7 ms·

The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse. It's a bit unfair to solely consider A

The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse. It's a bit unfair to solely consider American politics - there are plenty of Europeans on the fediverse, on both sides of the divide. And not everyone who prefers the more chaotic free speech servers are alt-right, unless you're one of those people who considers all non-leftists to be alt-right nowadays.

none_to_remain 4y ago
Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. This is what I was interested in - how the feudal topography had evolved in practice. Is there anything like a "map" (informatively arranged graph of federated clusters) around?
- eru 4y ago
  > Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create. They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.
  - enneff 4y ago
    Mosquitos are food for many other organisms.
    - eru 4y ago
      Yes? That doesn't mean there's any necessity involved. (Unless you are fond of teleological reasoning.)
      - enneff 4y ago
        Well by that logic nothing is necessary.
        eru 4y ago
        Not in an absolute sense, yes. But we still have relative necessities. If you want your car to drive, filling up the tank is necessary.
- easrng 4y ago
  Basically the way it works is most of the servers are run by people from marginalized communities. They don't like it when people call them slurs, so they ban slur-sayers from their own servers and block the servers that won't. When a new instance with slur-sayers pops up, the mods who care notice because they start seeing lots of reported posts, so they check if the new instance has responsive mods and rules against saying slurs and if it doesn't they block the instance. Then they usually make a #fediblock post about it including the domain of the instance and what it was blocked for, and people who appreciate moderation boost the post so the mods for more instances will see it. Of course it's not just saying slurs that instances get blocked for, but that and spam are the most common things new instances get blocked for. There are a few other common things that instances are blocked for, but since the people doing those things aren't trying to bypass blocks so they can harrass people they don't feel the need to make new instances all the time.
rootusrootus 4y ago
'Safe space' sounds like you're biased. 'Free speech' is aspirational, but ends up being 'where the shitheads go' in practice. How about those of us that just want to hang somewhere people don't insist on injecting random diatribes against kikes in unrelated discussions?
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  You don’t need to read every post which is posted on instances, similarly to twitter. You don’t read every post on twitter, but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings. You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    It’s far easier and more appealing to simply join the community that doesn’t have shitheads in the first place. I’ll take the “safe space” community any day. All the racist/sexist/whatever bullshit is pretty worn out anyway. > but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings. I’m not going to waste my time actively doing that. So while it happens naturally over time, I’d rather not see the shitheads before they get filtered out.
    - friend_and_foe 4y ago
      The safe space communities are just as bad if not worse than the shitheads you're referring to, except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. They're PCP being peddled in a coca cola commercial by an abusive boyfriend.
      - nkrisc 4y ago
        > except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. I don’t see how that’s possible in online community.
vkou 4y ago
My observation of 'free speech' zones is that they turn into 'safe space' zones as soon as you post something left-wing in them.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Yes the irony of r/conservatives one of the most ban happy reddits, where the posters all vehemently promote how pro freespeech they are.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > one of the most ban happy reddits There are so many subreddits that are so ban-happy they'll ban you just for daring to participate in another subreddit that they don't like, that if one doesn't do that, I don't think it can qualify as "one of the most ban happy" ones.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  I spent months starting arguments daily on Parler and Gab by convincingly playing the character of a pansexual Soros funded double vaxxed, anti-2A, pro-abortion, climate science worshiping socialist and never got shadow banned, canceled, kicked, or warned in any way. So in my experience they very much did NOT become safe spaces, even when faced with every idea I could think of which could be considered solidly "left."
  - troad 4y ago
    That's an... interesting hobby.
  - Matl 4y ago
    That sounds like you're playing the exact caricature of what they think 'the left' is so it's valuable to have you around as a sort of prototypical 'see, you don't want to be like him'. In other words, you help them keep people away from 'the left' so there's no reason to ban you.
  - KingMob 4y ago
amatecha 4y ago
What's the value of narrowing down the fediverse (or any social platform) into three subjective categories like that? To counter the validity of your particular ternary delineation, relatively speaking all communities are a "safe space": they all have their own idea of what is accepted and what isn't. Introducing such a "polarized" view to newcomers to the fediverse seems like a huge disservice and gives them a falsely antagonistic sense of what they're going to experience, IMO. At the same time, I'm not sure what framing other people approach social interaction but not once do I think things like "left", "right", or "sides"... "divide". I'm nearing 40 years old and still don't understand rationally why people lean towards these simplistic labels when people in general don't nicely fit them at all. I'll see some toot I don't like and think "oh, don't wanna see that sh*", block the user or perhaps the whole instance (if it's one where most people posting there share such stuff I don't like to see). The specific political stance of the person or instance won't even cross my mind, because why do I care? I just didn't want to see some racist or hate-propagating BS, regardless of where it's coming from or what ideologies it could be associated with. Anyway, just my $0.02 on this topic; I didn't want to see this kind of polarizing perspective go unchallenged.
- csande17 4y ago
  As I understand it, in the fediverse the divide literally exists in the network topology. Members of Group A share an address space with members of Group B, but the structure of the fediverse prevents them from sending messages to each other. This is interesting to talk about because it's a pretty unique situation. Other decentralized systems have converged on a single globally connected network everyone uses; either everyone can visit your website or your website is irrelevant. (You're either allowed on Twitter or banned from Twitter.) Individual blocks exist but they aren't widespread enough to break the whole network into pieces. The closest comparison I can think of is when Russia disconnected itself from the Internet. Everyone was still nominally part of "the Internet", they all still used globally unique domain names and IP addresses and stuff, but suddenly Russians could only access Russian websites and non-Russians could only access non-Russian websites.
- kukkeliskuu 4y ago
  Claude Lévi-Strauss visited an Indian tribe and asked them to draw a map of their village. Everybody draw the huts as a ring. But the ring was drawn in two incompatible ways. Some emphasized a central gathering place in the middle of the village in their drawing, and drew the huts around that, some closer, some further away. Others drew a clear line between the village: the people on one side, and others on the other side. This is essential to how people conceptualize disagreement. At the root of the disagreement is something sacred, something taboo, which cannot be openly discussed. Some people consider others to be closer or further from the taboo. Other people think that there is a line that divides incompatible views about the taboo. The immediate reaction to this description is very likely to be a misunderstanding if you think about it in the context of an actual divide. Nobody is above the taboo, including you, although everybody thinks they are above the taboo. You cannot escape it with "logical thinking", because both sides conceptualize the taboo in incompatible ways. The logical thinking happens within this conceptualization. The immediate reaction is to blame one of the sides of the discussion of misunderstanding.

