to one part of the political spectrum. Many present the term as a "right-wing talking point" – but if you go looking for it, you can find Marxists invoking the term critically too (for example, the noted African-American Marxist Adolph L. Reed Jr.)
I think it is an attempt to name a real phenomenon – a particular strand of left-of-centre thought, with a great deal of contemporary influence, which (among other distinctive traits) foregrounds issues of race and gender/sexuality, in opposition to the classic Marxist emphasis on economic class as the "underlying cause" of all those other issues. If you don't want to call it "wokeness" – fine then, what should we call it?
My personal suggestion would be to go back to what it was called when I was a kid; "knee-jerk". "knee jerk" doesn't have a specific axis connotation (unlike "woke" which refers explicitly to progressive issues). It was primarily aimed at (knee jerk) liberals but could easily be aimed at reactionaries without any change of meaning.
I asked what we should call "a particular strand of left-of-centre thought, with a great deal of contemporary influence". Your answer ("knee-jerk" which "doesn't have a specific axis connotation") isn't actually answering the question I was asking, because a term intended to apply to people with widely differing ideologies (obviously) isn't appropriate as a label for one particular contemporary ideological stream.
I misunderstood your intent -I thought the idea was to suggest a term which could be applied to the True Believer regardless of ideology. I didn't realize you simply wanted another phrase you could sling at the left.
You absolutely have misunderstood my intent – I was asking for a descriptive term for a particular current of contemporary left-leaning thought, to replace a term which has admittedly become rather pejorative in connotation – yet you seem to misunderstand me as looking for another pejorative instead. And "woke" is still not exclusively pejorative–it is not hard to find people calling themselves "proudly woke"–maybe much of that's ironic, or "reclaiming"; but couldn't also some of it be in homage to, or even in continuity with, its origin as a positive self-descriptor? And not all critical invocations of "woke" are fairly labelled as "pejorative"–such as when Reed criticises "woke" from a Marxist perspective. [0]
Surely it is valuable to find descriptive terminology for different ideological currents – across the totality of the political spectrum? The traditional Marxist answer is "yes" – followed up with an analysis of the endlessly diverse ways in which those various currents support class interests, which is what Reed presents for "woke".
Eh. Some people want bubbles, let them, you can't force people to do something they don't want to do.
Personally I run my own Mastodon instance for myself and federate with everything, left or right, I don't care. I block stuff for myself that is illegal in my country, but I like reading about opinions I don't necessarily agree with.
Well in practice I don't think that the typical outcome would be partitioning users by interest. In email, we don't have that for the most part, instead people choose the provider that provides the service they like the most, with some exception.
I think we really need to interrogate this idea that filter bubbles are a bad thing. Some of the biggest negatives of twitter (and positive in terms of engagement) is that you have these groups that are opposed, and then a tweet from one bubble goes viral in another causing a war between bubbles. The exact same issue with brigading on reddit. Maybe we should trust people a little more, let people who agree have a space to agree and discuss their shared goals, interests and ideas, and then trust them enough to know that if they want to hear opposing views they know where to go.
That is fine, but the existence of a bubble on Twitter is often defined by having a common external enemy. That's what the participants inside the bubble have in common, and very often not much else.
They aren't necessarily deep friends, these bubble people. Move such a bubble to friendly territory where there is only peace, and many will fall apart.
> I think we really need to interrogate this idea that filter bubbles are a bad thing. Some of the biggest negatives of twitter (and positive in terms of engagement) is that you have these groups that are opposed, and then a tweet from one bubble goes viral in another causing a war between bubbles.
"Thing from one bubble goes viral in another" doesn't require two bubbles to exist on the same platform, as in Twitter. If the two bubbles are segregated to different platforms, people will still post screenshots/etc of one on the other, and some of those will go viral. "Libs of TikTok" is a good example of this – TikTok and Twitter aren't federated, but that doesn't stop left-leaning TikToks becoming viral in right-leaning Twitter; and you can find plenty of stuff on TikTok critiquing "Libs of TikTok" (and Twitter more generally) in turn. Similarly, there are whole subreddits devoted to stoking outrage at screenshots of Twitter and Facebook posts.
No doubt a shared platform accelerates this mutual feedback process a bit, simply by reducing the friction of cross-bubble quotation; but it still is going to happen a lot even without one.
It's a good thing to create an enviroment that is safe from 4chan-style brigading, yes.
>Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree,
At this point? No -because neither side can agree on common references; the left get their news from one set of news outlets and the far right get their news from qanon or whatever facebook fringe groups.
It's impossible to have a conversation if you cannot even agree on basic language or common references.
With their being fewer and fewer genuinely left-of-center outlets it becomes necessary for people to be able to build enclaves that won't be shitposted into oblivion (see also: reddit with the_donald and other brigading subs)
The way I think about it is that it allows for self-regulation the way it happens in real life too. In real life you can't go into someone's neighborhood meeting and harass people, you'd get kicked out and you wouldn't be welcome going forward. The same way servers can cut ties with other servers. Someone here explained it much better than me but the idea that everybody should have an opportunity to be heard by everyone just isn't realistic and isn't what we do in non-virtual communication. Federation allows to facilitate that.
This is exactly the problem I've had with Twitter as a social platform. The network is simply too big to the point that it's strange to me that the default means of posting is to literally everyone using the platform. Smaller discord communities I've been in rarely get into flame wars as often as people on Twitter since they tend to already be a self-selected group of like-minded people. Putting people with wildly different views in front of each other and incentivizing "hot takes" via like and retweet counters is very much the opposite of a healthy social environment.
This analogy in part breaks down because in the digital space, such "bans" don't require any substance.
If in the physical space you'd ban somebody from ever joining your meeting or neighborhood again, you need to have some type of probable cause. Something really bad must have happened.
Meanwhile in the digital space: banned for life because your comment was too long. Don't believe me? Watch:
If people aren't happy with how their instance's admin behaves (e.g. "banning" users or removing ties to a particular server), they'll leave the instance. There is no single entity that's in control anymore.
It is my understanding that no matter which server you sign up on, you can follow people on every other federated server. So, it doesn't much matter what political stance each server officially takes, because the bubbles are connected.
It's not great, but on a centralised alternative administration will take a side and some groups will be pushed out completely. Unless, of course, such platform will commit to being a public square, but reddit isn't that.
Federation offers at least some hope of cross-pollination.
> isn't this just exacerbating the filter-bubble effect that cranks up polarization?
I don't think that the goals of these software products are to reduce political polarization. What does the telephone do to reduce political polarization?
The really painful thing is that probably 80% of people are quite reasonable but on social media the extremes on both sides dominate conversation. Extreme toxicity as well as extreme fragility are the norm.
Extremity is highly engaging and richly rewarded, hence maximizing polarization has become an incentive on its own. "normal" users have been exposed to this discourse for several years now, and may have internalized it.
Replying to myself here because there's no single comment in here that this matches, but rather all of them: I appreciate the thoughtful responses I got here that raise points for consideration beyond simplistic answers (like questioning the assumption that "filter bubbles are bad", or questioning whether it's _always_ an applicable assumption).
It's just too bad that the flagship instance of Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is full of literal hardline Marxists and Soviet Union nostalgics/apologists. Totally insufferable.
Um, recruit some more users? This is a good opportunity to take personal responsibility and individual accountability for a problem as you see it.
The first thing people need to learn about stoicism is that you can't change other people as much as you want to. Make peace with this and do things that are in your control.
