"Nazi instances"< -- These ones will likely de-federate themselves from the wider federated web, they can't handle a broad range of perspectives well.

this is a deep misunderstanding of how far-right groups operate. they actively seek connection with the wider community because it presents them a chance to recruit and they're numbers get decimated when they're deplatformed. offering them a base of users to proselytize to only benefits them.

Social media has enabled these groups to both silo themselves and get promoted to users site-wide

yes precisely

This method of content promotion is responsible for the explosion of online hate content in the last decade

this has a deeper material reason underlying it. it's got more to do with economic decay and the lack of prospects people face than the algorithms. we saw the same thing early last century. far-right ideology explodes in popularity when the left fails to make the case for a more equitable distribution of resources and because our oligarchs fund them to an obscene degree -- minor fascists with a hundred followers on social media will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding (cf Ali Alexander). fascist ideology spreads because it poses scapegoats for the problems in society.

Nazis had plenty of websites in the 90 and early 2000's but they didn't get much traction with them because Facebook wasn't forcing them into your home feed

yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won't be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.

I really don't have a problem with these sites existing, people should be free to have their own disgusting racist thoughts and share them with their own little chat rooms and forums and the like.

I do as me and mine belong to groups they target. if they're allowed to rise to accumulate any power, it will spell death for us. there have already been multiple attempts in the US to organize pograms against trans people, as an example.

And they should be ruthlessly mocked and kicked out of every other space they could possibly go to.

inshallah

however, I'd like to point out that 4chan originally started making memes to mock the fascists -- their use of irony turned over time into unironic fascism and they became a hotbed for neo-fascists.

Again, using the e-mail example, I can get an email from whitepowerwebsite as a gmail user. That's not google giving them a platform, it's just a neutral protocol for online communication (e-mail) working in a federated state as it's meant to

email is a bad example because it only provides point-to-point communication, unless you join a mailing list. social media is different -- views get broadcast to the wider public on a given platform. federating with nazis allows them to broadcast their views and create a sense that their vision of the world is actually what everyone else believes. exploding-heads is federated with lemmy.world and the consequence is that many users have left lemmy.world specifically to get away from the fascists dumping their disgusting worldview onto the platform.

Gmail isn't expected to police the entirety of e-mail, the legal liabilities lie with the sender and receiver.

they actually do have liability under laws like the DMCA, SESTA/FOSTA, and the new slate of laws recently passed to go after sex traffickers (and in reality a wide host of "undesirable" content more generally). but that aside, I'm not talking about legal liability. I'm talking about the responsibility the people running these instances have to not help build fascism. it's an ethical/political responsibility, not a legal one.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are right about worsening economic conditions leading to the rise of far right movements. I was more speaking to their digital footprint. If you remember early Facebook, it was nothing like what people use today.

yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won’t be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.

If lemmy A is federated w lemmy B (the nazi one), it means:

Users on Lemmy A can subscribe to communities and users on Lemmy B and vice versa
Users on Lemmy A can comment on communities on Lemmy B and vice versa

It does not mean:

Posts from lemmy B show up on Lemmy A (except in the "global" view on main page, which is non-default, and likely won't show up their either due to massive downvoting). I would imagine, in time, that the global tab actually gets entirely removed since you have a problem where a single lemmy instance can massively inflate their vote count to make their votes the top voted posts across the whole network. You can't enforce instances to follow the rules on this and you can't audit their compliance. There are certainly some solutions to this involving blockchain but that's an aside and those are at least a few years away afaik. 90% of users never do the "non-default" option in whatever app they're in.

So this flooding the feeds scenario, I just don't see it. In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don't show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves. There is no scenario in which Lemmy as a federation provides a good platform for them (outside of their own nazi-friendly instance), because Lemmy doesn't work like other social media works.

[–] silent_water@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don't show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves.

I will take this to mean communists make up a soft majority on lemmy given the number of complaints about commie posting keep popping up on the major comms lenin-laugh