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Comment by larrysalibra | Hacker News Reader

If you get kicked off a mastodon server, you lose your followers and posts unless you're able to move your account before you're kicked off - which requires the cooperation of the server that wants to kick you off.

> If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you.

People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them.

> So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do.

It took me a while to get my head around it as well. The intro and faq on the github repo really helped me.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

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> People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them.

They have platforms they could go to. Parler, Rumble, Truth Social, their own blogs/websites, running a Polermo or Mastodon instance.

Twitter was a giant public pool. For the most part everyone was chill. And then the trolls arrived and started shitting and peeing in the pool. Swimming in that pool (the algorithmic timeline and such) became horrible.

My idea that it was less about the "powers that be" deplatforming people and more not owning the platform you post on. I love the federated social movement and the push for people whom I agree with and disagree with to own their platforms I am just saying that the "wo is me, my megaphone was taken away from me and now I have no way to access the hordes of other trolls that think and spew the hate that I do" is a false narrative because nothing was stopping them from creating their own platforms with off-the-shelf tools or spinning up websites like the Drudge Report or blogs or going to the other places where they like the alt-right or other fringe folks.

Federated is okay as long as it’s not used to organize violent acts. Sunshine isn’t always the best medicine.

Centralized social media has inspired and organized countless violent acts. Malaysia and India with Whatsapp is probably the most shocking. I don't see the connection between Federation/Centralization/etc. and violence. Can you explain your reasoning?

Centralized can be removed so that violent people can’t organize. It’s impossible to do that when those individuals own the servers or have a decentralized network.

Monopolies in media make government censorship easier. They also make intentional government incitement to nationalist violence easier, but that's not the violence that people who think they're well-represented by the government worry about.

> Twitter was a giant public pool. For the most part everyone was chill. And then the trolls arrived and started shitting and peeing in the pool.

Have you ever looked at the replies to a Trump tweet, an Ilhan Omar tweet, a J.K. Rowling tweet, or a Briahna Joy Gray tweet? The degree of bullying, invective, and threats coming from people who support deplatforming is intense.

But are they wrong?

Anti-Trump responses make sense. He's the most polarizing US President in recent history and almost everything he's done has been bad for the US (ok of course this is arguable but hold on while I make my point). Him leaving the platform was good for Twitter and for democracy. If he comes back as a candidate then he'll likely come back to Twitter, his account has already been reinstated.

Omar, if she breaks Twitter rules, can, and should, have her personal account suspended. As a sitting congresswoman she is entitled to her official handle. Unlikely to get deplatformed, so not an issue.

J.K. Rowling's takes on the transgender community is not even something I want to touch. It's too toxic and complicated to do so. That being said if -- see a pattern here? -- she runs afoul of the Twitter rules (whatever they may be) her personal account can be suspended or banned.

Briahna Joy Gray -- of course there are extremists on the left -- but if they don't oh I dunno -- incite a violent riot to overturn an election -- then I doubt she'll be deplatformed, though if she calls for violence or ... which would run afoul of rules ... see I am starting to see how the pool analogy really does work.

I know my stance on censorship is not a popular one. I have struggled with it myself. But I think it is self-consistent and I stand by it: let the wierdos, racists, nazis, hate filled folks scream into the void of their own making on servers they own to others that subscribe to their bullshit. As for me and the rest of the civilized world we'll continue to swim in clear, shit and pee-free water. ;-)

> It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them.

This is an important point. Free speech is really as much about the rights of the listener as the rights of the speaker, if not more so.

I think this is a good way of framing the censorship debate, because while it may be easy for some to dismiss the rights of a few dozen famous people that they hate, it's way harder to argue that the millions of people who follow those celebrities shouldn't be allowed to hear what they have to say, even if they want to.

(To be clear, I'm making a generalized moral argument here, not a legal one, so let's skip the whole "but it's a private platform" debate this time.)

If the rights of the listener have been infringed, why wouldn't the listener simply go to where they can continue listening? Nobody's holding a gun to their head.

