Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse(join-lemmy.org) |
Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse(join-lemmy.org) |
If you choose Run A Server, it suggests two main options: Ansible or Docker. It specifically warns against "from scratch".
When I'm developing software, I want people to be building it from scratch. If someone likes something I made enough that they want to take it and build a docker or ansible thing out of it ... okay, that's flattering, albeit a little confusing, and it's not my default.
And I probably wouldn't agree to support those third-party ansible/docker things which someone else felt the need to create.
What happened to rolling a versioned tarball that you can chuck in opt or wherever and point nginx at it? Eg, if I knew I could pull in versions of lemmy server through my package manager, I'd be totally trying it out as my side-project this weekend.
This is what the notice (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/from_scratch.h...) actually says:
> Disclaimer: this installation method is not recommended by the Lemmy developers. If you have any problems, you need to solve them yourself or ask the respective authors. If you notice any Lemmy bugs on an instance installed like this, please mention it in the bug report.
Supposedly so it's easy to reproduce issues locally. I remember participating in the PHP community long time ago, and constantly having to replicate peoples arbitrary Apache/NGINX configurations just in order to reproduce issues, so it's not surprising that people are using Ansible/Docker for setting up development environments.
I just wished people stopped pushing for that bloated mess in production too, but step by step...
cargo build --release
I don’t see a problem.
Serving the frontend cannot be a challenge either I imagine but I didn’t bother looking at the frontend.
If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter - the code is designed to make it as difficult as possible to change out. Thankfully some nice souls [2] are maintaining that anti-feature removal.
This is not an alternative to reddit, where you would see a front page with content on it.
The tech is the easy part, you need to have a place that is worth going before the tech will be utilized.
Pretty good means switching to it will not be too tough for Reddit users since most of the users (anecdata) preferred the older UI to which it is very similar and is easier to use on mobile.
What happens if I run an instance and these subs become popular - am I going to be liable legally for their use or will a broader community be able to input into their moderation?
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
This created a firestorm on Lemmy, on which it was noted that Lemmy removes conservative and libertarian communities with the reason "No conservative communities":
> Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities
> Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed
Perhaps the underlying software is fine, but the largest Lemmy instance is not exactly the friendliest to anyone who wants to express themselves more freely than they are allowed to on mainstream social networks.
I mean, you must be aware by now that those "conservatives" did ruin a couple of actually good communities in the last years (especially in the reddit clone scene) and some people just don't want to deal with those people at all. And they shouldn't have to.
I just wish, we could have a platform that was; not necessarily politically neutral, but where it didn't consume so much of the site.
Unfortunately when I visit Lemmy, I'm fronted with a lemmygrad.ml, and a "leftist" privacy focused one, which seem to be the only populated instances at the moment. So it doesn't inspire much hope.
1) at the very least there should be an option to run it as a single community, not multiple communities. Federation means you can have multiple communities, each on their own server, the whole user created multi community paradigm makes sense on centralized services like reddit. Added bonus, you remove site administration and have only moderation, removing bureaucratic layers is good.
2) subscriptions on federated services should ideally be handled client side. If I want to subscribe to a community feed, needing to log in doesn't make sense when a community I follow might not be on my home server. I should only need authentication to interact.
The optimal way to distribute social news: bittorrent-style P2P swarms.
People copy and paste news articles with photos (maybe this is piracy?) and share them as files with known hashes. The swarm pulls down all the articles for you to read locally without ads or scripts. No HTML and script garbage. Beautiful plaintext with minimal markdown-style markup.
A core group of 5 or so people alone can probably scrape what's valuable of the old web on a daily basis, rendering the need for the web moot. The web is going away anyway with the social media giants. We should just own the method of distribution instead of having it locked away in Medium and AMP.
User identities in the system are PGP signed, but can be effectively anonymous. You follow people that you upvote frequently, and articles they upvote are given higher priority in your feed. You share your voting with others to create rich filters. If the system detects noise, you know where in the graph it comes from and can nuke it. It'll take time to build a reputation, so people won't risk it.
You can layer comments on top and distribute them the same way.