none_to_remain 4y ago

Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. This is what I was interested in - how the feudal topography had evolved in practice. Is there anything like a "map" (informatively arranged graph of federated clusters) around?

eru 4y ago
> Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create. They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.
- enneff 4y ago
  Mosquitos are food for many other organisms.
  - eru 4y ago
    Yes? That doesn't mean there's any necessity involved. (Unless you are fond of teleological reasoning.)
    - enneff 4y ago
      Well by that logic nothing is necessary.
      - eru 4y ago
        Not in an absolute sense, yes. But we still have relative necessities. If you want your car to drive, filling up the tank is necessary.
easrng 4y ago
Basically the way it works is most of the servers are run by people from marginalized communities. They don't like it when people call them slurs, so they ban slur-sayers from their own servers and block the servers that won't. When a new instance with slur-sayers pops up, the mods who care notice because they start seeing lots of reported posts, so they check if the new instance has responsive mods and rules against saying slurs and if it doesn't they block the instance. Then they usually make a #fediblock post about it including the domain of the instance and what it was blocked for, and people who appreciate moderation boost the post so the mods for more instances will see it. Of course it's not just saying slurs that instances get blocked for, but that and spam are the most common things new instances get blocked for. There are a few other common things that instances are blocked for, but since the people doing those things aren't trying to bypass blocks so they can harrass people they don't feel the need to make new instances all the time.

rootusrootus 4y ago

'Safe space' sounds like you're biased. 'Free speech' is aspirational, but ends up being 'where the shitheads go' in practice. How about those of us that just want to hang somewhere people don't insist on injecting random diatribes against kikes in unrelated discussions?

