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Comment by sbuttgereit | Hacker News Reader

"Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with."

So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal on the front page of mastodon.social had only of either relatively neutral topics or various progressive tropes on the news of the day. No contrary views were there at all. Perhaps this is what you mean: it's your bubble, so it's cozy and non-toxic. A safe-space of sorts for all right minded people.

I do agree with you: Twitter is a digital hellscape. Of course, I deleted my account half a decade or so ago for this reason and to be fair, it's not changed. It might now have a different flavor with Musk, but still as toxic a place as it was before him. I can't see Mastodon as being much different and with that I'll do us both a favor a stay away from there as well.

View on HN

> So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation.

I'm not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you're linked with, but I'm on Universeodon and I've frankly seen nothing of the sort.

You do have a point of course, but I haven't seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hateful people simply get banned, and the servers that house them get blacklisted. Which isn't too dissimilar to how the world used to function before centralized social media made it harder to moderate which people you want to spend your time on.

I'm progressive of course, so it's easy for me. But the thing is, if you came up to me in the real world and started to talk about how wrong it is for people to be gay, then I'd frankly walk away from you. This is what becomes possible with decentralized social media, but I'm not sure I'd call it a bubble or safespace, it's simply going back to the world before Facebook and Twitter, to when it was much easier to ignore people.

> Toxic and hateful people simply get banned

I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.

If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.

>but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.

You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you.

Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.

I had to leave an instance because the maintainer said pro-life views were forbidden. Didn't matter whether you expressed them or not - the owner had a policy against private opinions.

I agree with your point about freedom of association, but let's not pretend this is just limited to racism.

And if you support the concept of free association, what do you do when it collides with civil rights law?

The great thing about Mastadon is that you're not actually excluded by being banned from a particular instance, you can go and join an instance that is aligned with your worldview (and as I understand it, still interact with people from other instances).

What do I do if instance A (this is where the person I follow) decides to ban instance B (my instance of choice)?

What if this happens more than once? Should I reregister every month and refollow the same people again and again?

What if I set up my own server and people will decide that some of my toots are not "left" or "progressive" enough?

Well that’s society working as designed I think.

Really? wow, okay. Thank god I'm not part of this society.

bigot bĭg′ət (noun)

One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

Furthermore, leftism needs to have these banning-systems because modern leftism cannot survive in a free speech environment.

This is why all leftists started leaving twitter when Musk took over and promised free speech (not freedom of reach), they knew instantly that the gig was up.

uh-uh-uh-uh, wait a minute, please contain your prejudice. First off, you're talking of a very narrow and US-centric definition of "leftist". Second, it's tiresome to hear this constant whining about "leftists" that cannot tolerate (or in your version, survive free speech) different views. It's simply not true, what doesn't rub well is constant complaints about being disrepsected for maintaining some frankly disrespectable opinions. That simple...

All freespeech platforms, from 4chan to twitter, are pre-dominantly right wing.

All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.

Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe. The west is one global entity these days. JK Rowling is hated by swedish leftists and california leftists.

Third, "it's simply not true" is not a convincing argument in the face of millions of examples. Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?

Twitter is a free speech platform? Did I just imagine Elon banning unlabeled parody accounts? Did Elonjet’s account get restored? What about Chad Loder, the activist Elon banned at Andy Ngo’s behest?

> All freespeech platforms, from 4chan to twitter, are pre-dominantly right wing.

> All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.

This seems to be relying on popular belief rather than facts, and making a lot of assumptions in regards to why particular groups would prefer particular forums. If we're drawing spurious correlations 4chan also seems to enjoy a lot more violent and illegal pornography than say reddit - can we draw conclusions from that regarding the right as well?

> Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe.

You're now defining a sub group of the left. What separates the "woke" left from the regular left. or are they all one and the same in your eyes? And if so, do you think that actually aligns with everyone who calls identifies as left?

> The west is one global entity these days.

Are you American? As a Canadian I say it definitely is not, we're now at an impasse I guess?

> Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?

Who are the biggest comedians? And if they are the biggest why would they go to a college when they can fill a stadium.

There is literally no difference between "modern leftism" or "modern right-wing" in free speech environments, you are just being dishonest.

