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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
(Unless you are fond of teleological reasoning.)
But we still have relative necessities. If you want your car to drive, filling up the tank is necessary.
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.
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.
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."
They also tend to speak favorably about certain U.S. Republicans whom they say are pro free-speech and when you point out they are pro banning (BDS as an example), you either get instantly blocked or they suddenly 'are tired of this conversation and no longer wish to engage'.
Oh the irony.
I'm not saying that doing the former won't get you blocked too by rightists who basically just want their own echo chambers, but the latter seems to be the default level of discourse on Twitter when talking to the "other," so if that's what you defaulted to, I'm not too surprised you were shown the door.
Still others would rather just have a place to avoid politics altogether. My main account is on phpc.social which is supposed to be a hub for the PHP community, but recently there's been an uptick of people joining (or re-activating old accounts) and posting or reposting political nonsense. Quite annoying.
I specifically joined Mastodon to escape that and to try and see what the other side is really about. There are two broad categories of 'rightists' on Mastodon - the ones who are just looking to be provocative and then there are the ones who present themselves as more serious.
The first camp are non-serious trolls seeking to enrage, so I did not engage with them. The 'serious' ones are generally posting all kinds of things incl. toots I sometimes like and agree with and so I follow some of these accounts.
The problem with the second category is that when it comes to political discussions they tend to retreat to the same level of discourse as the trolls often. For example say a discussion turns to Jeremy Corbyn; they'll refuse to look at/read anything that suggests against him being what they believe him being, (some kind of CCP agent/extremist sympathizer/left of Mao communist that would've crashed the UK economy, ironic as that may sound atm).
Everything suggesting otherwise is some kind of a leftist rag apparently, but baseless accusation pieces confirming their bias I should take as authoritative.
Not seeing a contradiction between cheering the firing of a left-leaning professor and supposedly being pro free speech or endorsing someone who is for banning BDS as being pro free speech.
It also tends to happen that if I do admit some of their points as valid, they tend to take it as some sort of a big win and basically present it as a complete win for their argument, ignoring the points I countered them on completely. Everything seems to be a contest to own me and this is with people who outside of politics seem to be posting about tech, music or whatever.
It's extremely hard for me to find any right-leaning person on there who wants to find things we agree on, exchange civil views on things we don't and basically reach out in good faith. I know people like that are out there, but it doesn't seem to me like they number many, not on Mastodon for sure.
You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.
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.
I don’t see how that’s possible in online community.
The federated feed is noisy, just like the real world. You pick from it and decide what you interact with. Letting someone decide what you see there, it doesn't lessen the SNR, it just lessens what you see. For every hentai bot you don't see there is at least one real person with something interesting to say that you'll never see.
I prefer to decide what information is available to me, and that necessarily means wading through things I'm not interested in sometimes.
But if you really don't want to see arguments about Jews or whatever, just don't follow anyone who posts that. And if someone you follow does start with that stuff, just unfollow them, perhaps block them. In that manner it works the same way as on Twitter; once you have a solid base of sane people you're following, it's hard to just stumble across content that upsets you unless you're actively looking for it.
I don't believe most of these arguments, but I still think people ought to be able to say them.
There’s a reason 4chan is only popular with a certain demographic.
"You" in the proverbial sense of course, the way you used it above.
https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...
Not sure if you can block hashtags or something like that on Twitter.
"But nazis exist on the fediverse!" Yes, they do, just as they do in real life. But if you don't intentionally attend their rallies or whatever it is nazis do nowadays and instead stick to whatever non-nazi-aligned places and activities you feel comfortable with, you're probably not going to encounter any of them.