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By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. W

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the world's diversity of societies and views. Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?

afavour 3y ago
I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed. > they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.
- soundnote 3y ago
  You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea. Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.
    - soundnote 3y ago
      The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea. Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        > The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. I think you're committing the error of treating social categories as set-theoretic absolutes when humans are far more multidimensional. It's like "Well they're not really patriots; they tell me Americans are great but they don't want me talking to Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr." No, they don't, because those Americans were traitors who hurt their fellow countrymen. "Listen to more LGBTQ voices" and "Don't listen to Gays Against Groomers" aren't actually contradictory concepts; 'listen to' doesn't mean 'give equal, uncritical weight to every'. The missing sociological tool you may want to dive in on is 'Intersectionality,' which is the concept of how one's privilege is contextual and multidimensional factor; a person can be both oppressed and oppressor.
- gvurrdon 3y ago
  Your comment reminds me of a time I was a member of a sports club. One other member was thrown out as they were revealed in a newspaper article to also be an active member of a neo-Nazi organisation. But, they'd never said or done anything that gave the slightest hint of it and appeared to be quite pleasant and liked within the club. I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.
2devnull 3y ago
It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?
  - soundnote 3y ago
    Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.
  - RationalDino 3y ago
    The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you. To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things. Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.) I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.
pastage 3y ago
> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know. There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.
- EricE 3y ago
  Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.
  - pastage 3y ago
    It is quite hard to understand short comments. What are the relevant disasters you are talking about in this instance?
  - wwweston 3y ago
    [flagged]
t-3 3y ago
You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!
- soundnote 3y ago
  The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence. It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.
  - t-3 3y ago
    What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.
shadowgovt 3y ago
There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content. You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives). The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that. (I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).
jmbwell 3y ago
> Mastodon's federation policies Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know. I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.
KittenInABox 3y ago
How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female? No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
Somewhat unrelated: a few months ago, before most mastodon instances started censoring their list of servers they blocked from federating, you could just look at the rules page of almost any popular server and see a server URL and why they were blocked. To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.

afavour 3y ago

I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed. > they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.

soundnote 3y ago
You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea. Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.
  - soundnote 3y ago
    The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea. Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      > The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. I think you're committing the error of treating social categories as set-theoretic absolutes when humans are far more multidimensional. It's like "Well they're not really patriots; they tell me Americans are great but they don't want me talking to Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr." No, they don't, because those Americans were traitors who hurt their fellow countrymen. "Listen to more LGBTQ voices" and "Don't listen to Gays Against Groomers" aren't actually contradictory concepts; 'listen to' doesn't mean 'give equal, uncritical weight to every'. The missing sociological tool you may want to dive in on is 'Intersectionality,' which is the concept of how one's privilege is contextual and multidimensional factor; a person can be both oppressed and oppressor.
gvurrdon 3y ago
Your comment reminds me of a time I was a member of a sports club. One other member was thrown out as they were revealed in a newspaper article to also be an active member of a neo-Nazi organisation. But, they'd never said or done anything that gave the slightest hint of it and appeared to be quite pleasant and liked within the club. I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.

2devnull 3y ago

It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.

shadowgovt 3y ago
I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?
- soundnote 3y ago
  Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.
- RationalDino 3y ago
  The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you. To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things. Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.) I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.

pastage 3y ago

> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know. There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.

EricE 3y ago
Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.
- pastage 3y ago
  It is quite hard to understand short comments. What are the relevant disasters you are talking about in this instance?
- wwweston 3y ago
  [flagged]

t-3 3y ago

You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!

soundnote 3y ago
The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence. It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.
- t-3 3y ago
  What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.

shadowgovt 3y ago

There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content. You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives). The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that. (I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).

jmbwell 3y ago

> Mastodon's federation policies Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know. I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.

KittenInABox 3y ago

How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female? No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.

extraduder_ire 3y ago

Somewhat unrelated: a few months ago, before most mastodon instances started censoring their list of servers they blocked from federating, you could just look at the rules page of almost any popular server and see a server URL and why they were blocked. To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.