Content is ephemeral as you want and decays naturally if nobody keeps or seeds it. Some archive team might want to keep stuff, but nobody else has to go to the trouble of maintaining infrastructure to do so.
No spam. No ads. No VC-funded growth engines that require your phone or a mobile app. Just a solid protocol and beautiful reading and authoring client.
The protocol should include a plaintext legal preamble / poison pill that prevents companies from ever trying to coopt it: BEGIN. BY EMITTING THIS PROTOCOL, WE OFFER SHARES EQUIVALENT OF 1% OF OUR COMPANY ON A DAILY BASIS TO ANYONE WHO CONNECTS TO THIS CLIENT. Or something to make "embrace and extend" impossible by forcing companies into an impossible legal contract.
If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7].
[1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
[3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[4] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
[5] https://github.com/innereq/lenny
I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.
A test instance is at https://littr.me
Edit: actually it would make sense if word filters themselves were hard to add. But having their own filter and making that hard to edit is bonkers.
Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file.
Done.
Updates would take zero time to deploy.
It's all about taking a position.
Taking a position is fine. But, imagine a self driving car which wouldn't let you drive home to Cuntsington, MA (an example)?
The DEVs think this logic is fine?
Strange people.
That list seems very Americanocentric.
Indeed it is. There are comments here and there in the GitHub issues where the devs defend the filter as being targeted at making it harder for "the [American] right wing" to use the platform.
It's naïve, and they don't want to talk about it.
And here's the related code: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df...
edit: I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.
Well I don't remember the exact phrasing but I think your original comment did have a part asking people not to discuss this further. I can see how this would not be well received.
Wow, this was a fantastic thread. It very clearly and logically lays out how to kill software by injecting your ideology into it.
RIP dessalines
I'm not quite expert here, but, IIRC, this language problem is partially inherent to ActivityPub. The sender can attach translations, and the receiver can pick one from the set, but no one knows what's gonna happen if the expectations from both sides don't match.
One might, instead, re-fetch the messages from the sender using HTTP + content negotiation, which will definitely cause different types of headache.
> Civil discussion for the center and center right
> Karl Marx: Atheist or Satanist?
> Candace Owens
> transphobic comic
> no links to github/gitlab
is this what passes for "civil discussion" and "center/center right" these days?
I get that censorship in major tech platforms is problematic, but the sense of martyrdom in comments like yours feels a little overwrought.
Yeah, sure you can be banned for questioning if an untransitioned man wearing a wig is really a women, but this isn't what most people are concerned about. The censorship has now gone far further and in many cases to simply disagree with mainstream narrative on some politically charged subject will be enough to have you removed. One of my favour YouTubers "Mouthy Buddha" was banned for making some videos about Epstein and paedophilia -- the guy produced "conspiracy" content but it's really high quality stuff with no hate at all.
I mean even the US president was banned for "violence" despite asking rioters to go home, being acquitted and the FBI finding that there was no coordinated insurrection plan.
I'm not coming at this from any political position. A lot of content social media platforms censor I don't like, but that doesn't mean I think it should be censored. Things like racism have been deliberately defined in a very loose way that practically anything can now be considered racist and used as an excuse to censor. A popular comedian in the UK got banned during the world cup for saying, "all I'm saying is, the white guys scored". He was mocking how the UK media had been running stories for weeks about how the "diversity" of the England team is what made them great, but that wasn't allowed because "racism".
For example, try talking about a need for safe spaces for X, and you will immediately get abuse from random strangers complaining that you aren't thinking about Y.
Or try saying anything about treatment Z side effects. You'll be downvoted and insulted for not sufficiently trusting the science.
Some discussions just work better in a less open, moderated forum, where people will try to engage with you, rather than having an angry internet mob materialize out of thin air whenever their trigger topic is mentioned.
That's such a naive and ignorant viewpoint. Everything which one doesn't agree with suddenly doesn't become racist, xenophobic, and homophobic content.
Post from an hour ago:
> Somali feminist: Facebook is being used to silence me
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28452991
Another one from 2 months ago:
> The blackout Palestinians are facing on social media:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645282
From yesterday:
> The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443244
Facebook and IG also banned the mother of one of the soldiers who died in Afghanistan last week.