If you think modern leftism is being mad about people being racist, that says more about you.

>Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole.

This is oversimplifying things.

Here is the example: https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01...

>We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that

So I can't really be part of the team if a person whom I follow on github or somewhere else is somehow "correct worldview". I may even not be aware of this.

Not to mention that many people actually have no idea what they are talking about and use words like "nazis" only to describe abstract "bad people" as opposed to their image of "good people"

Example from the same link:

>we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism)

Apparently I won't be able to participate if I follow Bill Gates blog.

This is an odd minority viewpoint for HN actually. I find most people feel rather empowered by the decentralized nature of mastodon… or email for that matter.

Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain.

The difference here is you can just hook into the same decentralized system the publisher is using, and subvert them by finding another instance to use or even making your own! With no difference in reach or power.

Why is that bad? The seems to be MUCH better for you.

> Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain.

This is a strawman. Commenter said anything about the right to free speech, only about the willingness to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.

We all know that Bob is not obligated to listen to Alice, and he is not required to host a venue for her opinions. But Bob's eagerness to run away to a place where there is no risk of seeing Alice's view, while not necessarily bad (if you want to live in a bubble, live in a bubble), it is _not_ a virtue.

Ignoring people with opinions that are sophomoric, bigoted, or can’t be differentiated from trolling saves an immense amount of time and frustration. Filtering noise can surely be closer to something a person with a healthy attitude towards other peoples opinions would do as opposed to letting every single person get their 30 seconds on the megaphone, even after their third or fourth flat earth tirade.

What exactly is not a virtue about Bob’s eagerness to be able to eat lunch with friends and associates without having random people poking in and saying cruel things about his existence?

I’m really confused by this rhetoric, because the logical conclusion is that Bob should at minimum be exposed to things he doesn’t want to be exposed to regardless of what the thing is because of the potential Bob might be missing out on a good point. But it also means if Alice’s view is sending Bob death threats and threatening to murder his family, Bob should be exposed to that as equally as if Alice’s view was that pineapples are a superior topping on pizza?

It's very disappointing that you cannot distinguish between "opposing views" and "death threats".

Let me try to help: one is not illegal so it should in principle be allowed on a platform that is seeking an honest discussion. The other is a crime and can be dealt withing the framework of the law. If the person commiting crimes is behind an anonymous identity, I think that's where the problem actually lies - perhaps the administrator should be compelled by law to disclose the real person behind the anonymous profile (is the Mastodon community against that)?! If what they've done is indeed against the law, then a ban is definitely justified (and may be required by law - i.e. we're back to the rule of law, not mob rules), no one will argue against that... but what I am against is banning people simply for having opposing views, which is what we actually see happening. Do you see people complaining that someone who commits crimes online should not be banned from anything? That's not my argument or anyone else's argument, so your response comes as a complete strawman.

I think you’re trying to make exceptions because the actual rhetoric and logic this leads to is distasteful. Using “well it’s illegal” is just shallow logic to differentiate speech that should or shouldn’t force people to expose to as is that people should be exposed to whatever they consent to be exposed to.

Frankly, if Alice is seeking honest disagreement discussion, Alice should seek to talk with people who consent to that kind of engagement with her, instead of chasing after Bob who would rather not engage. If Alice is having difficulty finding those people, maybe her source selection is simply quite uncommon; lots of highly controversial subject matter applies almost exclusively to small parts of the population, and a minority of that minority is generally available to debate on that subject.

I’m sure Alice can have spirited debate about toppings on pizza, a subject that a larger set of people are usually willing to disagree and discuss about. If she insists on trying to force a minority of a minority to debate with her, I think a friend group is fairly justified in defending Bob by ousting Alice, as Alice is unable to respect people’s basic boundaries like “can we change the subject”.

> Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government.

This is a commonly parroted error. The First Amendment to the US Constitution which protects freedom of expression is mostly between the gov't and you...

...but the CONCEPT of freedom of speech is an ethical concept that goes well beyond the roll of government. It is about ensuring the rights of minority speech and controversial opinions.

Speech that makes you uncomfortable can be some of the most valuable speech people need to hear.

