there is a rightwinger instance constantly showing up in my feed and blocking users/communities one by one is getting a bit annoying :/
Lemmygrad? A lot of instances ban it, message the admins directly
While I understand your wanting to ban such a community, I think moving away from that type of action is a good thing. It’s all about personal freedom. I have some instances blocked already but I would never decide to do that for everyone because what gives me that right? Speak out against them. Make your views know. Denounce, Rage, never quit. But never censor. Freedom of information and choice is the end goal. Banning a topic is what leads to radicals because they have no outlet for their insanity.
By “ban” they mean defederate from. They’re not banning an instance from the Fediverse, the instance that’s defederating from the other one is just choosing not to interact with or have to see them anymore. So your rhetoric here is misapplied, because one instance defederating from another isn’t silencing the latter for anyone else but the instance that made that choice. It’s not analogous to restricting freedom of information or personal freedom at all, on fact it’s precisely an exercise of personal freedom: freedom of association! It’s more equivalent to just leaving a club and never coming back or hanging out around them anymore. Yes, it’s done on the whole instance’s behalf, so it effects more than just one person, but thats why random instance members can’t defederate an instance they don’t run from another instance, there’s a decision procedure to make sure it represents the wishes of the instance as a whole.
Semantics. If you defederate an instance, in this case lemmy.world blocks the instance /c/(hate group), you make the decision for everyone on that instance (you being the owner), on who can see what. This will create pockets of many little hubs instead of one big decentralized mesh network. This comes right back to the “owner” of the instance controlling everything that the user can see. I understand someone is paying the bills and that moderation is going to be needed. This is of course going to come down to choice. Is there a way to view each instances block list? If not it should be implemented into the back end somewhere, once again to allow freedom of choice.
What decision procedures are in place to stop rogue instance owners from making unilateral decisions? I admit I’m very new to lemmy and activitypub as a whole. If the community as a whole can weight in on the decision, then by all means, go ahead. 100% fair and I agree with you. I’m just against any type of actions being made by small groups of individuals that are “for the good of everyone”. I really don’t have an agenda here. I just want the freedom of choice for everyone. I’m tired of living in a world where there are people who think they know whats best for everyone else.
Thank you for your time to respond. Regards.
It’s not censoring, they can still go and subscribe to something even if it’s defederated afaik. It’s just not shown by default, which sounds like a great idea for instance owners that want to protect their users or curate the overall atmosphere. Or they just create an account there if they disagree with the decision.
I 100% agree that it’s the owners choice if he decides to block content. But as far as I know if a instance is defederated and the instance owner doesn’t publish a block list, users on the server would have no idea it existed in the first place.
There are already a couple of search engines that show instances. Maybe if some of the developers could add categories so people could find things they are interested in. This could be a useful tool for building communities. As long as it’s an uncensored database of indexes I think this would be great. If you know one that is indexing instances by category please post it.
I’m sure instances will post guidelines and rules once they get everything straightened out. I’m just a strong advocate for personal choice. Once again I understand why some people want moderation and I understand eventually it may well be needed for some communities. As long as the owners are open about this that’s fine, but not all operators are going to be transparent with these policies.
I agree. A bad opinion/agenda that is denounced with logical reasoning and compassion will do far greater good than simply censoring. The potential future followers of that bad opinion/agenda would maybe be swayed by a superior view point if they saw the majority of comments were opposed to it.
I thought it was generally somewhat studied that we’re already at a point where correcting bad actors isn’t enough anymore, as they can spread much faster than humanity has resources to be on top of it with right information. Deplatorming seems to be the currently suggested praxis.