I just think we're capable of opinions more mature than complaining about something and then expecting others to fix it for us.
This is a social problem, not a technical, financial, or legal one. Recruiting and organizing people is a fundamental skill in the modern world. The only thing stopping one from doing this is merely saying the right things to the right people.
So is each lemmy instance just a full standalone clone of the full reddit feature set? And multiple instances will all have the same duplicate communities? For example.
If you're comparing it to reddit, it'd just be like subscribing to two subreddits with similar topics. It's moderated by different people so the rules change but the links might be about the same thing.
So, exactly how long before shills and bots are cross pollinating some paid for narrative on all the technology subs using the same script?
“Hmm, almost all of r/technology is against nuclear, that informs my personal view point a little… “hmm, every one of these technology reddit-likes is against nuclear, I guess everyone agrees and I should too”.
I am aware that this is not a bug to Reddit, it is the reason they are looking at an IPO, is a very in-demand feature to be able to shape narratives.
I look forward to seeing how a federated Reddit deals with narrative pushing.
this is basically how matrix's federation works. every homeserver has its own copy of any room that any of its users are on, regardless of what server owns/created the room originally, they all keep in sync with each other to merge messages in from the other homeservers. you can also create local-only, homeserver-specific channels if desired.
The two you linked are different communities, with different rules, different content and moderated by different people. They just happen to have the same name.
What federation lets you is view and interact with communities that are hosted on another instance, for example:
Does it have the same mastodon problem of separate namespaces? I'm having a tough time getting enthusiastic about federated social media that has disjoint namespaces. Is there no way to have a federated-but-shared namespace so I don't have to lose my username when an instance shuts down?
but I want everyone to perform the same landgrab for handles every time a new service comes along. Don't worry about where ambiguities exist, it'll be handled via first comes first serve, trademark law, or just by reselling names on the black market /s
Unfortunately the only way to achieve that in the fediverse is by hosting your own instance, or at the minimum using your own domain and having someone manage the instance for you.
one shared namespace is problematic for reasons. You can figure email though, right?
DNS is a solved problem and we're never going to see anything better come along because DNS has survived the test of time (see the Lindy Effect - DNS is old, crusty, and like the Art of War or Shakespeare, it's worth learning).
Is this gpt-3, or have you just coincidentally written 3 paragraphs that seem, at a glance, relevant and on-subject but that actually are saying nothing at all?
Sorry, it genuinely looked machine generated to me. After posting I went to look at your profile and realised you are a real person, but you'd already replied by the time I tried to delete my comment.
OK then:
> "that's a feature, not a bug!
one shared namespace is problematic for reasons."
Is just saying "I'm right you're wrong and I refuse to explain why".
> "You can figure email though, right?"
Are you saying that being able to understand email means one should find the benefit to separate namespaces in social
media? Or that email is everyone's definition of perfect and so everything should be like it? Or something else, considering it took me a bit of guessing to even think of those first two explanations?
> DNS is a solved problem
First, are you suggesting DNS is 100% perfect at what it does and nobody could ever have any complaint about it? Second, it's not clear to me how it being a solved problem for what it currently does means it's necessarily the right approach for any new uses? I need to get a tire on my car replaced tomorrow, and I really hope they don't tell me "you don't need a new tire, you need DNS - haven't you heard, it's a solved problem".
I'm genuinely not trying to be sarcastic I just don't understand any argument you're trying to make.
I agree it is confusing for products intended to be global, networked and hyper social to have overlapping usernames.
People expect and understand username exclusivity.
I rarely think of a distributed ledger as the useful answer for something, but I wonder if there are other ways a social network like lemmy or toot toot could agree on something like this.
That sounds like it would get rid of a significant portion of what makes federation worthwhile. I see this request a lot, so I'm sure it has merit to a decent amount of people, but I can't help but feel like the people requesting it are simply missing the entire point of the thing. It feels like people are so captured by the way centralized walled gardens work, they can't even conceive of a world without them.
I keep seeing this repeated over and over every time the discussion of the Fediverse comes up, but I don't actually see this being a problem in practice.
It’s perfectly fine if the network consists of a bunch of loosely connected islands without the ability to propagate information across the entire network because there is a limited number of people you can interact with meaningfully. Federation favors smaller communities where the interactions are more personal while still facilitation interaction between different communities.
Even a centralized site like reddit is ultimately broken down into subreddits because nobody wants to see all of reddit all at once.
This is an issue because people want social media to be an identity that they control. Suggesting it is fine to lose your identity and all the work you spent building connections whenever an instance shuts down is nonsense. People are looking for reasons to move away from Twitter, not for more reasons to stay on Twitter. Federated identity is something that can be added but Mastodon doesn't have something like this to the best of my knowledge.
some identities are not directly yours to control, but are roles assigned to you by your membership in a group.
Employment, for example.
Luckily good orgs use directories to manage membership (LDAP, etc).
What I'm thinking about here is something like my particular city (Los Angeles) delegating social media accounts to people involved in government, like city council members or spokespeople in certain departments (LAFD? you get the picture).
Federation implies that users identity should not be tied to a single instance but that they should be able to access their account from any federated instance.
That's not how federation works at all. Your identity in Fediverse is akin to an email address. You're not losing your identity when you interact with people on other servers, and Mastodon does allow you to verify yourself.
The way this works is you have to put an HTML tag on a page on a site you own, then link to that page in your Mastodon account. This verifies you as the owner of the site and your identity.
I'm not sure this is a huge issue if you set up user expectations adequately. Just like JoeAsshole@gmail.com isn't the same account as JoeAsshole@hotmail.com.
A workable alternative would be using a pubkey fingerprint with an mutable display name, but who wants to help their family sort that out?
Individual low-membership subreddits are usually much better than the frontpage, but for these subs - what's the benefit of federation? An obscure topic will need a large baseline community to pull from to get a quorum for conversation.
I think the benefit is a preemptive transition onto a more consensual platform where you are the owner-operator who can adjust the rules and mechanics instead of a tenant to an exploitative behemoth who can ruin your community without even noticing it.
The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to move off your tenant platform.
And as time passes, you are more likely to want something which your tenant platform does not offer.
Maybe it is a different style of displaying images. Maybe it is a different way of defending against bots and spam. Maybe it is easier reporting of spam by users.
Whatever it is, a platform with a user:operator ratio of over a million will probably not have the resources to accommodate you.
Anyone got a standalone ActivityPub client? Couldn't find one. The protocol is intended to cover both server/server federation and client/server fetching of updates, correct?
What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids.
People are banned for typing 3 sentences (too long!), "repeated anti-communism", ....insert laundry list of other bullshit reasons...and get this: admins can simply wipe out an entire community at will. I'm not sure if that means it doesn't federate or simply stops working.
> What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids.
Why is that? Open moderation logs are, in my opinion, the corner stones of establishing trust between moderators and users on a discussion platform cum social network.
First, it's a potential privacy issue. It effectively is a single place where all dirt is concentrated, open for all to see. In case violators leak personal info, willingly or not, their mistake might be used against them in the future.
Second, it can be used to instantly find unpopular mods and mod decisions, and overwhelm them with more of the same, generating busy work or even harassment.
OK, fair point, I keep forgetting that not everyone on the internet is a decent human being. :(
However I think that for entities which are not global network levels of population, a public moderation log is good. If there are abusers, banning them is probably not a difficult proposition among numbers counting into thousands or less.