I often find it telling when you ask someone who favors social media censorship if they would prefer themselves be shielded from uncomfortable speech, or if they specifically want everyone to be shielded.

Without fail, they want censorship for everyone else - not themselves.

I see you’re coming at this from a moral stance where I do agree with you, it’s not great on a personal level to not be challenged.

But does that apply here? We’re talking about private citizens, running a publication platform.

If you went to your local community newsletter, asked to put in an article saying “this community is full of bigots, and none of you want to hear about it” and they deny including your article, there’s no legal recourse for you.

Sure, there’s the ideals of the marketplace of ideas, but there’s also very real restrictions on speech because society wouldn’t function if everyone was required to hear and consider every voice.

I’m also not American, so I’m no expert here obviously. I could be totally wrong on this and maybe there is legal precedent for forcing a private publication to publish something after some sort of legal free speech complaint.

There is also the concept that once corporations reach as certain SCALE, then they ethically have some responsibilities towards the principles society asks of government.

In 1776, a person shouting obscenities in a pub, would get duly thrown out. He had the freedom to shout in the park, at a coffee shop, in the library, or in any of a thousand other places in town.

Today, political discourse takes places almost entirely online and via private corporations. Google isn't a pub on 2nd ave and 54th street. It's ALL THE ESTABLISHMENTS IN TOWN. ...or at least it, along with 3-4 other of the global tech oligopolies. It's important to note that while massive global tech companies are not formally part of government, they are very integrated with gov't through lobbying, gov't contracts, and direct political sponsorship, and a variety of other individual contacts and arrangements.

As a result of their SCALE of their control, they implicitly inherit some ethical obligations to allow uncomfortable speech to occur.

I don't believe in limitless speech rights - but the current limits are vague and selectively enforced and thus easily susceptible to political bias - which is the most dangerous kind of censorship.

> This is an odd minority viewpoint for HN actually. I find most people feel rather empowered by the decentralized nature of mastodon… or email for that matter.

Mastodon is decentralized at the protocol level. It's the opposite of that at the social level. The mob rule may be "decentralized", but it turns out it still sucks. Cross one extremist and get accused of being a bigot / -ist du jour, and them and their friend will run you out of town. No big deal, you say, you can always switch towns? Except no, because the extremists will follow and denounce you for your "bigotry" / -ism, and threaten to do the same to anyone willing to harbor you, and then no town will want you in, because none of them want to be cut off of everyone else. On the main subnet, it's every instance pointing a gun at every other one - even if most believe the common rules are extreme, no one trusts others enough to challenge them.

The irony is, this is basically rediscovering the lessons of past thousand years of civilization. Mastodon is the digital equivalent of a sea of towns afraid of their own people and other towns alike, due to roving parties of political officers executing criminals and wrongthinkers alike. Somewhere along the way people figured that rule of law, presumption of innocence, due process, proportionality of punishment, civilization, are nice things to have.

Anyway. Been there, done that, tried to enjoy it while pretending there is no problem, until the admin retired the instance. I don't feel like participating again. I'm off both Twitter and Mastodon. As much as I hate corporate ad-poisoned Internet, I do have to grant it that it's the more honest one - people will do bad things to each other in pursuit of ad revenue (or revenue in general), but at least they're not pretending too much. They're not bending their own minds past breaking point to feel OK with delivering mob punishment and signalling allegiance to not become targets themselves.

If I’m being honest, that’s a bit dramatic. The internet has always been at least a little clique-y.

If the group-think and witch hunting is as hard on you as you seem to describe, I can assure you there are MANY others in the same position.

So make your own thing.

Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.

The adventurous among them will venture over when they want.

> If I’m being honest, that’s a bit dramatic. The internet has always been at least a little clique-y.

Maybe. And maybe it's my age showing. But there's one other thing - the modern social media solve for a different problem than the forums and boards of yore: they're all-encompassing, topic-agnostic. They're social, as in, one identity, for everything, with everyone.

