Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance

The downfall of ruqqus began when they (ruqqus) banned mgtow, who had migrated from reddit after a ban there, and a bunch of other guilds, and failed to provide a good reason for that or evidence of broken rules. This contrasted sharply with the free speech forum promise that ruqqus had been promoting before. Then the ruqqus admins said that they "pivoted" to be more an open source project and less a free speech community. And then of course everyone just left and ruqqus became a wasteland.

The use of the term "instance" to describe a deployed instance of software predates federated software like mastodon.

If you're interested in a federated Reddit clone, check out Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

The comment that got flagged for trying to reverse this missed its point, but I thought it had one.

My reply-too-late:

While that is a little hyperbolic, there's definitely a "kid gloves" approach you have to take in a lot of online discussions.

E.g. there was an article on burnout that popped up on HN[0] recently where the author made sure to apologize for being a "privileged white chick" early on. You can't just talk about your problem with burnout and how you handled it, you have to virtue signal about issues that might not even be related first.

I've seen discussions on Twitter get swamped with "what are you doing in our conversation?" replies that drew the line on racial boundaries, when the issues at hand weren't even exclusive to race.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665065

They're akin to when you're a kid with friends and one of you starts cussing, the rest don't react negatively, and then you just f-bombing all the things. Some people don't want to be adults or approach life that way, they just want the veneer of adulthood.

you had to do that on reddit every time you discussed trump.

"I loathe that racist, I didn't vote for him, but I thought it was funny that he said... blah blah"

conforming to groupthink and avoiding judgement by the ingroup is a major problem across the "free world". regardless of political leanings.

There is a more general law that has nothing to do political leaning that was coined by someone who's community generally disproves your point.

moot, creator of 4chan, has a talk or blog post (can't find it now) detailing this exact dynamic. There are plenty of times moot banned discussion of a certain topic (not even politically relevant), those users would get mad and start their own chan. That chan would eventually be a community of people who just post about how they hate 4chan and continue to be contrarian until they died. Community building is hard and you can't build a platform around being anti-the-other-platform. I think it's fashionable to call these "new platforms" right wing, but this is not a new trend and its something common you would see in the phpBB days of the forum, except instead of the new platform being "right wing", it was that the old platform was fascist because the moderator was an asshole. That said, 4chan is a platform you can clearly point that started out non-partisan. Before Trump 4chan was pro-occupy Wall Street. The community, on its own, became more right wing without overtly advertising itself as such. Over time however it's clear that /pol/ is a far right platform and there was no need for it to splinter off from everything. The lack of robust right wing communities online has more to do with community building rather than self-censorship. A rightwing community has to be exclusionary from the start, and it's hard to bootstrap a community that must ostracize a portion early members.

It's my view, that globally in the western world, that conservatism is actually just a very loud minority position. The loudest conservative folks tend to act the most anti-social and ultimately tend to get ostracized. This ostracism as a result of their anti-social behavior leads to some persecution complex that they are being pushed out when in reality they just hold a minority position. The "no racism" rules are required because when said person gets banned for calling someone a n*gger who was just posting an image of a birdhouse, they tend to be the most pedantic about rules. Most normal people just don't want to deal with that.

I think the key is to avoid going full free speech. What you want to create is a more permissive community that's still under someone's thumb to a degree. It's difficult to start a community under just a slight change in priniples like that, though, because the lion's share of the people in the old community are fine with the status quo.

...So in addition to being more permissive, it seems that you have to have a better product, generally.

From SSC:

> ..if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

What do you mean by "free speech?" "Unmoderated?" "Uncensored?" "Speech not limited by the government?"

In the US "hate speech" is legally protected as free speech (although hate speech has no concrete definition).

I wonder if there are any actual free speech services out there: Would any of them tolerate being swamped (as in 90%+ of the content) with insults hurled at their owners and operators?

My guess would be that there's already a limit to their tolerance. And from there, it's really a matter of seeing what kind of content they _do_ tolerate.

A site full of extreme* right wing stuff: That site is an extreme right wing site. If it is indeed "free speech" (which isn't demonstrated yet), that's merely coincidental, but it's not its defining property.

* To adopt hunterb123's preferred phrasing, because for them extremism apparently only begins when people start to draft assassination plans, not just daydreaming about it. I don't care about that particular semantic game, so I'll be as compatible as possible on this thread.

You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary.

Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship.

The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.

If left wing voices were equally banned from the mainstream sites then there would be balance on the alternatives.

Probably not, because here's the thing: Reddit isn't all that restricted.

Reddit still has swear words, porn, angry arguments about politics and religion on any subject, people arguing that most any social norm should be done away with... now you'll have to find the right subreddit for that, but that's about the only problem.

You have to dig quite deep to bump into a subject that you won't find any outlet for. Even in the cases where a subreddit got banned, you can almost always go and express the same opinion in r/changemyview and not be kicked off the site.

This means that there's about 3 reasons to ever seek out an alternative:

1. You have an issue with the management. Eg, you object to how the company works and don't want to give them money/traffic.

2. You have a purely philosophical disagreement with how the site is run, even if it doesn't impact you personally. You're offended the code isn't Open Source, or that moderation exists, or that people aren't able to hate on fat people, even though your personal usage of the site is just posting cat pictures and not impacted.

3. Your interest is one of the banned subreddits and you're a persona non grata on Reddit.

Of the three, the third is by far the most likely, and they're going to swamp out any influence the first two might have easily.

What’s the incentive for users to use it?

You’re offering a comparable product except with no real existing user base and a higher friction to gain new users for your community.

There’s some marginal audience in people interested in the principle of the thing, but the bulk of your users are going to be users that can’t be serviced by the main players.

If your only offering is “X, but we won’t ban you” then you’re going to collect the dregs of the internet.

There’s a bit of a feedback loop here as well in that many of the existing services are banning users and communities because they’re negatively impacting advertisers and the rest of the community. So when your service is overrun with the undesirables in short order, the rest of the communities are going to be negatively incentivized to migrate and you’re going to find it impossible to find any real financial support or backing.

So no, I don’t think “X, but free speech” will ever turn into anything but a cesspool. You need an offering that will attract desirable users as fast or faster than the undesirables that have been kicked out of anywhere else can sign up and that’s going to take some sort of additional value.

Yes, that's lemmy.ml

I've sometimes thought that downvotes shouldn't count for much when given by someone who doesn't reply. Count them, just not with nearly as much weight as someone who is willing to explain their disagreement. We already have flagging for marking something is inappropriate.