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.

  • CoinOperatedBoi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
        1 year 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.