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> For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc. Sad to

> For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc. Sad to see you feel the need to include this disclaimer to be able to voice your opinion without being labelled by those same "leftists" here on HN. Yes, there are plenty of people here who are quick to downvote and throw accusations of -ism/-ist/-phobia your way when you venture outside of their "safe spaces" but... who cares?. This labelling says far more about the people attaching labels to anything which goes against their world view than it does about the persons being labelled. Just let them put their silly stickers and click that downvote button, with your ~50K karma you can spare a few for the good cause of freedom of expression without fear of retaliation.

PaulHoule 3y ago
One thing I like about Hacker News is that there is very little of that BS. Mastodon loses the right wing trolls (although I hear there are a handful of widely blocked servers) but has the minus that it does have a subculture of people who normalize othering and dehumanizing behavior in each other. It also has a large "silent majority" of nice folks but the effects of chronological feed + boosting amplifies a loud minority beyond their actual numbers.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Mastodon does not so much "lose the right wing trolls", it is just that some of the biggest instances are run by "left wing authoritarians" who simply do not allow views outside of their own comfort zone [1]. There are likely to be some right wing instances as well but those are shunned by those bigger instances, some of which even block other Mastodon instances which are deemed unclean since they do not have a strict enough blocking policy. Gab and Truth Social are based on Mastodon but they do not federate and searching for "conservative fediverse sites" does not produce anything other than criticism of conservativism on the fediverse [2] so it is unclear whether there is such a thing as a 'conservative fediverse'. What is clear is that if there is something like that around the main Mastodon instances refuse to federate with it and with that they make themselves far less interesting for those who prefer diversity of thought than they could otherwise be. [1] Diversity of thought is the one diversity which really counts but also the one shunned by those who profess to strive for diversity. [2] There is a clear need for a politically neutral - not "left" or "centre" or "right" but "unbiased" - search infrastructure

PaulHoule 3y ago

One thing I like about Hacker News is that there is very little of that BS. Mastodon loses the right wing trolls (although I hear there are a handful of widely blocked servers) but has the minus that it does have a subculture of people who normalize othering and dehumanizing behavior in each other. It also has a large "silent majority" of nice folks but the effects of chronological feed + boosting amplifies a loud minority beyond their actual numbers.

the_third_wave 3y ago
Mastodon does not so much "lose the right wing trolls", it is just that some of the biggest instances are run by "left wing authoritarians" who simply do not allow views outside of their own comfort zone [1]. There are likely to be some right wing instances as well but those are shunned by those bigger instances, some of which even block other Mastodon instances which are deemed unclean since they do not have a strict enough blocking policy. Gab and Truth Social are based on Mastodon but they do not federate and searching for "conservative fediverse sites" does not produce anything other than criticism of conservativism on the fediverse [2] so it is unclear whether there is such a thing as a 'conservative fediverse'. What is clear is that if there is something like that around the main Mastodon instances refuse to federate with it and with that they make themselves far less interesting for those who prefer diversity of thought than they could otherwise be. [1] Diversity of thought is the one diversity which really counts but also the one shunned by those who profess to strive for diversity. [2] There is a clear need for a politically neutral - not "left" or "centre" or "right" but "unbiased" - search infrastructure