Even women who are against biological men competing in their sports are getting silenced under the label of "transphobia."
One only get to understand what censorship feels like when it comes for them.
https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/19/on-facebook-banning-pages-...
And now we've moved on to "misinformation" which has no real definition other than being mitigated by so-called fact checkers who mostly work for American for-profit newspapers.
Correct. Ownership is governed through intellectual property laws, the type of license used, agreements and so on. Lemmy's code is released under a GNU Affero license, and so ownership and usage are governed under this license.
Large open source projects tend to set up legal entities (foundations, non-profits) which manage their brand, trademark, intellectual property rights and so on.
> but the operators of the servers are distributed and independent.
In the era of classic web forums, you would download a copy of vbulletion, phpbb,... operators would download a copy of the software and set up their own intance(s) on their own server(s).
The federated model operates the same way. The distinction, though, is that all these instances are interconnected. They can communicate with each other. In the federated model, you have an account on server A, but you can use that account to subscribe and see content of and participate on server B.
> How do they typically manage things like scale, data growth, security, monetisation etc.?
Each to their own. Operators work independently. The operator of instance A is entire responsible for their own setup regardless of what happens at instance B. Operators get to set the rules on their own instance as to moderation, monetization, topics, community growth, etc. etc.
Since servers are interconnected, each instance can use an allowlist to determine which other instances, and their users, are allowed to connect and participate. As an operator, you get to decide that users of B can connect with your server, but users of C aren't allowed.
> Is the experience likely to vary a bit across the operators?
Communities are groups of people. Just like in real life, a community establishes its own culture, its own identity, its own way of communicating. So, yes, the experience can vary across the board depending on who's active on your instance.
Functionally speaking, all Lemmy instances operate the same way. You have communities, comment threads, voting, posting, etc. Barring configuration differences, as a user, the experience is quite similar across servers.
> And how do users trust which operators then want to join?
The same way you'd trust your ISP, your bank, the garage that services your car, etc. You read reviews, you try to gauge sentiment, number of users, etc. etc.
Mastodon - a Twitter clone - uses the exact same federation protocols as Lemmy. Mastodon has an order of magnitude more users across its instances. A big feature in Mastodon is the ability to just move your account from one instance to another instance. A thing Lemmy doesn't seem to have at the moment:
https://lemmy.eus/post/8181/comment/31995 https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
The thing I enjoy about Lemmy is that you can join an instance and if you don't agree with the policies and the people there you can join a different instance.
Having more users isn't going to help if the core developers are anti-diversity.
Which is fine, write code, live by your beliefs, but enforcing them in software on other people who might implement it is what I have a problem with.
Open source and federated platforms like lemmy will not magically fix the problem( * ). But they come with two killer advantages: 1) They are open, transparent and evolvable, hence diverse people can work on solutions and 2) Don't have private data monetization as their defining business model which frees up potential to explore less antisocial possibilities.
These "big picture" aspects will take some time to play out in full. But if you have the time there is nothing preventing you from setting up an instance that would strike the right balance (pun) and create history :-)
( * ) What would a "fix" look like? well thats not a easy question to get consensus on, but a workable definition is that at least people do not behave worse than in real life (as in person-to-person contact if you remember what that is :-)
I do not mean ideologically. Just in conversation. More of us learning to talk with one another better is a really good thing.
The American idea of leftism varies widely, and on all axis too.
A similar thing can be found in the right.
Both have populist factions that have a lot in common. Many identify as indie too. They lack a solid party home.
Both have moderate and conservative factions too.
Authoritarianism is also on the rise generally.
All of this can be disturbing. I find the economic policy that way right now myself. Labor seems to be organizing though. Others see that as disturbing!
What I know, having had a ton of conversations in various venues around the nation is the body politic is far more complex. Everyone is listening to some loud or compelling voices and not talking with one another near enough to garner a better sense of where people are at and how policy might make a whole lot better sense.
It does not have to be disturbing. Shouldn't in my view.
The vast majority of people do not want to have that conversation (hence the flagged post of the grandparent).