Back in the day, topical, isolated cliques were all we had. All the different mailing groups, IRC servers, phpBB boards, etc. were entirely independent of each other. Sure, I may have used the same handle on a bunch of them, but reputation - good or bad, pristine or smeared - did not propagate through the boundaries. Then social media happened, and we got used to having centralized platforms, with a single identity, for all aspects of life. That's the world of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Mastodon is just decentralizing Twitter on a protocol level - it's carrying over the expectation of single identity, of a topic-agnostic, all-encompassing platform.

> Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.

Because the Internet isn't a niche hobby anymore. It is life. There's no on-line vs. off-line anymore, they're both intertwined in almost everything we do daily. In other words, it's serious. Serious, as in, standing up to worst cases of dishonesty and hatred on some board may suddenly cost you your actual job, and your family a roof over their heads.

People have tried to create more sensible set of community rules on Mastodon. Last I checked, none of those attempts were successful - mostly because anyone who tries or is seen supporting the attempt, gets shot on sight^W^W^Waccused of being hateful racist bigot wanting to harbor literal nazis. There's an inherent asymmetry here; it's the same kind of play as "would someone think of the children", except the society doesn't have antibodies for the former just yet, like it has for the latter.

What is bad is the missing balance. I need to see opposing views (there are more than two sides)

Set up your own server and ban the people you want to ban. It's that simple.

I don’t know why HN seems to have a culture of confusing minority opinions for toxicity and hate.

If you are against gay marriage there’s nothing at all toxic or hateful about that. Hell, I know gay people who were against gay marriage when the public debate was at its peak.

Where it’s toxic is if any time a gay person talks about wedding planning, posts a meme about the phrase “her wife” having good energy, or shares art of two guys at the altar you appear in the replies to get on your soapbox and start an argument about gay marriage. Nobody asked. Alternatively, just like HN, if your account is entirely flamebait about gay marriage nobody wants to see that and you’ll get the hammer.

Where it’s hate is when you express the that you’re against gay marriage because you don’t want to see gay people to be out in public, you think affection between two men is disgusting and unnatural, you call their sexual orientation a lifestyle choice, call gay people pedos, or otherwise pick on, doxx, belittle, or dehumanize gay people.

Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. I express minority opinions constantly and have never once even been worried about the banhammer.

It did not use too, but it is hard for me to tell where/when the shift happened. All I know for sure is that anyone with mildly stronger views on 1st amendment are called speech absolutists. It is extra annoying, because 'hate speech' is mostly recently made up term to stifle free speech AND, more importantly, does not exist anywhere in US constitution.

<< Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful.

You can, but it becomes a game of using language that it is harder to pinpoint ( hence silliness like Xi banning 8 for infinity ). All the while majority opinion can be as hateful as is deemed necessary ( and no one complains because it is the majority ) creating yet another echo-chamber we so sorely need.

FWIW, this trend is now being challenged.

edit: I like calling spade a spade. You can dislike it all you want, but I am personally less and less willing to comply with other person's sensibilities[1].

[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763...

> because 'hate speech' is mostly recently made up term to stifle free speech AND, more importantly, does not exist anywhere in US constitution

Which is why dirty commie liberals like me want to get a national hate speech law passed just like other countries have.

    Canada (which passed in the 1989)
    Ireland (passed in 1989)
    New Zeland (passed in 1993)
    Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, UK, Iceland, Denmark

So I don't know your definition of recent is but it's been around for a bit. And the term "free speech absolutist" just another instance of a very deep rooted fundamental difference between red vs blue which is freedom vs liberty. It crops up all over the place: freedom from vs freedom to, equality vs equity. Both sides actually want free speech, the blue side just argues that speech is more free when it's not stifled by hate.

<< just like other countries have.

I moved from the old country partly cuz of Lèse-majesté laws regarding ruling elite and clergy. Forgive me, but other countries having X type laws does not automatically constitute a valid argument to enact anything similar here. I now personally see it as an indirect way to circumvent original framework of this country having failed to do it directly.

In short, I am going to use a very, very old argument. If everyone jumped off of a bridge, would you do it too?

<< is more free when it's not stifled by hate.

Fascinating statement and I would love you to elaborate further, because to me it is contradictory.

Freedom of speech is called freedom of speech for a reason. It is not called freedom with asterisk to account for other person's perception of your communication. That is not freedom. It is the opposite of freedom. Frankly, what you are proposing inevitably results in an echo chamber. It is cool if that if it is what you want. It is not what I want.