Pretty much what I see too -except that you forgot a step: "piss and moan about a content filter that was disabled a year ago even after it's pointed out that it's disabled"
And HN is where the Smart People go! Meaning some of the brightest folks on the internet.
If this is the best we can do, we're collectively fucked, y'all!
Sorry but if you are nbfobic in the paragraph arguing you aren't bigoted, have a picture glorifying someone who broke into the government building of their own country because they couldn't believe their candidate lost as a banner and are spreading COVID misinformation, I doubt you are apolitical.
It seems like a user's best move is to find the Lemmy instance with the most users and most active community, because nobody wants to deal with figuring out "which instance has the best subreddit for X". So this sounds like it just results in Reddit, again, with extra steps.
Social media has come to play an important role in our society. It's a way for people to get news and to discuss it with their peers as well as a tool for education. For better or worse, social media has become an invaluable tool and an integral part of our society.
It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned.
Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.
Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities.
It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data.
Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them....
Sorry, but this is way too much of a good news show.
Federated systems make collaboration much harder, not easier, in comparison to centralized platforms. This is one of the biggest complaints regarding Mastodon.
"No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear"
In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
My experience having used both Twitter and Mastodon is exact opposite. Mastodon tends to foster more personal interactions and collaboration precisely because instances are smaller and focus on specific topics.
If you're an artist then you can join an art instance and connect with other artists. If you're interested in functional programming then you join a functional programming instance, and so on.
You're still able to interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but you have a focused community on your server instance.
>In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
I can guarantee you that Mastodon will outlive every commercial social media platform in existence today.
The type of collaboration I was referring to is across bubbles, not inside a bubble. Collaborating within a niche bubble can be done anywhere, on countless platforms. Cross community collaboration is underwhelming in the fediverse compared to a centralized platform.
As for Mastodon outliving other platforms, that's not what matters. What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
This type of collaboration happens all the time. People interact all across the fedivrse. I'd really love to see all the research you've done to come up with your thesis there that cross bubble collaboration is somehow worse in the fediverse.
>What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
Except that's also nonsense. Popular instances run for years on end, it's also trivial to migrate from one instance to another.
You're just throwing out straw man arguments here. Meanwhile, arguing for centralization of the internet shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet is supposed to work.
> A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
> Rules
> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
> Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
> No porn.
> No Ads / Spamming.
And a look at the moderation abilities:
> Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
A quick search leads us to this issue thread[1], which starts with a very reasonable request:
> It's generally not a good idea to hard code something like the slur filter because the needs of every instance is different. Instances in another language would need their versions, and cases where the slur filter over blocks need to be addressed by the admins.
> A good idea would be to store the slur filter in the database and initialize it with a default when spinning up an instance, but make it editable by admins without changing source files.
…which encounters, shall we say some resistance:
> If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
That's just one of the quite hostile responses of this <checks notes> group against hateful conduct.
It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too. We have other comments here asking for a centralised authority - we have it, it's the developers!
Whether someone is exercising their free speech is not relevant to the perception of hostility in a comment, or similar kind of assessment, unless it involves a (at least perceived) threat of imminent danger. That's clearly not the case here so I'm afraid I can't help answer your question, rhetorical or not, as it's missed the point somewhat.
That was a reference to your line, "It seems that not only has 'community of leftist[s]' given up on free speech (as is the vogue)..."
You seem to place quite a bit of value in free speech, yet are bothered when the creators of this project use theirs to set boundaries, going so far as to call it "hostile." It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
I called their responses in the issue thread hostile, which they were. As to the limits of free speech, they're not just limiting what they hear/see, they're deciding to do that for others too. That seems to go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space.
> It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
It is hostile, but how is their hostility in that case justified by their stance against certain forms of prejudice? I don't see the justification. Moreover, the list of prejudices (if they are, they're just vague assertions at this point) they gave is not necessarily hostile. For example, a racist might publish a paper saying that the IQ of one race is less than another's. That is racist but not hostile. If they were to write "thus we should eliminate them" or "I hate them because of this" or, to a member of that race were to show any sort of aggression for simply being of that race, that would be hostile. It is eminently possible (and I'd say, easy) to be against hostility of any sort discussed here, and against racism while also noting that they're not synonyms and that they don't always overlap.
> As to the limits of free speech, they're not just limiting what they hear/see, they're deciding to do that for others too
It's their project, they can do what they please with it. This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
> go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers. Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours. Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours. This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
> It's their project, they can do what they please with it.
Who was questioning that? No one, thanks for noticing.
> This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
> > go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
> Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers.
Again, thanks for noticing.
> Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours.
And?
> Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours.
Clearly, it's why I'm criticising them.
> This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
> Who was questioning that? No one, thanks for noticing.
You're welcome! I'm pointing that out because apparently you haven't noticed that, hence your criticism.
> It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
I just think if devs are working on smth for free and I want them to add a feature and they tell me they don't want to then complaining about their attitude is a waste of time as well as rather unbecoming.
> As we're discussing a Reddit alternative it seems apt to use the phrase "username checks out".
and trying to get something for free and then playing victim when you don't is somewhat akin to being a brigand, ain't it? I'm not entirely sure what such username games buy us given we seemingly both embrace negative connotations in our handles.
Publishing work open source is not magical protection from criticism, nor from requests, especially when using software with an issue tracker that you leave open to anyone. Whether they receive money for it or not is also irrelevant - would their reaction or their decision be better if they earnt a million quid per issue? No, so let's not bother with such facile excuses.
Furthermore, I haven't added anything to the project's issue tracker, and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request. Please try not to create straw man arguments because they're more convenient to rebut than what has actually been written, that's unbecoming.
> would their reaction or their decision be better if they earnt a million quid per issue? No, so let's not bother with such facile excuses.
It would be super relevant if they got paid a million per issue by the community because then there would be an expectation of receiving something in exchange. Project maintainers don't owe you anything, the whole point of FOSS is that this doesn't matter because you can just fork it and make your own opinionated changes to circumvent differences of opinion instead of achieving nothing but negativity by hand-wringing over tone.
> and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request.
We can tone police the OP of that thread as well if you like. The way the OP effectively says:
> this [what currently happens] is just bad
> this [what I want] is much more sensible
has the same capacity to appear aggressive in nature.
None. This is like complaining to Linus that your favorite <kernel feature> isn't supported and then getting mad when he tells you to pound sand when you can simply fork the kernel and add it yourself.
It sounds like you wouldn't want to be part of Lemmy's federated network in the first place. Maybe use a network that you find more palatable? Why do your preferences trump theirs?
> > Yes, I have a problem with overtly hostile responses to reasonable and polite requests
> Again - this means that you probably don't want to use this project, then.
You haven't answered the question why, you're begging the question. You can scroll up and see what I asked and perhaps finally answer it.
> > More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
> Because you've dismissed their entire project based on their comments in a single PR from years ago.
This is a non-sequitur. Firstly, I haven't "dismissed" their entire project, I've criticised their stated position and the way they handled a polite issue request (not a PR). Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to? When you see a question I'd be grateful if you could try answering it instead of trying to answer the straw man version of me you've created in your head.
> Firstly, I haven't "dismissed" their entire project
> It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too.
This... seems like dismissal. They claim to be a federated project, you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech" makes this not a federated project and is an abandonment of real free speech (again, your idea of it).
> Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances? Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
> Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Because you "have a problem with overtly hostile responses to reasonable and polite requests," which you believe the maintainers are guilty of. Hence, it's likely you wouldn't want to listen to them because you have a problem with how they communicate, i.e. the way that they would communicate with you. I can keep answering this question over and over again in different ways, but I'm not sure how to make this simpler to understand.
> I can keep answering this question over and over again in different ways, but I'm not sure how to make this simpler to understand.
The lack of understanding is all yours, as you've managed to conflate the developers with the users of Lemmy - is it really just them on this alternative to Reddit?
I also wonder why the hostility within a network goes up as the hate speech goes down, it seems counterproductive.
> Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances?
If you were their lawyer or their dad I would understand this need to come up with an excuse, but you're not.
> Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
I could try but I already have evidence of hostility that backs up my claim, why would I start working to satisfy a different claim that you'd like to make on my behalf, presumably for your benefit here, when I asked you to back up your claim but you've provided nothing? That makes no sense.
There's something like 10 days to respond to a comment on HN so you can still do it.
> you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech"
You mean, the standard idea given by those who support free speech? Yes, that idea.
> makes this not a federated project
Reddit also has servers that talk to each other but won't allow others to join its network that it doesn't control, it's not considered federated either.
Lemmy can do what they want, but they are both being bad stewards, and hurting their own chances of success by rejecting what is typically a core tenet of federation: maximizing interoperability by default.
The nature of federated networks is such that the vast majority of nodes by count will always be more or less default configured, and serving a tiny, single digit or low double digit population. In spite of their miniscule size, they almost always punch above their weight in terms of content produced, which makes sense, given that at least one of those dozen or so people was at least driven enough to build their own platform.
Keeping these small networks in the network is generally very high value, and so generally you want to maximize federation by default. Sending some messages, either inbound or outbound into the ether, without explanation, silently weakens the network and lowers interactivity of the entire federated graph.
Maybe messages with slurs are so bad that the cost is worth the benefit, but its far from a free choice, and it's one that an API team should view as a solemn, painful compromise - hurting the network and the interface in order to keep it safe.
That doesn't seem to be the attitude or level of respect the Lemmy devs give their own decisions however, which is why I'd consider them bad stewards of their own project.
"Free speech" is a universal concept, whereas by the "constitution" I assume you mean that of the US. A universal concept isn't limited or controlled by what one particular country's constitution (as interpreted by that country's courts) may have to say about it.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations.
So, when talking about freedom of speech most nations abide and follow the prescriptions of the international framework supplied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and further ratified as members of the United Nations. I think it's safe to speak about the universal concept and the national/political concept as being the identical.
Japan has ratified the UN Declaration of Human Rights and has a constitution that is heavily influenced by the US one but it doesn't protect freedom of speech in the way you think it might. From [1]:
> Under Article 230-1 of the Criminal Code of Japan:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”
“regardless of whether such facts are true or false” isn't the way to protect freedom of speech in my mind, nor anyone I've ever heard supporting freedom of speech. Hence, no, it's not safe to conflate the concept and the implementation in law, and not just for this reason but because in the vast majority of cases the implementation in law does not protect freedom of speech to even the amount the US constitution does (which is still not far enough, in my opinion).
Of course, there will probably be nations that will not abide to the strict letter of the declaration of human rights. I wanted to add a caveat to my initial post, but I thought saying "most nations" would suffice. :)
If you're counter arguing my statement with "in the vast majority of cases" I would welcome some supporting evidence on your part. Which Western states have a very different definition of freedom of speech from the one in the declaration of human rights?
Also the declaration specifies exceptions for libel and national security among others, a clarification that can be found (again) on Wikipedia:
> The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals".
You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
I think the only country that I can think of that comes close to actually protecting free speech is the United States. There are clear violations of free speech rights in much of Europe and there is basically no protected speech in many other parts of the world. India's constitution follows the guidelines but in practice speech is heavily regulated through hate speech laws.
I'm sure there are other countries that actually take the notion of free speech seriously but I'm too ignorant about the laws of every country to know that. Most countries I can think of have glaring issues with protecting people's right to free speech.
If you equate "freedom of speech" with permission to spew "hate speech" unchecked then I'm afraid you also have a different definition of free speech than the rest of the civilized world.
This is completely and utterly wrong. There are simply no supporters of free speech who differentiate it from "hate" speech, only the opponents of free speech do that so let's have nothing so mendacious enter the discussion. Freedom of speech is required in order to protect speech that others would prefer not to be expressed - no protection is needed for inoffensive speech, what would be the point!
As to "the rest of the civilized world", as pointed out several times now, very little of the "civilized" world has strong speech protections. Germany? Laws against Holocaust denial and defamatory fake news[1], which sounds Orwellian. France isn't pro-free speech either[2]. The UK has the backwards Communication Act and libel laws that are criticised the world over[3], leading to hundreds of convictions a year[4], including for posting your favourite rap lyrics[5]. Canada's free speech protections are anything but[6]. Australia has "less protection of free speech than most Western countries" according to a former High Court judge and there are raids on journalists[7], which we know happens in the US all too regularly[8] as well despite its much lauded first amendment. Italy charges writers for expressing opinions[9]. Perhaps I could complete the G8 with the state of free speech in Russia? Or you'd like to move on to places like Norway that only managed to get rid of its lese majeste laws in 2015? Or Thailand that still has them. Germany only got rid of its lese majeste laws in 2018 after a dictator tried to use them against a satririst, which brings us full circle and we haven't even touched the worst parts of the world.
The fun thing about "hate speech" is that it's almost entirely arbitrary and can be redefined to suit the whims of the people in any given year. Free speech is the enemy to authoritarianism, not its ally. What is acceptable speech should not be able to change just because there's a change in government or a different party is elected.
I'll gladly accept that my definition of free speech differs from the "civilized world" that has no clue what free speech is and has basically no interest in protecting it.
> I think the only country that I can think of that comes close to actually protecting free speech is the United States
Nobody supports unlimited free speech. Everyone accepts there needs to be certain limits. Suppose there is a billionaire with a very dark personality, and you are a low-paid waiter in a restaurant. He's unhappy with the service you provided, and is in a particularly angry mood today, so he instructs his minions to falsely label you as a child molester, and spends millions spreading that false accusation across the globe, simply as a way of hurting you–does any one really think "free speech" should include the right to that kind of speech? But if you don't, you support defamation laws as a limit on free speech at least in some extreme cases, even if you think many of those laws (as they currently exist) go way too far.
So, if we accept free speech has to be subject to some limits – the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)? Is there some objective answer to how that balance ought to be drawn? You seem to think that the US does a better job of that than most other countries (or maybe even every other country)–maybe you are right, but surely that's an argument that needs to be made, rather than simply something which is self-evident (as you seem to think it is).
> does any one really think "free speech" should include the right to that kind of speech?
Some do propose this, most don't.
> the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)?
- freedom from defamation, provide a justice system where truth is the ultimate defence (as common law states have - it could be improved though)
- freedom from fraud, already covered by contract law and caveat emptor
- freedom from privacy invasion, that is part of free speech (you choose who you share information with, hence, privacy is implied and necessary)
- freedom from perjury, there are laws against perjury in common law
> Also the declaration specifies exceptions for libel and national security among others
As I pointed out, Japan's defamation law is painted in such a way as to make it so broad that it affects all speech. Hence, bringing up such an exception is not a refutation of the point but an indictment of the exception itself. As to the "national security" exception, the US's FISA courts are a good example - or should that be bad example? - of why such an exception is easily abused. Have you not heard of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks?