You have a lot of these so-called leftists rebelling against the philosophies of Marx and other communist philosophers on very fundamental issues (e.g. gun ownership for the proletariat, or the freedom of speech) all because of the current political climate in America. At the same time, these people will support and protect Big Tech and other capitalist interests when it is politically convenient to do so. I've heard American leftism once jokingly called Socialism with Silicon Valley Characteristics.
Ask any one of these new-age leftists what they think of Alex Jones' YouTube channel being banned, and they will hit you with a response that would disturb any of the Gen X leftists who grew up in an era where Communist was a dirty word and the protection of free speech was a top-most necessity. New-age leftists have grown up in the left-sympathetic social media era and cannot conceptualize the pendulum ever swinging the opposite direction.
Having "leftist" in the description makes people (at least myself) automatically jump to the conclusion that one can get cancelled/banned/deplatformed for posting any thought or argument that disagrees with the mainstream. I'm not a conservative or anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but this culture really creeps me out.
Also in the About page the author of the software says things like:
> [Reddit's] libertarian founders have allowed some of the most racist and sexist online communities to fester on reddit for years
(Implying that this community wouldn't permit certain types of discussion, defined by very broad and ambiguous terms that were weaponized such that they can be used against anyone who disagrees with the leftist ideology in any way).
And criticizes reddit for being:
> liberal, and pro-US, not left (leftism referring to the broad category of anti-capitalism)
I wouldn't be comfortable with participating in a discussion moderated by a person who says things like that.
Also, as a person who grew up in a country ruined by "anti-capitalism", I find that trend in American culture extremely disturbing. Can you think of any anti-capitalist country (now, or at any point in history) that you'd like to live in?
Luckily this is a free software and anyone is free to run their own instance.
Politics aside - I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance focused on free speech, without automatically attracting all the worst people?
I don't think it's even worth considering such a community left-wing. They're more like an anime poisoned grooming circle that embraced red aesthetics for shock value.
However pathetic that sounds though, I'm the bigger loser for even being familiar with this nonsense.
it's unastounding to me in the extreme that the right has very little presence on most of the fediverse.
I like to believe 'we' are in a real majority. The point is the same, even if this isn't true: It's not some mythic 50/50 world, and there is no phantom "equity" out there which is a "balance" between libertarian-right, centerist and left views.
Apes, penguins, take your pick. Collectivism is out there. Its a basic model. I'd call it "herd mentality" but that tends to have negative connotations. Sure, there are apex elements in collectivism. It doesn't undermine the main thesis: There is more collectivism, essential left-wing thinking, than a lot of people credit.
In the US, because of individualism, this is often ignored. The belief "most" people in the US simply want to a) be left alone to b) sink or swim on their own and c) pay less taxes is a bit distorted. Really? They just want c).
Capitalism allows people to organize collectively too. Proponents would claim that it enables more freedom to do so than ‘leftism’.
The United States leftism leans heavily to the contemporary idea of all other developed western nations rightism... so are we to be seen as a bit disturbing by the rest of our nation peers? (hint, they mostly seem to :D )
Limiting speech means there are plenty of rational opinions we would otherwise miss, options, solutions. It reminds me of that NASA satellite caught throwing away useful data at the system level. If you start editing deeper and deeper eventually you start to throw out important solutions.
We need to keep the solution space as big as possible.
Does that lend itself more to your intellectual curiosity?
There are obviously other political spectrums, but those are all extremely insignificant minorities. Surely you don't only find satiation to your curiosities in said extreme minorities, that seems rather unfulfilling as any meaningful advancement in them is highly statistically unlikely in you or your direct childrens lifetimes.
I find the answer in most cases is worries over personal judgement.
More of us quit doing that and more people will have that conversation.
I usually lead with, "ignore the talking heads on TV."
Worked wonders for me. I enjoy politics and culture again as do others I talk to.
The other basic worry is inability to manage a conversation coupled with the idea of ideology being the means to better ends rather than the reasoning tool it really is. A person who maintains one ideology, sans a working understanding of others, will feel threatened when its merit is challenged.
