Gull

It depends on whether what you're about to say is "Hitler did nothing wrong." Nazis lost WWII, so the entire world is not safe for them. Nobody cares about creating safe space for Nazis.

You can make your own Fediverse instances and do whatever you want on them, but you will get instance-blocked and you can't force them to "reason" with you about it.

If you want to exist in the company of others, you must regulate your behavior. This is not dictatorial, each person gets to say on what terms they want to deal with you or not.

If someone is posting like a Nazi, it will always be more efficient to block their messages from propagating, than to require each and every user to individually see their messages and then block them.

This is an important question, because the Fediverse is actually full of instance blocks and incompatible Codes of Conduct.

Ah, the "programmers are all buttplugs" hypothesis

Then use it from Google, like a better Quora - but that doesn't mean you log in and contribute content or hang around.

You don't have access to the ones which refuse to federate (for example, because they will only federate with instances that accept the same Code of Conduct).

It's what every underdog social network says when it doesn't have the network effect yet. BlueSky, for example.

The differences among instances really do matter.

If Stormfront opens an instance tomorrow, would you say it makes no difference because they will all talk to each other anyway? You shouldn't. The example of Mastodon shows they won't all talk to each other, often for very good reasons. Like "that instance is literally Stormfront." You can expect that instance to have Nazi moderation policies, to normalize Nazism and to engage in Nazi brigading.

Imagine an average Redditor lands on one of the main Lemmy instances, where everyone (on penalty of excommunication) holds that Stalin Did Nothing Wrong, that Ukrainian culture and language should be exterminated and submerged in the Russian Empire, and so on. If that Redditor doesn't really understand that the instances are different in viewpoint and policy, they can reasonably conclude that the Fediverse is dominated by tankies. Meanwhile, despite their faults, Twitter and Reddit still exist and are not so clearly dominated by people who like to promote genocide. What does the average user think?

When Stalinists are running the main Lemmy instances, it should not be surprising if history undergoes sudden and frequent changes there.

There's an entire book on this predilection of Stalinism: "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia" (1997), by David King.

More mundanely, posters on the main Lemmy instances should already have seen that if anyone mentions oppression by certain states, e.g. the systematic oppression of certain minorities, this will ironically be labeled as "racism." The racism of genocide denial is a Stalinist's bread and butter, and will never result in deletions or bans.

America isn't run by tankies.

It matters. For example, if Stormfront runs an instance, that instance will be full of Nazis. There's no way they will tolerate anybody else there. Ergo, if you know someone is from the Stormfront instance, you know they're either a Nazi or they're lost and so clueless that they don't realize what all the funny crosses mean.

Stormfront people (again, this is an example) will then sic their userbase on any thread about Judaism. They will intentionally exploit the confusion created by lack of context. They will create threads which users don't realize are transferring them from the world of ordinary humans into the Nazi dimension, where they will be confused and bewildered by the fact that suddenly 80% of their online peers are expressing the kinds of views that are expressed by a Stormfront denizen.

The same will be true when NazBols run an instance and it is already true of the pro-genocide tankies that kbin is already federated with.

When fascists (including tankies) run instances, they purge people who disagree with them, just as in "real life" - so instances run by fascists and tankies are going to be full of fascists and tankies.

If kbin is drowned out and perma-brigaded by tankies then the tankies win, but everyone else loses.

If you're going to federate with fascists and tankies, it always matters to have that context front and center: "this thread/message comes directly from fascist/tankie central"