Remember when the whole point of leaving Reddit was escaping heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers? Yeah, about that.
I've been banned more times in the fediverse in a few months than I ever was in years on Reddit. At least on Reddit, the rules exist and you can see them—even if enforcement is spotty, you know what you're supposedly violating. Here, it's whatever mood the local mod is in that day.
Got banned today from lemmy.ca for "AI slop." There's no such rule anywhere on the instance. The real reason? My post didn't fit their narrow ideological box. No debate, no warning, no discussion—just the banhammer.
The fediverse promised freedom from corporate censorship. What we got instead is a bunch of small fiefdoms run by virtue-signaling mods who silence anyone who steps one toe outside their approved narrative. It's more fragmented, more arbitrary, and honestly more authoritarian than the platform we all supposedly fled.
Decentralization without a real commitment to free expression is just decentralization of censorship.
edit: I've written an article with my opinions on the topic.
The Opium of the Labels: How Woke Moralism Serves Capital
You're alienating queer folk by minimizing their struggles, and making the equivalent argument to saying organizing the working classes just gives ammo to capitalists to crush worker organizing. It's fatalism and has no place in any socialist movement. Queer liberation isn't about "labeling people," it's about establishing protection and sovereignty for some of society's more vulnerable, who form a part of the broader working classes that usually take on a more revolutionary position due to their precarious position.
You're alienating some of the best comrades in order to apply a vulgar and dogmatic view of class struggle that bleeds more into metaphysics than dialectics.
You're proving my point by framing this as a binary choice—either adopt your specific brand of identity politics or be a bigot—and that's not dialectics, it's gatekeeping that ignores the actual class struggle while you police my language instead of focusing on material exploitation like child labor or wage slavery that affects all workers regardless of identity; solidarity isn't built on purity tests, it's built on shared economic interest, and when you alienate workers for not using perfect phrasing, you're just shrinking the tent until it only fits your clique while the real world burns under capitalism.
Exploitation of queer and marginalized comrades is a material process as well. Queer folk are regularly exploited at higher rates, which forces many into less favorable jobs, lower pay, and less choice due to having stricter employment requirements. Immigrants face similar struggles, forming a separate striation of the proletariat that is uniquely exploited beyond the rest of the proletariat. It isn't about phrasing, it's about establishing a coherent, correct, principled line and not alienating the working classes by taking a socially reactionary position.
The fact that queer and other marginalized groups are exploited at higher rates than their non-marginalized fellow workers is key to Marxist analysis.
I agree that queer and marginalized workers face unique and heightened exploitation under capitalism—that's a material reality I don't dispute—but my point is that you're treating these struggles as separate from class rather than interwoven with it, and by demanding absolute ideological conformity on every social issue as a prerequisite for solidarity, you're fracturing the very working-class unity needed to fight the system that exploits all of us; the goal isn't to ignore specific oppressions but to build a broad coalition where we can disagree on tactics and phrasing while still recognizing our shared enemy, because without that unity, we're just fighting each other while capital wins.