Fact is we have many solutions to the problems we face with no requirement they all conform to a single ideological frame.
Our far left is most other places moderate left. Do you not see this to be true?
Our far right is just full blown fascist/Christofacist now. We have $10,000 bounties on the heads of those assisting in seeking medical care in one of our largest states now.
-They didn't go to Lemmygrad
-No definition of leftism would exclude the very leftist people who went over to Hexbear, the Lemmy instance for exiled r/Chapotraphouse posters
-they don't seem to be particularly into anime
-they are very into left politics, socialism, trade unionism, anti-imperialism, and so on. So like they are left-wing
^So that's where this quote came from, TIL..
https://quillette.com/2017/01/12/the-blank-slateism-of-the-r...
> One only get to understand what censorship feels like when it comes for them.
This looks like you were starting to write "First they came for the" and then realized the next word was "socialists".
Saying that after your previous paragraphs doesn't erase the political content of that previous paragraphs.
I'm definitely in favour of free-speech, I'm just not particularly left or right wing in my political views or voting habits.
> Yeah, sure you can be banned for questioning if an untransitioned man wearing a wig is really a women, but this isn't what most people are concerned about.
> the guy produced "conspiracy" content but it's really high quality stuff with no hate at all.
> I'm not coming at this from any political position.
can you hear yourself?
You mean, they aren't allowed to spread absolute blatant lies and falsehoods, that have already caused at least one deadly riot, in an attempt to overthrow a fair and legitimate election that just happened to not be convenient for their personal agenda? Good.
> This last year we had a UK media organisation banned from YouTube for questioning the UK COVID response.
I'm not from the UK and haven't kept up with news about the UK, so I can't really comment on this one. But out of curiosity I looked it up. If we're talking about the same instance, one of Rupert Murdoch's radio shows was banned for content that YouTube flagged as contradicting the World Health Organization's guidance on COVID. That content was then soon reinstated. That is notably different than saying you are not allowed to "question" the UK government's response to COVID. YouTube misidentifying content on their platform is well documented and happens all the time outside of the context of politics. So again, YouTube's actions here were flawed, but far from the political censorship that you imply.
> People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms.
This is blatantly false, and so easily disprovable. People on Twitter and Facebook constantly repeat falsehoods about election fraud. I just now Googled "youtube biden president illegitimate" and got several results back attacking the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. The funny thing is I only clicked one video because I want to avoid YouTube's recommendation engine thinking this is content I want to see. YT surfaces fringe ideas so readily. How do you think that stuff spread in the first place?
> Even US media outlets like the NYPost were censored for running stories Twitter didn't like during the US election.
Twitter bungled their response on this, and they backed down after they were rightly criticized. One tabloid getting banned from one social media platform is again, not at all close to certain topics not being allowed on major tech platforms. Content attacking Hunter Biden (the topic of the article that got the NYPost banned) happened before, during, and after the the ban. The NyPost is also back on Twitter.
The rest of your claims follow a similar pattern.
I again repeat my assertion that censorship in major tech platforms is flawed and problematic, but the narrative that certain view points are being choked out by tech platforms is simply not true. Fringe ideas have flourished in the age of social media, and would have not entered mainstream discourse if it weren't for the tech industry.
Sounds almost reasonable, except:
Putting a question mark after misinformation and conspiracy theories doesn't magically transform them into reasonable questions.
And pluralizing the word "elections", doesn't fool us into thinking this is about more than the 2020 presidential, and Donald Trump's lie that it was stolen.
It has been thoroughly litigated and found to be legitimate by both public and private entities. Anyone continuing to "question" it most likely has an agenda of undermining that legitimacy.
So if I was to try to get you killed on this forum but then my next post said "violence is bad though" would that make the first part go away?
Every community has ideas about what's right and wrong, and there will always be people who disagree. Moderation will always be required because that's just the nature of communities.
> Politics aside - I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance focused on free speech, without automatically attracting all the worst people?
To the point I just made: no, it's not possible refrain from moderating a community and then avoid having people there who engage in behavior you don't like. If your definition of "free speech" includes a complete lack of moderation, then you'll always run into this problem.