You seem reasonable. I am willing to engage. Convince me 'free speech' is more free when it is restricted.

I know I will 100% regret posting anything remotely viewed as political here but this...

Both sides actually want free speech, the blue side just argues that speech is more free when it's not stifled by hate.

Is the most alarming doublethink I have seen in some time.

I can't speak for other people but I'm not gonna go after you or anything. It's not unreasonable or anything to see freedom as in liberty as contradictory in nature, people say the same thing about the paradox of tolerance or tragedy of the commons. It's one of those things things if you say viewing freedom from a systems perspective is invalid then its the natural conclusion.

I don't really see it as doublethink. There's plenty of examples were rules make people more free. Our whole system of laws is based on that idea.

I can drive on public roads and get where I want to quickly and safely because we all follow traffic laws. I have greater freedom to travel because there are rules.

I can mostly (well during the day at least, give it up for being a woman) walk around freely and completely defenseless because of the laws about assault, murder, and theft.

Right now we're on a forum where good discussion can be had because the mods will drop the banhammer if you start posting hate. If you know that posting anything about a controversial topic or just being a person who's identity is controversial at the moment will bring out a tidal wave of green accounts hurling insults against, you likely wouldn't post. Would you feel comfortable existing in the public sphere as a trans person if when you tweet you about any topic you got a hundred replies telling you to kill yourself already? Would you want to hang out in an IRC channel where any time you talk someone says, "shut up woman, get back to the kitchen?"

If you believe your right to swing your arm ends where my face begins then whether you think it's right to restrict hate speech or not I think there should at least be some recognition that my position is at least logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.

<< Would you want to hang out in an IRC channel where any time you talk someone says, "shut up woman, get back to the kitchen?"

You, an individual who does not want to see this can set ignore on that someone.

<< logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.

It is consistent if you accept the logic leap made to assume restriction on speech somehow enhances it. Personally, I am not convinced, because I think you confuse safety ( or mental comfort ) with freedom.

Maybe the word freedom has become too overloaded with meaning in English language. Maybe we should use something else:

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"

Also, as a very practical measure, even if we do assume that hate speech actually does what it is supposed to do ( identify hate and remove hateful content ), do you really think it is smart to hide it from public view? And we did not even touch that 'hate speech' has recently come, not unlike nazis' to mean 'anything I don't like'.

I find it funny you bring up Ukraine in this conversation, it is considered the 2nd most corrupt country in Europe only behind Russia[1], has a long history of far-right ideologies [2]. And recently during this conflict have supported multiple groups that use literal Nazi imagery, most notably the Azov Regiment, which the Ukraine government are telling us are totally not Nazis despite using a bunch of imagery(such as the Black Sun and the Wolfsangel) that would likely get you arrested in some of the other countries you mentioned. [3]

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index?c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

> If you are against gay marriage

I didn't use being against "gay marriage" as the example though. I used being against "gay people" as the example.

Oops, I wasn't referencing anything specific when I typed this up. I can see how that is confusing. But yes, I agree with you. I won't say that there's no way to be against gay people without being hateful but it feels like an incredibly tough needle to thread.

> Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. I express minority opinions constantly and have never once even been worried about the banhammer.

I've been banned from several subreddits for simply disagreeing with majority views, and pretty much every time it was in a neutral or respectful tone.

-----

PS: the entire concept of "toxic" seems "new age-y" and pseudo-religious. People refer to things being toxic as a substitute for "evil" and "taboo" - stuff that brings uncomfortable or negative associations, and in this manner they are embedding their projection of a civil religion onto others, which is an act of aggression in itself in a medium that is supposed not to have such rules.

Note that they say "toxic" and not just "rude" which would imply a certain common, traditional culture that most people would be expected to know and to some extent abide by. Toxic takes the place of the figure of "rudeness", "bad manners" and "heresy" but instead of based off a longstanding tradition, culture and religion, based of a newfangled atheist civil religion that a lot of people simply don't accept or don't want to play ball with. Their very presence and their discourse is seen as contaminating society, thus "toxic" - this is exactly equivalent to the moral worldview of a religious fanatic.

