aski3252

Maybe this is a language semantic thing. Would it be better if I called it a ‘privately-owned townhall’? The idea is that, yes, there is private ownership but they are inviting the public at large.

A townhall is a public institution owned publicly. A privately owned townhall is an oxymoron as far as I see it.

But for argument's sake, I could somewhat see twitter, facebook or the internet overall as a privately owned public townhall to a certain extend.

And maybe lemmy or the fediverse overall could be considered somewhat of a townhall too.

But individual lemmy servers are not townhalls, they are more like privately owned pubs.

It’s not restricted to family members, people who are in a certain line of work, people who have been screened, etc

Well that depends entirely on which lemmy server we are talking about. I'm sure there are lemmy servers that are restricted to family members or people who are in a certain line of work. And there certainly are lemmy servers that only allow people who have been screened.

I don’t think comparing it to a person’s home is accurate either

Fair enough, maybe comparing it to a privately owned bar or pub would be the better analogy. Bars and pubs are privately owned, but in general, anyone who follows the rules can enter them. But if the bar owner feels like you have violated a rule, they can throw you out or even ban you.

However, due to the nature of private ownership, they are allowed to ban/censor as they see fit.

Right, but on a positive note, the code to lemmy is not privately owned, it is public. So while servers can control their own server like a dictator, they don't have any control over other servers.

that is still censorship, which by definition is restricting free speech.

You can certainly see it like that, yes. But I don't see a huge issue with it as long as this is openly stated in the rules of the server and as long as alternatives are allowed to exist.

Online, technology changes that to an extent. Not saying all the functionally exists currently or that kicking them out isn’t still an option. But lemmy is open-source and it is certainly within the realm of possibility that for text-based comments/posts/etc, a screening process to disallow words you don’t want could be added.

As far as I see it, the technical aspects seem to be a big obstacle at the moment. I think with better mod tools and block tools, some servers will probably reconsider re-federation. At the moment, the de-federation reflex seems to be chosen more due to practical reasons (they don't want/can't deal with the additional moderation).

Just that it is short-sighted and petty to do so if the reasons are political ones.

I personally do see the appeal of a "nice" anti-toxic community, it reminds me of the "good old" internet forum days where your comments were removed for the simplest of reasons, like calling somebody an idiot, or posting in the wrong place, or posting something that has been posted before. Many say people nowadays are too sensitive when it comes to what content is tolerated, which does have some truth to it, but many nowadays are also very sensitive when it comes to moderation where they almost believe that any moderation or censorship is inherently bad.

Now I also enjoy free-speech forums from time to time, but I do see the appeal of a heavily moderated "clean" space if I'm being honest. And I don't see how there cannot be both existing at the same time.

But considering user controls exist, I think it is a bit of a control freak move myself.

I can certainly understand that, although I also can understand that constantly blocking people can get annoying.

IMO a lot of the so-called “racist” and “transphobic” (the correct term would be “transmisic”) feelings that exist online today are not true hate of minorities but strong annoyance with political correctness and language control.

I think a lot of it is people being overwhelmed with how fast things are changing nowadays. 15 years ago, about 50% of the people in the US believed that homosexuality should not be accepted. This has changed very very rapidly, so it's natural that a lot of people have issues with that. I also think that equating "racism" and "transphobia" with "hate" is reductive.

During BLM, people are told that in addition to obvious slurs, they can’t say “blacklist” and “whitelist” (despite those terms having nothing to do with race if you study their origins) or “master” and “slave”

That's just liberals doing liberal things.. They don't want to do actual change, they just want to make PR moves. And I think saying "maybe we shouldn't use terms like master or slave anymore" is not exactly the same thing as saying "you can't use the term master or slave".

There’s also some people that get offended bc you refuse to acknowledge their beliefs (e.g. no injecting hormones and mutilating your body, does NOT make you a woman).

Well yeah, when you are convinced that you are a man born in a woman's body, you don't want to constantly be told that you are not a real man. People can disagree if they want, but I understand that people don't want to have this endless debate that will never ever be resolved because those kind of endless debates inevitably end up becoming toxic.

And you will always end up offending someone.

I think this is where my opinion differs to the opinion of many right wingers. Right wingers always think it's about offending people. To me, it's about creating a non-toxic community. In order to do that, you need moderation. This has always been the case, otherwise you end up in a COD MW2 lobby situation where everyone is just screaming insults and slurs into the mic. And I'm not against that because I'm offended by that, I just don't find it appealing as it hinders constructive conversations.

Well again, most in the current userbase would argue otherwise..

Also, don't you think it's a little bit ironic? You are upset that this server is getting defederated, but at the same time you call the current userbase "retarded"? Why do you want to federate with people you call retarded in the first place? And why are you surprised that people don't want to federate with people who casually call them retarded?

Maybe you are 14 years old (either physically or mentally) and calling people retarded is normal to you, but most adults are kinda over that phase.

No one cares about the current user base.

The current user base does.

We can attract normal people.