Would you be willing to name this county?
Capitalism != individual freedom != democracy. Those are all separate axes.
> Having "leftist" in the description makes people (at least myself) automatically jump to the conclusion that one can get cancelled/banned/deplatformed for posting any thought or argument that disagrees with the mainstream. I'm not a conservative or anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but this culture really creeps me out.
Outside of maybe 8chan, what is a community that won't ban you for saying something they find harmful? Left/right/liberal/conservative communities all have this.
It's totally fine if a self-described left-leaning community is not for you, but there's nothing weird or creepy about it.
Also that federation choice being in hand of instance owners makes an account on each instances a must. You are going to have a person or two that your instance owners don’t like, or instance or two that don’t like yours.
Setting up your own community with specific standards is totally fine imo.
In some sense I agree, but what happens when these communities begin to overflow with people, and chaos increases? It leads to opinion suppression( no I'm not talking about extreme opinions on any side of the political spectrum , I'm talking about opinions which differ from the status quo ), echo-chamber creation, and worst of all, unnecessary aggressive behaviour and mud slinging.
There are parts of society well served by markets and other parts that really aren't. Same goes for applying socialist ideas to problems.
Recognizing just that fact is a basis for conversation that can lead somewhere meaningful for all involved.
I like to lead with how is it all for you and how did you arrive where you are politically?
Common struggles, life stories, other things help start a conversation.
Then it's give and take.
The idea of any side, particular ideology being right, best fit, one size fits all is crazy! That isn't reality.
Talk about it from there.
Many would agree money in politics is bad, for example. I sure do. Another interesting chat is the for profit motive.
Compare and contrast public utilities. The one where I live is straight up government, runs at cost plus. A few miles down the road it's private. Runs at cost plus margin, plus...
All other variables are the same, and what's the impact?
Power is very reliable where I live. It's not so much down the road. Why?
There are many things to discuss like this and get a sense of where the ideologies apply well and where they don't, and after a time, people begin to realize "their team" is playing them for profit due to corruption.
And they are! Make no mistake!
Gets better from there.
I am having these every chance I get. Every time I get someone out of the ideology as means to better ends trap, that's someone who will consider policy, features, benefits, costs, risks and that's all we can ask for, and all we need.
It's also someone willing to talk about money in politics, legal corruption here and what that all really means in terms of ordinary people getting reputable, meaningful representation.
All of that is a foundation for action later on when this stuff bubbles up into something we can actually act on.
The Left isn't averse to debate. The Left is averse to repeating the same tired arguments about iPhones and authority and "human nature" until the heat death of the universe. Things that have been addressed in great detail for over a century.
There is actually a lively debate taking place. It just typically doesn't take the form of Zizek vs. Peterson SuperBowl style spectacles. It takes place in literature, and in meetings among organizers trying to actually accomplish their goals. People like that don't give a flying fuck what John Stossel or Ben Shapiro have to say. This mainstream "debate culture" is so far detached from the actual struggles taking place.
From my point of view, having to build things is a hassle: one needs the dependencies, it will work differently on different OSes/distros, the maintainer needs to keep the build instructions up-to-date and verify manually that they won't break (for all OSes/distros). Ansible or Docker just gives you a reproducible thing, easier to verify in one step whether the build instructions in it still work.
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy - Sun Tzu, "The Art of War".
Developers as well as operators should read Sun Tzu and take what they read to heed. To know what you're running it makes sense to know what you're installing. While this still leaves open the chance of the actual code being riddled with nasty bits it at least removes the chance of the Ansible playbook or dockerfile adding something "extra".
I haven't seen it being a problem anywhere and especially not in the prominent cases of the last years.
As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)
More censorship = less content on social media, which is a good thing for humanity.
Plus, honestly non-anonymous discussion of controversial subjects might actually be worse. You still get maximally aggressive interpretation, but you actually know each other so you can lose real friends.
Discussing anything on the internet that makes anyone feel emotional is just a bad thing no matter how you do it. That's why I'm completely fine with censoring anyone with violent views I disagree with. Get them off the internet first, then maybe someday everyone else will get off too.