And those "heretics" are dealt with with medieval intolerance as there is no discussion to be had on these "values" from their point of view. You see in this people the fervour, hatred and emotional response you'd expect from an inquisitor who just witnessed wanton heresy or a taboo being broken, and that is exactly how more often than not mods behave in these platforms. Their interest in expanding their ideology and protecting themselves and others from heretics motivates them to put a lot of free labour in these endeavours, which is hard to compete with.

So what I see often happens that gets people banned based on their political views tends to be someone trying to start a debate where someone else was not in a debate.

Trans person: *exists and makes a post*

"Honest debater": I don't think you should...

And they get banned. Not everything is or was an invitation to "debate".

Also known as (if I’m not mistaken) “reply guys”: those who attempt to hijack threads by replying to posts and steering the conversation towards something only tangentially related to the post/poster, almost always in an adversarial manner, rather than starting their own threads for the topics they’re wanting to discuss.

Yeah I'm generally not too up of whatever the latest term is, but you'll see accounts that literally registered and immediately started making no posts except telling people their political views are wrong. Or their existence is wrong.

Like, if you're only there to argue, nobody is going to want to hang out with you, sorry. Plenty of good debates happen, including people with differing political views, but you have to bring something besides hate to the table.

Of course, then those people claim they were "censored" for "being conservative" or whatever, but more than likely they were just banned because their only point in registering was to attack other people.

I think "reply guys" are men who tend to always reply to tweets from women, inoffensively but repeatedly,[1] and the thing you're describing is "sealioning"[2].

[1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int...

Honestly, "sealioning" reminds me of the ocean, which reminds me of my favorite shampoo, Ocean Breeze™. You should try it sometime!

> distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview"

People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.

Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?

I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.

Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.

The analogy is inappropriate:

1. Spam is filtered, not censored. I can still see spam in my "Spam" folder if I want to. Mastodon doesn't merely filter "bad" content; it prevents you from seeing it even if you want to. It would be the equivalent of email actively deleting spam, and "spam" includes an email that suggests vaccines have side effects.

2. It's easy to see that it's not for the benefit of users. They could easily mark things as toxic (perhaps by category, or by who marked it as toxic), and let users filter out what they want. It's not about helping users. It's about controlling users.

3. "Spam" does not include contrary political viewpoints. There's a difference between a viagra ad. I don't want my uncle sending me political rants, but I certainly don't want google deciding I can't read them.

Spam is censored, the vast majority can't even be sent because of SPF etc

You can pick a different server if you don't like the censorship on the one you're on, that's the whole point

To the spammers it's all great content you should be getting. No one's deleting your messages on your own Mastodon server, they're just not copying it to their server, what's the problem?

That was pretty much the world before mass social media. Most forums were human moderated and you can be banned for just being a jerk. Moderators are most of the time pretty good at interpreting nuance, tone and intention.

Who are these magical people who are fair and just, and how do you choose them? How come do they choose to do this completely free of charge? Do you pay for your Mastodon instance membership? If not, why is someone willing to go through the trouble of doing this for free for complete strangers? How the strangers choose the right moderators for them, even though they are not paying for any of this? I don't know, but something doesn't make any sense to me with Mastodon and similar decentralized services.

Except, before social media, forums were focused and independent, and the Internet itself was a nerdy hobby. Getting banned from a discussion board might have hurt in some cases, but wasn't really that big of a deal.

Today, social media are all-encompassing, and Internet is now a critical part of normal life. Getting banned from one modern discussion board can easily get you banned from every other one too, and/or the fallout may impact "offline" aspects of your life. At best, it'll make a bunch if things inconvenient. At worst, it may destroy your relationships, your career, and push you into poverty.

Or, in other words: getting banned from a group in the 1990s or early 2000s was like getting a formal reprimand in your record at school. Today, it's starting to look more like getting a criminal record in the police database.

What an odd thing to say. You can ban people from your instance of mastodon, just like you could ban, kick, suspend etc, people from your IRC server in olden times. What is wrong with that? How strange to make an act of moderation on your own personal instance into an act of censorship.