> You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
2. If we were talking about the meaning of common words in common use I might agree on relying on a dictionary but we are not
3. Wikipedia is also not a source of truth in a discussion on free speech. If you wish to argue your point then try to steel man it instead of looking for ways to avoid dealing with those made by your opponents, please.
4. The Oxford English dictionary defines "free speech" thus:
> free speech
> noun [mass noun]
> the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint: it violated the first-amendment guarantee of free speech.
That doesn't support your point.
And since you brought it up, my own definition:
Speech can be said to be free when one has the ability to share a view:
- with whom one chooses
- at a time of one's choosing
- without interference or punishment (physical or otherwise) by government or society
and that view is neither maliciously false nor a credible and imminent threat.
If you dont like the rules or userbase of lemmy.ml, you can choose one of the many other instances, which are administrated by different people and have completely different rules. There are also some instances which have the slur filter disabled.
That's good to know but I was only commenting on the statements made by the developers on the link provided, which I do take issue with. Why this should lead to any thought that I or others who have a problem with this statement would not "like the … userbase of lemmy.ml", I cannot fathom as it is entirely unnatural to me, although I do see it in some others - particularly amongst those who would make a statement such as that these developers have, ironically. Agreement or disagreement on pretty much any topic is not the basis upon which to judge one's own feelings towards any individual and certainly not a group. That is anathema to me and would find the suggestion inappropriate.
if I compare the one dimensional threads of twitter with tree-rendered threads, I find the conversations emerging to be different, on HN and reddit. Of course head topic/subreddit play into the nature of the discussion, my impression is I walk away with having consumed more voices. It's less personal in absence of avatar images, less face-to-face with the top-bottom reply view in twitter. Classical BBS forums have the same disadvantage.
I'm intrigued by lots of users using a federated system and curious how it works out and I look forward to read activitypub distributed posts tree rendered.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAnd here's the repos https://github.com/LemmyNet
It looks like ActivityPub
Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort.
I don't remember _any_ political discuss on the various warez forums I was on (nxsecure anyone?). Flame wars were a thing, no doubt, but it wasn't this already formed opinion where you've picked a side and now anyone on the other side is a bad guy. It is completely bizarre.
I think politics is just a bigger part of peoples' lives now and we're seeing that play out in real life as well as in internet communities.
People were just out to have a good time, have a laugh or get together over something they loved.
People seemingly don’t seem to be as good at that these days.
It's like the people who bitch about their HOA all the time but never go to a meeting or even know who the board members are.
Maybe I’m just dumb, but I don’t fully understand this comment.
What is unignorable? Politics? I can ignore it just fine when I consider it not an appropriate subject. And a losing strategy? For what?
Why does every arena have to be about picking a fight, rather than finding common ground? Why try to increase the divide in our society?
I just don’t get this mentality.
It's easier to ignore something that largely ignores you. It becomes impossible to ignore something when half the people in it consider your existence an affront to their sensibilities, and those people are inexplicably being listened to.
> Why does every arena have to be about picking a fight, rather than finding common ground?
There exists no common ground when people think other people shouldn't exist. If all those people stop having any influence on the world, perhaps the rest can successfully seek common ground and have reasonable policy discussions.
As a counter example consider someone who could no longer exist online even if he, sadly, had not passed: Erik Naggum
Erik certainly expressed political views in many of his comments, but at the same time it's very hard to box his thinking into any mainstream political narrative. I think today he would be both unwelcome on Twitter and HN or any more conservative sites. Erik represents a lot of what I remember and miss about earlier forums: strongly held personal beliefs that don't fit into any one particular bucket.
Individuals having diverse views within their own system of beliefs is what allowed us to have meaningful political discussions in the past because 3 people could talk about 3 different topics and the group could reasonably be split 2 vs 1 on all topics with completely different splits each time.
Also there was a ton of political stuff in the bush era as well. My theory is that you just dont remember it because there was still a solid foundation of political decorum and respect on both sides at that time.
Disclaimer: I am not american.
None of those emphasised words means what you think they mean.
The fact that some people have been radicalized to believe stuff like this is more likely the root of the problems we’re having today.
In that regard your comment is what I would objectively consider a bad comment on HN (and against the site guidelines too), but it was still useful in the broader sense of the discussion.
Your parent is asking for a place where there is little to no political discussion, not a place to have meaningful political discussion.
With the good old phpBB forums, they'd often dedicate one subforum for political/flamebait content, and it was allowed only in there. As a user, you simply didn't read that subforum if you didn't care for it.
Specifically, on those forums, you had to actively seek those venues to have these discussions. Today it seems you have to work to avoid these discussions.
pretending this is news reminds me of Paul Ryan being shocked that Rage Against the Machine didn't like him. I also will point out that your very own profile page here features a link to a political manifesto
Things were different before, and it seems things are becoming different again.
If you wanted a political discussion, you took it where it was welcome. "young people today" and "get off my lawn" and all that but manners and decorum went out the windows with the original eternal september and we may never see them again.
It wasn't like this but then the Internet wasn't still that much widespread as today. Social media boom really opened it to the masses but also bring political polarization which really bloomed in last ~10 years.
Twenty years ago I wouldn't imagine that in the nearest future we'll have communities on the Internet ruled and divided by political views. That we'll need to self-censor what and in what form we want to say to others under the risk of the instant ban. I didn't expect either that we'll need to agree to "codes of conduct" - netiquette and forums rules were enough for most of the time.
Back then I hoped we'll have virtual assistants connected to vast databases, that we'll met in the virtual worlds with photo-realistic avatars, that technology would blend indistinguishably with our environment, and that would connect us into one global village. And instead we got bubbled social networks with yelling influencers and ads, tracking on every corner of the web. Bleh.
Not since Arab Spring or rather shortly thereafter. I'm not sure if there was a ramp-up of "active measures" style agitation, "cointelpro" style group antagonism or what the exact mechanism was. But any way you slice it, it has become increasingly impossible for competing groups within the same sphere to communicate much less for their to be a dialog between the left and right.
No one can dialog with anybody else because the people upstairs want it that way!
[1] https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Bottom of page.
This of course is not necessarily a reason to avoid the underlying technology, but it may be something to consider.
> Edit: This comment was written at a time when Lemmy the software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance. At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its different, there are good mod tools, and many different instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0 (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml does).
The comment was edited Nov 2021 to include this new context.
Be more Lemmy.
[1] https://join-lemmy.org/instances
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493
LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 - Nov 2022* (186 comments)
Open Source federated link aggregator in rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 - June 2022 (37 comments)
Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 - Sept 2021 (213 comments)
(*Reposts are fine after a year or so but a major thread 13 days ago makes the current submission a dupe. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
Another conclusion: Federation alone isn't enough of a selling point. Federation must also be a key unlocker of other features. Perhaps more branded/tailored sites for different audience segments but which can feed into each other in meaningful ways might be one way to pitch it. But dropping federation entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior.
The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous.
To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media."
If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences.
(When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.)
The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.
As usual when chasing "mass adoption" I think that the target demographic would simply be chased off and the project with wither on the vine.
I belong to the later camp, and I suspect the grandfather post you're replying to does too.
Russia today is an ethnofascist dictatorship, but most tankies don't care because America Bad.
Like, is it really a great thing for mending societal bridges that folks can choose between a server for leftists or a server for hard-right folks and that split ensures that one never interacts with the other? Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree, to the point that we want to ensure that there's no chance for such conversations ever to happen, even by accident?