> it's way harder to argue that the millions of people who follow those celebrities shouldn't be allowed to hear what they have to say, even if they want to.

Nobody is making that argument. The actual argument is that a private company should not be compelled to provide free hosting for them. They can and have used other hosting services but many of their followers apparently prefer not to use those alternatives.

> Nobody is making that argument.

This is untrue.

Not only are people making that argument explicitly, but there have been any number of orchestrated attacks on private companies in order to force them to remove content. And if they refuse, attacks on their vendors and distributors (such as app stores), including by the federal government and congresspeople openly demanding that they be banned, surrounded with completely unveiled threats of investigation and new legislation.

> They can and have used other hosting services but many of their followers apparently prefer not to use those alternatives.

Those alternatives are under constant attack by people making that argument that "nobody is making." The ones that have secured revenue or financing that is difficult to attack (i.e. Substack, Rumble) are thriving.

If you read more carefully, consider the distinction between a mainstream platform being asked to remove people who violated their terms of service and saying that those people should not be allowed to use platforms which cater to extremists. The former is what actually happens for otherwise legal content — and the reason is obvious once you think about it: private companies can’t be forced to provide services for anything other than legally protected categories, but they are sensitive to what advertisers want and what will attract the type of users they’re looking for. Twitter was previously trying to be more mainstream, which is why extremists trying to recruit wanted to be there instead of alternatives like Parler or Truth Social which only had people who were already converted.

> People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear.

A tiny minority. The majority listens to public health (in the case of Covid) and doesn’t want to read conspiracy theories or research analysis by someone unqualified.

This. This is so well said. It’s what I was trying to say but got ended up being more trolly than I had hoped.

Qualified voices were either censored on social media or ignored by political powers in regards to COVID.

In Portugal, the group of medical experts assembled by the government was ignored after they opposed the political decision for injecting children: https://www.publico.pt/2021/07/20/sociedade/noticia/comissao...

It is wrong to dismiss the opinion of experts on this topic just because it goes against what mainstream media and political groups decide to impose.

They opposed it because they said there wasn’t enough information. That is the excuse for doing nothing — an argument repeated ad nauseam during the pandemic.

Certainly there is an argument that children will be harmed if we do nothing. It’s a difficult decision because children a small number if children die from Covid, but it’s still not zero. The best way forward is to proceed with caution.

They clearly stated their opposition to injecting an experimental substance on children.

After two years before the injections existed exactly 3 cases of COVID-diagnosed deaths across a population of +700 thousand children in Portugal. Now the number of children with heart problems related to the injections is visible on news at plain sight.

The experts were ignored. Those supporting the experts on social media got banned or shadowbanned. This is not science, unless you consider medieval practices to be science.

This is obviously false. Some people will eventually have to learn to cope with the fact that Trump won an election, which means that their received wisdom is not a consensual truth.

edit: Additionally, the reasoning is fallacious - all people are minorities in many ways, so a few dozen tiny minorities can add up to an entire population. You may not disagree with the government about covid (although the government has disagreed with itself about covid), but you might disagree with the government about something else.

You're making the case that all social media should simply agree with the government line (because the people who disagree are minorities.) That's a dangerous case to make if you ever want to replace a government democratically.

You are correct. Trump won in 2016.

Scientists work for the government. If something is wrong we should fight to fix it. But almost all of the scientists outside of government agree with the scientists that work for the government.

> People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear.

I think if that were true a certain social network would have at least 70m more American users.

Nah fam. Trump got kicked off of twitter and the world was better for it. Same with Nick Fuentes. The list goes on.

> It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them.

More accurately, it was because they repeatedly broke the terms of service and the companies were no longer willing to use their resources to provide free amplification for them. They had legal agreements with the platform and despite many warnings and leeway which isn’t extended to most people, chose to break the contracts.

oh stop, this aint the time.

It is, though, because if you don’t understand or are unwilling to honestly describe what really happened you won’t be able to come up with a viable response.

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