He's not complaining about the mastodon technical protocol: he's complaining about the people who control the community and the rules.

> the people who control the community and the rules

Who are these people? The protocol is decentralised, if you don't like it, spin your own instance! 5-10$ a month and you get more than enough for a few thousand people.

here is a post from the front page of mastadon. Seems pretty toxic to me. Im sure that person isnt getting banned, but the equivalent from the right would get banned.

Just so we’re clear here, Florida wants to ban children from discussing their periods but also wants student athletes to report their periods, in case you were still unclear about how fucking dumb these people are.

I run a politics forum and the one rule is no name calling/insulting people (famous or a forum member), groups, ideology etc. It is incredibly civil. It turns out 1) that is the only rule you need to keep civility 2) it makes for a really boring place as most people just want to name call and not actually discuss politics.

> to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview"

To me there are basically two sides to this, and I'll outline them with two examples.

One is when people decide to have a debate on whether or not trans women should be allowed in women sports. In this case, banning people who have the "wrong" opinion is sort of dystopian. At least with the decentralized social network, you can't really ban them, just silence them on your particular server, so in a sense it's less dystopian than centralized social media. But I frankly agree with you on this, because it makes having discussions on certain subjects impossible, which isn't great.

The other example is when someone posts pictures of Warhammer models they have painted, and someone starts commenting on their gender, race, religion or whatever that is completely unrelated to the original post. Or when someone is being plain hateful in any context. In those cases, the way I see it is that the hateful person is breaking the social contract in which we all agree to be respectful to each other. Once you break that contract, then it no longer applies to you. This is the way the real world functions, and it's how the internet used to function before the ability to moderate assholes was centralized and sort of removed.

I have absolutely seen toxic behavior, because it was levelled at me.

Specifically, for the "sin" of defending people who choose to also remain at Twitter because we still have some people we care about over there (in my case, lots of Black folks who haven't made the switch.)

And for that, I've been called, e.g. a Nazi.

As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today, the most visible toxic-but-cozy-because-our-silo was that BIPOC people don't need to use content warning (CW) labels when site guidelines say use CW labels on political toots. The reason given was that white people must not be able to opt out of the BIPOC experience of political outrage.

The New Left has become unrecognizable to me as a mode of liberal thinking and both sides of the political fence in the US appear to have escaped into a hole of myopic beliefs that mirror each other in their intensity and desire for control.

What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules?

> As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today ...

> The New Left has become unrecognizable to me

That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

When people are young, they challenge the corrupt system. As those changes are enacted, those young people grow older and become the system. Then a new generation sees that 'progress' of your youth as the old, corrupt, scelerotic system; they have nothing invested in your achievements; they see the system's flaws and push to change them.

The formerly-young-challengers, now old-system-members, say 'that's crazy, outlandish, outrageous, etc.' - exactly what was said to them when they were young.

Oh yes, I know, 'this time it's different'. 'These kids really are outrageous.' Those words are also exactly the same as before.

If you want to be progressive, you need to keep seeing the flaws, not accepting them, and keep pushing for change. The moment you stop, say 'far enough we've done a good job', you cease being progressive.

I would consider myself left leaning and still wish to see a lot of progress and change but I disagree with quite a few talking points of what might be considered the current “zeitgeist” of the far left. Would I consider misgendendering a _violent_ hate crime? No. Am I for more inclusion and free choice of gender identity? Yes. Do I think that pure socialism will save humanity? No. Do I think it’s bad we have people on the planet with more money than multiple countries combined? Yes.

I would even argue most progressives are seeing flaws and don’t accept them and push for change but you don’t need to be “radical”(as in further from the status quo) in your views to do that and it doesn’t make you less of a progressive - you are just trying to push to a different spot on the manifold.

If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions. The right wing is large and has lots of factions, with the only thing uniting them being resistance to the left's attempts to reform the system.

The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tends to favour you or not.

> The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tends to favour you or not.

I'm not sure about that. I know some conservatives (which I'd consider myself as well, though leaning libertarian) who are very well off but didn't start that way, and their political ideas remained constant. I know others who aren't particularly wealthy, but hold the same ideas.