...and that's why we can't have discourse. No one can agree on what constitutes "reasonable debate".
That validated my intuition and proved my point.
Thanks!
I hope that, like me, you enjoy the rest of your day.
But that's a large part of the problem, reducing everything to a simplistic "left-vs-right" dichotomy – everything is either "left" or "right", and everyone who is good/sane/rational/decent/etc belongs to one of them and everyone who belongs to the other is irrational/insane/wicked/etc
If someone is pro-war (to any degree), anti-worker/union or pro-capitalism I have a hard time taking them serious as a leftist; that's more of a liberal bag.
I think it is an attempt to name a real phenomenon – a particular strand of left-of-centre thought, with a great deal of contemporary influence, which (among other distinctive traits) foregrounds issues of race and gender/sexuality, in opposition to the classic Marxist emphasis on economic class as the "underlying cause" of all those other issues. If you don't want to call it "wokeness" – fine then, what should we call it?
My personal suggestion would be to go back to what it was called when I was a kid; "knee-jerk". "knee jerk" doesn't have a specific axis connotation (unlike "woke" which refers explicitly to progressive issues). It was primarily aimed at (knee jerk) liberals but could easily be aimed at reactionaries without any change of meaning.
My apologies.
Surely it is valuable to find descriptive terminology for different ideological currents – across the totality of the political spectrum? The traditional Marxist answer is "yes" – followed up with an analysis of the endlessly diverse ways in which those various currents support class interests, which is what Reed presents for "woke".
[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...
Personally I run my own Mastodon instance for myself and federate with everything, left or right, I don't care. I block stuff for myself that is illegal in my country, but I like reading about opinions I don't necessarily agree with.
It's the opposite. When people are aware of the bias of their sources the filter-bubble effect cease to exist.
The whole problem with the filter bubble is that people are unaware of the existing biases.
It's surprising how people don't understand this...
Sounds great. But remind me from where all this brigading, canceling, preventing speech, and censorship is coming from.
They aren't necessarily deep friends, these bubble people. Move such a bubble to friendly territory where there is only peace, and many will fall apart.
"Thing from one bubble goes viral in another" doesn't require two bubbles to exist on the same platform, as in Twitter. If the two bubbles are segregated to different platforms, people will still post screenshots/etc of one on the other, and some of those will go viral. "Libs of TikTok" is a good example of this – TikTok and Twitter aren't federated, but that doesn't stop left-leaning TikToks becoming viral in right-leaning Twitter; and you can find plenty of stuff on TikTok critiquing "Libs of TikTok" (and Twitter more generally) in turn. Similarly, there are whole subreddits devoted to stoking outrage at screenshots of Twitter and Facebook posts.
No doubt a shared platform accelerates this mutual feedback process a bit, simply by reducing the friction of cross-bubble quotation; but it still is going to happen a lot even without one.
>Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree,
At this point? No -because neither side can agree on common references; the left get their news from one set of news outlets and the far right get their news from qanon or whatever facebook fringe groups.
It's impossible to have a conversation if you cannot even agree on basic language or common references.
With their being fewer and fewer genuinely left-of-center outlets it becomes necessary for people to be able to build enclaves that won't be shitposted into oblivion (see also: reddit with the_donald and other brigading subs)
If in the physical space you'd ban somebody from ever joining your meeting or neighborhood again, you need to have some type of probable cause. Something really bad must have happened.
Meanwhile in the digital space: banned for life because your comment was too long. Don't believe me? Watch:
https://lemmy.ml/modlog
Federation offers at least some hope of cross-pollination.
I don't think that the goals of these software products are to reduce political polarization. What does the telephone do to reduce political polarization?
Extremity is highly engaging and richly rewarded, hence maximizing polarization has become an incentive on its own. "normal" users have been exposed to this discourse for several years now, and may have internalized it.
Thanks, folks!
The first thing people need to learn about stoicism is that you can't change other people as much as you want to. Make peace with this and do things that are in your control.
I’m going to just keep using Facebook, and this will die off
This is a social problem, not a technical, financial, or legal one. Recruiting and organizing people is a fundamental skill in the modern world. The only thing stopping one from doing this is merely saying the right things to the right people.
> On Lemmy you're able to subscribe to communities on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
“Hmm, almost all of r/technology is against nuclear, that informs my personal view point a little… “hmm, every one of these technology reddit-likes is against nuclear, I guess everyone agrees and I should too”.
I am aware that this is not a bug to Reddit, it is the reason they are looking at an IPO, is a very in-demand feature to be able to shape narratives.
I look forward to seeing how a federated Reddit deals with narrative pushing.
What federation lets you is view and interact with communities that are hosted on another instance, for example:
one shared namespace is problematic for reasons. You can figure email though, right?
DNS is a solved problem and we're never going to see anything better come along because DNS has survived the test of time (see the Lindy Effect - DNS is old, crusty, and like the Art of War or Shakespeare, it's worth learning).
(In passing, using top level domains as user id may be a good idea in some cases. In tech communities the friction may be bearable.)
I assume you aren't familiar with the Lindy effect though and I apologize for making an arcane reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
OK then:
> "that's a feature, not a bug! one shared namespace is problematic for reasons."
Is just saying "I'm right you're wrong and I refuse to explain why".
> "You can figure email though, right?"
Are you saying that being able to understand email means one should find the benefit to separate namespaces in social media? Or that email is everyone's definition of perfect and so everything should be like it? Or something else, considering it took me a bit of guessing to even think of those first two explanations?
> DNS is a solved problem
First, are you suggesting DNS is 100% perfect at what it does and nobody could ever have any complaint about it? Second, it's not clear to me how it being a solved problem for what it currently does means it's necessarily the right approach for any new uses? I need to get a tire on my car replaced tomorrow, and I really hope they don't tell me "you don't need a new tire, you need DNS - haven't you heard, it's a solved problem".
I'm genuinely not trying to be sarcastic I just don't understand any argument you're trying to make.
People expect and understand username exclusivity.
I rarely think of a distributed ledger as the useful answer for something, but I wonder if there are other ways a social network like lemmy or toot toot could agree on something like this.
It’s perfectly fine if the network consists of a bunch of loosely connected islands without the ability to propagate information across the entire network because there is a limited number of people you can interact with meaningfully. Federation favors smaller communities where the interactions are more personal while still facilitation interaction between different communities.
Even a centralized site like reddit is ultimately broken down into subreddits because nobody wants to see all of reddit all at once.
Employment, for example.
Luckily good orgs use directories to manage membership (LDAP, etc).
What I'm thinking about here is something like my particular city (Los Angeles) delegating social media accounts to people involved in government, like city council members or spokespeople in certain departments (LAFD? you get the picture).
https://riffic.rocks/city-hall-on-the-fedi/
The way this works is you have to put an HTML tag on a page on a site you own, then link to that page in your Mastodon account. This verifies you as the owner of the site and your identity.
A workable alternative would be using a pubkey fingerprint with an mutable display name, but who wants to help their family sort that out?
The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to move off your tenant platform.
And as time passes, you are more likely to want something which your tenant platform does not offer.
Maybe it is a different style of displaying images. Maybe it is a different way of defending against bots and spam. Maybe it is easier reporting of spam by users.
Whatever it is, a platform with a user:operator ratio of over a million will probably not have the resources to accommodate you.
My most fascinating discovery is the public Modlog: https://lemmy.ml/modlog
What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids.