No, not at this moment, lemmy is not ready for that. Even the tech savy redditors are/were struggling to understand lemmy's federated structure. "Normal people" are barely able to figure out how traditional social media works.

In addition, there is a lot of work to be done to fix technical issues before there is even a slight chance of lemmy becoming a respectable platform, let alone a mainstream platform.

There is a very extreme few pushing things though.

The admins are the ones pushing things of course, after all, they are the ones paying the servers and the ones who get in trouble for hosting controversial content they don't want to deal with..

But to repeat myself once again, this is supported by a majority of the userbase.. Maybe this changes in the future, who knows, but that's just a fact..

As another user has pointed out right now lemmy is full of reddit refugees. Reddit already purged all right wing people.

Most right wingers were purged, that's true. My point still stands. Most people on Lemmy right now support heavy moderation. Maybe this changes in the future, idk, but you shouldn't delude yourselfs into thinking that half the user base supports you.

A huge portion of the world

Yes, a huge portion of the world.. Social media overall, and lemmy especially, do not represent "the world". They represent a specific subsection in the western world who tend to lean left overall.

A huge portion of the world is still Christian or muslim whether you like it or not and have conservative values.

Right but they are not on lemmy..

It’s insane to think lemmy’s views are mainstream at all.

It would indeed be insane to think lemmy's views are mainstream.

But once again, my point still stands. Your views on homosexuality and other social issues are not mainstream anymore IN THE WESTERN WORLD. Even in the US, 75% of people think the LGBT community should be accepted. 15 years ago, it was a different picture, but those days are gone and the trend we are heading towards is pretty clear.

And just to be clear, I support you guys expressing your views on here. That's why I made an account a couple of months ago in the hopes of being able to be confronted with right wing views from time to time.

That is like saying the vast majority of trump voters support deportation of Mexicans so Mexicans should be deported.

Nope, I never made any argument whether lemmy servers should be heavily moderated or not. In my view, that should be up to the server admins to decide.

The person I replied to claimed that "Lemmy is alienating half the population". In my view, that's not true, most people on lemmy support heavy moderation.. The people this alienates are in the minority. That doesn't necessarily mean they are right or wrong just because they are in the majority, it just means that lemmy is not "alienating half the population"..

You guys can lie to yourselves all you want, but your views are not mainstream anymore.. Most people in the western world don't share your views anymore..

Lemmy has only attracted fanatics so far.

Your account is apparently 5 months old, so you should know how lemmy (especially instances like lemmy.ml) looked like back then.. That's when there were only fanatics, or at least radicals, on the platform.

The people who joined up recently due to the whole reddit thing are tech enthusiastic normies.. Most of them tend to lean center to center-left wing. And from their perspective, you are just as much fanatics as the Stalin worshipping commies over at lemmygrad.ml..

If Lemmy is alienating half the population from the get-go

You're not half the population, not even close.. The vast majority on lemmy supports heavy moderation.

The decision to block or defederate should be done at the user level and not at the site level.

It's pretty funny to me, when it comes to social media, conservatives seem to turn into communists. There actually are instances that are community funded and run collectively.

But when it comes to most servers, they are rented by individuals, set up in their spare time and on financed by their own money. Those individuals pay for that server, they are running their server and they can do with it whatever they want. How can you demand to choose what somebody does with their own server when you are not the one paying for it?

Things I’m interested in like Godot or Retrogaming have WAY MORE users on Reddit still

Every community has way more users on reddit than on lemmy.. Lemmy is so much smaller and younger than reddit.

Oh and by the way, lemmy was literally developed by radical commies.. Why do you expect it to have a significant right wing userbase?

Your example doesn’t fit bc you are trying to use a private space as an example of a public forum.

But it's not a public forum, at the end of the day it is a private space.. The server is rented by somebody, that somebody is paying for that server and that somebody can choose to do with that server whatever they want.. If somebody choose to host a private lemmy server where only they themselves are allowed, that's their right.

But if you open a place, real or digital, with the express purpose of having freeform or political discussions with large groups of people that you don’t personally know, e.g. a public forum/townhall/etc

But that's not even remotely what lemmy.world is supposed to be.. They choose to allow anyone who follows the rules, but they are very very clear that they are not "a free speech zone." and the rules are very strict, much stricter than twitter, reddit or most other social media sites, so I seriously don't understand how you can make the argument that lemmy.world is supposed to be a "townhall"..

I would argue that suppressing that kind of language

Nobody is suppressing your language.. You are free to say whatever you want on instances that support it.. Nobody is shutting down exploding-heads, but you can't expect somebody else to host content that they don't want to host on their servers, just as they cannot force this sites' admin to host content they don't want...

You have an argument when it comes to centralized social media, such as twitter, reddit, etc. where you are dependent on the company that runs the site. But with lemmy, you have free access to the code and are free to run your own server however you choose.

How is this about free speech? People on this server can say whatever they want as long as they follow the server rules. If you go to another server, there are other rules.

In the real world, you also have freedom of speech (optimally), but if you go to another man's house and insult his wife, you don't have to be suprised if that man tells you to leave..