I saw talk of them being federated with instances like “exploding heads” (literal neo-nazis) and “posting lolis rocks”, along with having interactions from users there. Is that true? idk how to check for that, I can only just barely stumble around the normal forum interface.

If so, why? They’ve been going hard on purging communists user-by-user and comment-by-comment, which seems like a little bit of a secondary concern to nazis and pedos, especially something as simple as just blocking the instances at the very least. What’s going on over there?

What I mentioned, if it is correct, might not be exhaustive, I’m just repeating what I heard about.

Edit: Correction, exploding heads are closer to being latter-day blue checks, complete garbage but not as pressingly bad as the other site.

  • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    23·
    2 years ago

    Isn’t there a way for individual users to completely hide an instance from their feed? Because I would just do that if it bothers you.

    I’m not saying that some posts/instances aren’t unethical, objectively incorrect, and/or dangerous, but widespread censorship is a slippery slope. If you want what you’re able to see to be heavily controlled, there are probably other instances with that purpose. An instance that describes itself as general-purpose and for everyone probably isn’t the place for that, though.

    • CoinOperatedBoi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      widespread censorship is a slippery slope

      I wouldn’t call blocking gore, nazis, and pedos “widespread”. For anyone who hasn’t heard the nazi bar story (source @IamRageSparkle on Twitter):

      I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

      And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

      Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

      And i was like, ohok and he continues.

      "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

      And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

      And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

      And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I think that’s a somewhat reasonable argument when such people are actually congregating in your space, and their presence necessarily impacts everyone else in that space.

        In your example, by telling those people to leave you would necessarily be taking away what they believe to be their space and hindering the ability for group members to talk with each other. In the context of federated communities, it doesn’t matter when you block an instance (if and when such actions become necessary) because they’ll still have both of those things.

        In your example, all interactions would constantly be influenced by the presence of that group and non-group-members would understandably associate that group with that space. In the context of a federated community, anyone can easily and instantly remove all influence on them by that group. Non-group-members wouldn’t make such associations because that group’s influence on non-group-members would by default be minimal.

        • DigitalAudioEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          That’s not how Nazis and other disgusting groups operate, though. Once they’re part of a community, they’ll start trying to get any other unknowing people interested in their content, so they start creating communities in disguise, trying to gain any new members, and make sure anyone who feels like an outsider, like they don’t belong, will feel welcome there, which in turn only strengthens those types of communities.

          4chan used to be a pretty diverse community, which while it was definitely always pretty intense and insensitive, had a bit of everything, but after the American 2016 elections, /Pol/ started spreading to other boards until the /Pol/ folk became a very sizeable group everywhere else.

    • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      122·
      2 years ago

      Censoring literal, open Nazis and pedos is perfectly fine by me, thank you very much. I don’t think there’s any “slippery slope” involved other than the risks of allowing such people free rein in open spaces.

      • UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        2 years ago

        Keyword literal.

        But nowadays people like to call Nazis other people that don’t agree with me and pedos weebs that like hs anime characters

        So I agree with you if anything illegal is going on.

        Are the Nazis advocating for violence and genocide and pedos distributing CP? sure block them and report them to the authorities.

        But I don’t care for fictional characters that doesn’t even resemble real life humans.

        Hot take I know.

        • ThisIsMyNewAccount@kbin.social
          3·
          2 years ago

          Nazism, by its very nature, advocates for violence and bigotry. There are a lot of abhorrent viewpoints that are despicable before they become illegal.

          Fuck them and fuck their claims and wanting free speech. That’s not even something they actually believe in.

        • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          To be clear, the “jailbait” forums that Reddit tolerated for years were not officially tolerating material that would be clearly illegal by US standards. If they had been, Reddit would have shut them down out of self-protection. Possessing outright child pornography is a strict-liability offense.

          They were, however, posting “upskirt” photos showing children’s underwear. They were posting pictures of children at the beach in swimsuits. They were, in short, posting photos of actual children, where the photos had been selected for being sexually appealing to pedophiles.

          Not drawings of fictional characters; real kids, selected for hotness to pedophiles.

          I think that’s something about which site owners can very reasonably say, “Even if it is not a criminal offense, we think it’s wrong and we don’t want it on our site” without anyone needing to be concerned about censorship of ideas.

          • UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Sure, like when imgur was changing it’s policy recently, people were asking for alternatives, the first search result of a suggested hosting site (don’t remember which) in duck duck go was an album of a child in swimsuit doing suggestive poses, pretty disturbing, that’s a clear line I agree with.

        • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          There are some absurd people on this board with bad political analysis, but you can see that I edited the OP. Hopefully I didn’t offend your identitarian tendencies or whatever that toe I stepped on was.

          The name of the second instance, let me remind you, is “posting.lolicon.rocks”. It seems to be run by an aggressively racist (loves to use the hard-r gamer word) pedo. Anyone who cheers what they even call lolicon is normally going to be some sort of 4chan-style sicko who probably pitched a fit at the Card Captor Sakura reboot having fewer upskirts.

    • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Blocking and unblocking should be normal, expected, easily discoverable, and openly discussed. There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.

      The whole system we’re on here is still new and in rapid flux. Expect change. This isn’t Reddit with admins saying for years that hosting /r/jailbait is essential to free speech. It takes time to develop agreeable responses to kinds of trouble this system hasn’t yet seen.

      SMTP email has been around since 1983. When I was running mail servers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was plenty of controversy over how to properly block spam & abuse from mail servers. IRC has been around since 1988, and the history of IRC is the history of conflicts over federation; going back to the founding of EFNet by the exclusion of eris.berkeley.edu.

      That’s what the long-term history of a federated service looks like. There is change. There is controversy. There are people goddamn sure that if you don’t accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.

      • CoinOperatedBoi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.

        There are people goddamn sure that if you don’t accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I liked them, but I think it requires more context than can be assumed. The first picture is titled “frothing fash” and the second one is an illustration of a frozen peach (“freeze peach” -> “free speech”).

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        2 years ago

        The problem is not that some (or many) communities may block access to some (or many) other communities, but rather that such blocking is not immediately obvious and may give an appearance that those blocked communities don’t exist (kind of like lying by omission). This is especially true if the description of your community implies a lack of enforced blocking. If someone manages a community where it’s very clear that outside access is moderately to extremely controlled, I completely support that.

    • king_dead@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Gonna just hammer this home: this slippery slope has literally never been true. Reddit getting rid of neo nazis, the fatpeoplehate lynch mob, and the pedophile subreddits only ever made the site better. This fear of censorship has ruined platforms far more than any so called censorship has. I would rather go back to Something Awful and their capricious mods than deal with another laissez faire administration