People are banned for typing 3 sentences (too long!), "repeated anti-communism", ....insert laundry list of other bullshit reasons...and get this: admins can simply wipe out an entire community at will. I'm not sure if that means it doesn't federate or simply stops working.
In any case, massive power trip vibes.
Why is that? Open moderation logs are, in my opinion, the corner stones of establishing trust between moderators and users on a discussion platform cum social network.
First, it's a potential privacy issue. It effectively is a single place where all dirt is concentrated, open for all to see. In case violators leak personal info, willingly or not, their mistake might be used against them in the future.
Second, it can be used to instantly find unpopular mods and mod decisions, and overwhelm them with more of the same, generating busy work or even harassment.
However I think that for entities which are not global network levels of population, a public moderation log is good. If there are abusers, banning them is probably not a difficult proposition among numbers counting into thousands or less.
> Want alternative to Reddit that doesn't have the clout of centrist mainstream media influencing it
> Find Lemmy, open source and free to use
> Lemmy is developed by political extremists that operate outside of centrist mainstream media
> Political extremists are on the wrong side
> Exclaim "Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort."
FWIW There are a number of right wing extremist Lemmy instances (https://wolfballs.com/, https://ovarit.com/, previously https://thedonald.win).
And HN is where the Smart People go! Meaning some of the brightest folks on the internet.
If this is the best we can do, we're collectively fucked, y'all!
Hard-coding slur filters sounds like the work of Sisyphus though.
It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned.
Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.
Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities.
It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data.
Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them....
Federated systems make collaboration much harder, not easier, in comparison to centralized platforms. This is one of the biggest complaints regarding Mastodon.
"No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear"
In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
If you're an artist then you can join an art instance and connect with other artists. If you're interested in functional programming then you join a functional programming instance, and so on.
You're still able to interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but you have a focused community on your server instance.
>In the fediverse, this risk is a 100 times bigger.
I can guarantee you that Mastodon will outlive every commercial social media platform in existence today.
As for Mastodon outliving other platforms, that's not what matters. What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
>What matter is instance survival, which is absolutely horrific.
Except that's also nonsense. Popular instances run for years on end, it's also trivial to migrate from one instance to another.
You're just throwing out straw man arguments here. Meanwhile, arguing for centralization of the internet shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet is supposed to work.
> Rules
> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct. > Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. > No porn. > No Ads / Spamming.
And a look at the moderation abilities:
> Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments. Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
A quick search leads us to this issue thread[1], which starts with a very reasonable request:
> It's generally not a good idea to hard code something like the slur filter because the needs of every instance is different. Instances in another language would need their versions, and cases where the slur filter over blocks need to be addressed by the admins.
> A good idea would be to store the slur filter in the database and initialize it with a default when spinning up an instance, but make it editable by admins without changing source files.
…which encounters, shall we say some resistance:
> If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
That's just one of the quite hostile responses of this <checks notes> group against hateful conduct.
It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too. We have other comments here asking for a centralised authority - we have it, it's the developers!
[1] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
how is that a hostile response exactly? Its a fundamental premise of foss isn't it?
You seem to place quite a bit of value in free speech, yet are bothered when the creators of this project use theirs to set boundaries, going so far as to call it "hostile." It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
> It's unfortunate that you find it hostile - I consider the hateful conduct that they're banning much more hostile and support their methods of collaboration to that end.
It is hostile, but how is their hostility in that case justified by their stance against certain forms of prejudice? I don't see the justification. Moreover, the list of prejudices (if they are, they're just vague assertions at this point) they gave is not necessarily hostile. For example, a racist might publish a paper saying that the IQ of one race is less than another's. That is racist but not hostile. If they were to write "thus we should eliminate them" or "I hate them because of this" or, to a member of that race were to show any sort of aggression for simply being of that race, that would be hostile. It is eminently possible (and I'd say, easy) to be against hostility of any sort discussed here, and against racism while also noting that they're not synonyms and that they don't always overlap.
Nuance exists, even when discussing prejudice.
It's their project, they can do what they please with it. This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
> go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers. Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours. Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours. This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
Who was questioning that? No one, thanks for noticing.
> This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
> > go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
> Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers.
Again, thanks for noticing.
> Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours.
And?
> Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours.
Clearly, it's why I'm criticising them.
> This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
Pray tell how I have applied force?
You're welcome! I'm pointing that out because apparently you haven't noticed that, hence your criticism.
> It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
Yeah, I'm not debating that.
> Again, thanks for noticing.
Again, you're welcome!
If you conflate criticism with being against freedom then I can see why you'd come to this erroneous conclusion, and many of the others you've made.
> Yeah, I'm not debating that.
It's not protection against criticism but to criticise is against the freedom of the project. Right.
Asking nicely is when you submit a PR as well IMHO.
No, asking nicely is not limited to issues that come with a PR.
> As we're discussing a Reddit alternative it seems apt to use the phrase "username checks out".
and trying to get something for free and then playing victim when you don't is somewhat akin to being a brigand, ain't it? I'm not entirely sure what such username games buy us given we seemingly both embrace negative connotations in our handles.
Furthermore, I haven't added anything to the project's issue tracker, and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request. Please try not to create straw man arguments because they're more convenient to rebut than what has actually been written, that's unbecoming.
It would be super relevant if they got paid a million per issue by the community because then there would be an expectation of receiving something in exchange. Project maintainers don't owe you anything, the whole point of FOSS is that this doesn't matter because you can just fork it and make your own opinionated changes to circumvent differences of opinion instead of achieving nothing but negativity by hand-wringing over tone.
> and I didn't criticise them for turning down a request but the way they reacted to a request.
We can tone police the OP of that thread as well if you like. The way the OP effectively says:
> this [what currently happens] is just bad
> this [what I want] is much more sensible
has the same capacity to appear aggressive in nature.
What's the issue tracker for and why is open beyond the core team?
> We can tone police the OP of that thread as well if you like. The way the OP effectively says:
> > this [what currently happens] is just bad
> > this [what I want] is much more sensible
> has the same capacity to appear aggressive in nature.
I don't see the aggression. If you ask me for something and I respond with:
- no, fuck off
- I'm sorry but I don't think that meets the current aims of this project so we won't be doing it
They're equally aggressive? Maybe you could give a better example because what I have right now is too absurd.
Are forks permitted to join Lemmy's federated network, and are those that use different filters to those that the core team would want able to?
More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Again - this means that you probably don't want to use this project, then.
> More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Because you've dismissed their entire project based on their comments in a single PR from years ago.
> Again - this means that you probably don't want to use this project, then.
You haven't answered the question why, you're begging the question. You can scroll up and see what I asked and perhaps finally answer it.
> > More importantly (for our discussion), why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
> Because you've dismissed their entire project based on their comments in a single PR from years ago.
This is a non-sequitur. Firstly, I haven't "dismissed" their entire project, I've criticised their stated position and the way they handled a polite issue request (not a PR). Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to? When you see a question I'd be grateful if you could try answering it instead of trying to answer the straw man version of me you've created in your head.
> It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too.
This... seems like dismissal. They claim to be a federated project, you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech" makes this not a federated project and is an abandonment of real free speech (again, your idea of it).
> Secondly, why is that single thread not indicative of the attitude of the developers? Do you have other issue threads available on the same or a similar topic where they were less hostile?
Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances? Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
> Lastly, it doesn't answer the question at all. Why would I have to share someone's values in order to think they're worth listening to?