mccorrinall 4y ago
You don’t need to read every post which is posted on instances, similarly to twitter. You don’t read every post on twitter, but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings. You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  It’s far easier and more appealing to simply join the community that doesn’t have shitheads in the first place. I’ll take the “safe space” community any day. All the racist/sexist/whatever bullshit is pretty worn out anyway. > but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings. I’m not going to waste my time actively doing that. So while it happens naturally over time, I’d rather not see the shitheads before they get filtered out.
  - friend_and_foe 4y ago
    The safe space communities are just as bad if not worse than the shitheads you're referring to, except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. They're PCP being peddled in a coca cola commercial by an abusive boyfriend.
    - nkrisc 4y ago
      > except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. I don’t see how that’s possible in online community.

vkou 4y ago

My observation of 'free speech' zones is that they turn into 'safe space' zones as soon as you post something left-wing in them.

cycomanic 4y ago
Yes the irony of r/conservatives one of the most ban happy reddits, where the posters all vehemently promote how pro freespeech they are.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > one of the most ban happy reddits There are so many subreddits that are so ban-happy they'll ban you just for daring to participate in another subreddit that they don't like, that if one doesn't do that, I don't think it can qualify as "one of the most ban happy" ones.
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
I spent months starting arguments daily on Parler and Gab by convincingly playing the character of a pansexual Soros funded double vaxxed, anti-2A, pro-abortion, climate science worshiping socialist and never got shadow banned, canceled, kicked, or warned in any way. So in my experience they very much did NOT become safe spaces, even when faced with every idea I could think of which could be considered solidly "left."
- troad 4y ago
  That's an... interesting hobby.
- Matl 4y ago
  That sounds like you're playing the exact caricature of what they think 'the left' is so it's valuable to have you around as a sort of prototypical 'see, you don't want to be like him'. In other words, you help them keep people away from 'the left' so there's no reason to ban you.
- KingMob 4y ago

amatecha 4y ago

What's the value of narrowing down the fediverse (or any social platform) into three subjective categories like that? To counter the validity of your particular ternary delineation, relatively speaking all communities are a "safe space": they all have their own idea of what is accepted and what isn't. Introducing such a "polarized" view to newcomers to the fediverse seems like a huge disservice and gives them a falsely antagonistic sense of what they're going to experience, IMO. At the same time, I'm not sure what framing other people approach social interaction but not once do I think things like "left", "right", or "sides"... "divide". I'm nearing 40 years old and still don't understand rationally why people lean towards these simplistic labels when people in general don't nicely fit them at all. I'll see some toot I don't like and think "oh, don't wanna see that sh*", block the user or perhaps the whole instance (if it's one where most people posting there share such stuff I don't like to see). The specific political stance of the person or instance won't even cross my mind, because why do I care? I just didn't want to see some racist or hate-propagating BS, regardless of where it's coming from or what ideologies it could be associated with. Anyway, just my $0.02 on this topic; I didn't want to see this kind of polarizing perspective go unchallenged.

csande17 4y ago
As I understand it, in the fediverse the divide literally exists in the network topology. Members of Group A share an address space with members of Group B, but the structure of the fediverse prevents them from sending messages to each other. This is interesting to talk about because it's a pretty unique situation. Other decentralized systems have converged on a single globally connected network everyone uses; either everyone can visit your website or your website is irrelevant. (You're either allowed on Twitter or banned from Twitter.) Individual blocks exist but they aren't widespread enough to break the whole network into pieces. The closest comparison I can think of is when Russia disconnected itself from the Internet. Everyone was still nominally part of "the Internet", they all still used globally unique domain names and IP addresses and stuff, but suddenly Russians could only access Russian websites and non-Russians could only access non-Russian websites.
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
Claude Lévi-Strauss visited an Indian tribe and asked them to draw a map of their village. Everybody draw the huts as a ring. But the ring was drawn in two incompatible ways. Some emphasized a central gathering place in the middle of the village in their drawing, and drew the huts around that, some closer, some further away. Others drew a clear line between the village: the people on one side, and others on the other side. This is essential to how people conceptualize disagreement. At the root of the disagreement is something sacred, something taboo, which cannot be openly discussed. Some people consider others to be closer or further from the taboo. Other people think that there is a line that divides incompatible views about the taboo. The immediate reaction to this description is very likely to be a misunderstanding if you think about it in the context of an actual divide. Nobody is above the taboo, including you, although everybody thinks they are above the taboo. You cannot escape it with "logical thinking", because both sides conceptualize the taboo in incompatible ways. The logical thinking happens within this conceptualization. The immediate reaction is to blame one of the sides of the discussion of misunderstanding.