Also I'm aware I'm being a hypocrite right now just by responding here. I'm supposed to be working. Like I said, the internet is just bad and my hypocrisy is proof of it.
There are important conversations within the LGBT that would be really interesting, but asking questions that could be construed years later as homophobic, no matter now innocent can publicly destroy people.
I'd love to have a discussion breaking down certain ideologies, including the merits as well as demerits of certain controversial groups. But this could actually cross into criminal in the UK with the interpretation of some laws. And certainly come back to haunt me years later publicly.
On the flip side, we have the ability for systems to mine through words and sentence structure and identify commonalities. Perhaps there's like an "on screen keyboard" for conveying meaning without giving up your specific grammar patterns. This kind of editing is so costly for the human race :(
you need to be far gone to manage to get yourself kicked off Facebook.
For what it’s worth if your leftists will only talk to people who already accept their worldview and assume everyone else is like Ben Shapiro, it validates the point that they are not available for the kinds of discussion we are talking about.
Seems acceptable to me (anyone else can host their own index right?) just trying to understand.
I'm imagining - finding a topic or person or something that you want to follow, and then, your 'instance' / host pops up with "the thing you are trying to get data from is banned from this host".
Seems like an excellent opportunity to upsell someone to starting their own host / own rules system.. Star your own droplet for $10 a month maybe?
I did say it was worth doing, more or less.
I haven't said anything meaningful about politics.
What I said, perhaps a bit too abruptly to be well understood, was "the use of a non-meaningful piece of slang that is almost entirely held by a specific group of poorly informed folks is a red flag that any attempt to discuss politics will end in a likely mix of muh jerbs and dumbocrats."
The phrase "leftist" properly applies to a group of people who essentially haven't existed in the United States in around 80 years.
It would be like if someone went to a baseball stadium and started calling people soccer hooligans. That is not a person from whom to learn sports.
Thanks for the attempt at a table turn. You've been a delight
There are large numbers of people who describe themselves today as leftists, and there have been for the past 80 years. People across the political spectrum, academics, and the news media use the term in relation to contemporary politics.
If you are using a definition that stopped being relevant 80 years ago, it will be hard for you to have a coherent discussion with people today.
Some useful links that explain it further:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/7/15183128/mastodon-open-sou...
While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.
A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."
The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).
Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.
If the lemmy team wants to have their slur filter for their "official" instance, they are free to. However, part of being decentralised is to give people the power to run their communities as they see fit and so they shouldn't be beholden to the infallible lemmy devs to maintain a slur list that the community can't manage themselves. Maybe they want to add or remove slurs or remove this filtering entirely, it isn't the place of the lemmy devs to decide that for them.
I’m curious if you feel the same way about other features such as the ability to ban users or remove comments, which is in effect is a much greater limit on people’s speech. I can say significantly less as a banned user than as a user who is discouraged from saying the n word (since you can still post those comments. they just end up with the word censored)
Do I think this is good feature? Absolutely not. It’s an anti-pattern. But my read is that it was a stop gap for a site which had a live instance running with minimal resources during early development. The maintainer has said they are removing it. Surely if the slur filter was a moral consideration rather than a practical one, they would have no interest in removing it.
The point of federation is autonomy. Communities can decide on their own how they would like to conduct themselves, instead of having Steve Huffman or Mark Zuckerburg write the rules for them. Several alternative social media websites, including instances of Lemmy, have actually sprung up explicitly because of censorship they experienced on the hegemonic corporate platforms.
Hexbear for instance was born from the ashes of r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the most active (per capita) communities on Reddit. The Reddit staff pulled the plug in the midst of a generational political crisis and mass civil unrest and didn't even have the nerve to cite a single, specific infraction. And now, the community is free to discuss subversive political topics without having to worry about advertiser boycotts applying pressure to have their community shut down.
This idea that free speech starts and ends with the ability to use slurs is among the most idiotic brainworms which persists among libertarians. Nobody in power gives a fuck if you spend your time spitting on people who have even less power than you do. They only care if you can articulate a political program which threatens their ability to rule.
Is there a link where I can also read this bug?