Because you "have a problem with overtly hostile responses to reasonable and polite requests," which you believe the maintainers are guilty of. Hence, it's likely you wouldn't want to listen to them because you have a problem with how they communicate, i.e. the way that they would communicate with you. I can keep answering this question over and over again in different ways, but I'm not sure how to make this simpler to understand.
The lack of understanding is all yours, as you've managed to conflate the developers with the users of Lemmy - is it really just them on this alternative to Reddit?
I also wonder why the hostility within a network goes up as the hate speech goes down, it seems counterproductive.
> Think about the last time you were curt with someone - do you believe that it is indicative of your general attitude, or indicative of your attitude because of some extenuating circumstances?
If you were their lawyer or their dad I would understand this need to come up with an excuse, but you're not.
> Can you please collect some other issue threads on the same or a similar topic that you believe establishes a pattern of behavior?
I could try but I already have evidence of hostility that backs up my claim, why would I start working to satisfy a different claim that you'd like to make on my behalf, presumably for your benefit here, when I asked you to back up your claim but you've provided nothing? That makes no sense.
There's something like 10 days to respond to a comment on HN so you can still do it.
> you claim that their lack of alignment with your idea of "free speech"
You mean, the standard idea given by those who support free speech? Yes, that idea.
> makes this not a federated project
Reddit also has servers that talk to each other but won't allow others to join its network that it doesn't control, it's not considered federated either.
The nature of federated networks is such that the vast majority of nodes by count will always be more or less default configured, and serving a tiny, single digit or low double digit population. In spite of their miniscule size, they almost always punch above their weight in terms of content produced, which makes sense, given that at least one of those dozen or so people was at least driven enough to build their own platform.
Keeping these small networks in the network is generally very high value, and so generally you want to maximize federation by default. Sending some messages, either inbound or outbound into the ether, without explanation, silently weakens the network and lowers interactivity of the entire federated graph.
Maybe messages with slurs are so bad that the cost is worth the benefit, but its far from a free choice, and it's one that an API team should view as a solemn, painful compromise - hurting the network and the interface in order to keep it safe.
That doesn't seem to be the attitude or level of respect the Lemmy devs give their own decisions however, which is why I'd consider them bad stewards of their own project.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations.
So, when talking about freedom of speech most nations abide and follow the prescriptions of the international framework supplied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and further ratified as members of the United Nations. I think it's safe to speak about the universal concept and the national/political concept as being the identical.
> Under Article 230-1 of the Criminal Code of Japan:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”
“regardless of whether such facts are true or false” isn't the way to protect freedom of speech in my mind, nor anyone I've ever heard supporting freedom of speech. Hence, no, it's not safe to conflate the concept and the implementation in law, and not just for this reason but because in the vast majority of cases the implementation in law does not protect freedom of speech to even the amount the US constitution does (which is still not far enough, in my opinion).
[1] https://kellywarnerlaw.com/japan-defamation-laws/
If you're counter arguing my statement with "in the vast majority of cases" I would welcome some supporting evidence on your part. Which Western states have a very different definition of freedom of speech from the one in the declaration of human rights?
Also the declaration specifies exceptions for libel and national security among others, a clarification that can be found (again) on Wikipedia:
> The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals".
You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
I'm sure there are other countries that actually take the notion of free speech seriously but I'm too ignorant about the laws of every country to know that. Most countries I can think of have glaring issues with protecting people's right to free speech.
As to "the rest of the civilized world", as pointed out several times now, very little of the "civilized" world has strong speech protections. Germany? Laws against Holocaust denial and defamatory fake news[1], which sounds Orwellian. France isn't pro-free speech either[2]. The UK has the backwards Communication Act and libel laws that are criticised the world over[3], leading to hundreds of convictions a year[4], including for posting your favourite rap lyrics[5]. Canada's free speech protections are anything but[6]. Australia has "less protection of free speech than most Western countries" according to a former High Court judge and there are raids on journalists[7], which we know happens in the US all too regularly[8] as well despite its much lauded first amendment. Italy charges writers for expressing opinions[9]. Perhaps I could complete the G8 with the state of free speech in Russia? Or you'd like to move on to places like Norway that only managed to get rid of its lese majeste laws in 2015? Or Thailand that still has them. Germany only got rid of its lese majeste laws in 2018 after a dictator tried to use them against a satririst, which brings us full circle and we haven't even touched the worst parts of the world.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/europe-germany-business-3d266e6de...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/fran...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921#main...
[6] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/despite-what-you-may-th...
[7] https://theconversation.com/australia-doesnt-protect-free-sp...
[8] https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-...
[9] https://pen.org/sabotaging-free-speech-in-italy/
I'll gladly accept that my definition of free speech differs from the "civilized world" that has no clue what free speech is and has basically no interest in protecting it.
Nobody supports unlimited free speech. Everyone accepts there needs to be certain limits. Suppose there is a billionaire with a very dark personality, and you are a low-paid waiter in a restaurant. He's unhappy with the service you provided, and is in a particularly angry mood today, so he instructs his minions to falsely label you as a child molester, and spends millions spreading that false accusation across the globe, simply as a way of hurting you–does any one really think "free speech" should include the right to that kind of speech? But if you don't, you support defamation laws as a limit on free speech at least in some extreme cases, even if you think many of those laws (as they currently exist) go way too far.
So, if we accept free speech has to be subject to some limits – the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)? Is there some objective answer to how that balance ought to be drawn? You seem to think that the US does a better job of that than most other countries (or maybe even every other country)–maybe you are right, but surely that's an argument that needs to be made, rather than simply something which is self-evident (as you seem to think it is).
Some do propose this, most don't.
> the question is, where to draw those limits? How to balance freedom of speech with other freedoms (such as freedom from defamation, freedom from fraud, freedom from privacy invasion, freedom from perjury, etc)?
- freedom from defamation, provide a justice system where truth is the ultimate defence (as common law states have - it could be improved though)
- freedom from fraud, already covered by contract law and caveat emptor
- freedom from privacy invasion, that is part of free speech (you choose who you share information with, hence, privacy is implied and necessary)
- freedom from perjury, there are laws against perjury in common law
As I pointed out, Japan's defamation law is painted in such a way as to make it so broad that it affects all speech. Hence, bringing up such an exception is not a refutation of the point but an indictment of the exception itself. As to the "national security" exception, the US's FISA courts are a good example - or should that be bad example? - of why such an exception is easily abused. Have you not heard of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks?
> You can argue that you personally hold a different opinion about what "freedom of speech" is, but I would say that for the vast majority of people using the definition in the dictionary is the correct way.
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
2. If we were talking about the meaning of common words in common use I might agree on relying on a dictionary but we are not
3. Wikipedia is also not a source of truth in a discussion on free speech. If you wish to argue your point then try to steel man it instead of looking for ways to avoid dealing with those made by your opponents, please.
4. The Oxford English dictionary defines "free speech" thus:
> free speech > noun [mass noun] > the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint: it violated the first-amendment guarantee of free speech.
That doesn't support your point.
And since you brought it up, my own definition:
Speech can be said to be free when one has the ability to share a view:
- with whom one chooses
- at a time of one's choosing
- without interference or punishment (physical or otherwise) by government or society
and that view is neither maliciously false nor a credible and imminent threat.
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
I'm intrigued by lots of users using a federated system and curious how it works out and I look forward to read activitypub distributed posts tree rendered.