Fundamentally, I believe it's more about "what will work?", in essence "if we organized our society along these lines, would it still function, or would it fall apart", and progressives and conservatives have vastly different opinions on that.

For a single issue: conservatives generally believe that "if you pay people to do nothing, that's exactly what they'll do" and thus are opposed to high welfare (because people will stop working, and without people working, nothing gets produced), while progressives believe that people will be freed by not worrying about their income and will voluntarily work and become very productive, which is why they're very much in favor of high welfare (e.g. UBI). It's one side saying "don't change this, you'll break everything" and the other side saying "no, we need to change this, it'll get better".

But it's not about your current status in the system. My political convictions haven't changed much since when I was pretty much poor vs now that I'm doing very well (though they've become calmer, but I'd attribute that mostly to age).

UBI or basic welfare is supported by many right-winger opinion leaders, eg Friedman and Hayek.

I don't think Neoliberalism maps onto left/right that well, but is generally favored by people who believe in markets. It's not particularly conservative or right-wing though.

> If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions. The right wing is large and has lots of factions, with the only thing uniting them being resistance to the left's attempts to reform the system.

Which is by and large the entire problem. The right is rarely interested in solving problems.

So I could find minor points of agreement -- there's certainly people out there who are a tad too radical for my taste. The problem is that in general though I'm very much in favor of change, and the right isn't.

> Which is by and large the entire problem. The right is rarely interested in solving problems.

The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem. That is basically why they pick up the label "conservative", the right only exists as a political unit to resist threats from the left. Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies). And every faction generally keeps busy dealing with their own perceived problems.

> The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem.

That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.

> Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies).

No, the right favors non-government approaches because they want to pick and choose. They for instance heavily endorse personal charity because you get to pick who you help.

I on the other hand think there should be a floor in society below which nobody is allowed to fall, and that it ideally should be implemented in a fully blind and dispassionate manner, eg, UBI. Everyone gets it automatically no questions asked, without needing to be liked by the local community.

> That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.

My government have made it very difficult for me to take my own health, retirement savings, home improvement and often financial decisions into my own hands. Typically the way his happens is that some leftist will be responsible although in the case of the financial stuff it tends to be nonpartisan corruption. If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen. Ignoring the left is not really an option; they'll identify resources and come for them to fund their own plans. Otherwise the awkward truth is that controlling government wouldn't be such a big deal.

> My government have made it very difficult for me to take my own health, retirement savings, home improvement and often financial decisions into my own hands.

> ...

> If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen

Right, that's exactly what I was talking about. We can agree on the surface about some things, but underlying priorities and views aren't really compatible even when things happen to align by accident.

Eg, my desire for having guaranteed social minimums isn't really compatible with your desire to personally control what your tax money gets spent on.

Three posts ago you were pointing out obstructionism, now you're saying we have fundamental incompatibilities that can only be resolved by putting money into a pot and having it spent the way you want it to be.

I put it to you that it isn't 'obstructionism', it is plain old disagreement. Or if you prefer, the left is being just as obstructionist in blocking the right from making their own decisions. The only difference is where the obstructions are happening.

> Three posts ago you were pointing out obstructionism, now you're saying we have fundamental incompatibilities that can only be resolved by putting money into a pot and having it spent the way you want it to be.

There's different things being discussed. I started answering the "If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions" bit.

My answer to that is that there are genuine underlying incompatibilities, and so even if there's a superficial agreement on something once in a while (eg, we both agree some policy goes a tad too far), it still makes no sense for me to switch camps.

The obstructionism is a tangential side point: that the right seems to have no policy other than being anti-left, and so far you've done nothing to convince me otherwise.

Global warming will be by far the biggest challenge going forward. As long as parties on "the right" don't believe in it, or take it seriously or don't address it appropriately there is no way in hell for me to ever consider voting for anything on that spectrum. I can deal with a little over the top wokeness. I cannot deal with the destruction of the planet.

But the catastrophising of climate change is also harmful, and results in people proposing 'solutions' that seem likely to bring about an even faster collapse of civilisation.

One 2019 UK report (https://www.icax.co.uk/pdf/Absolute_Zero_Report.pdf) proposes a timeline that's been circulating on Twitter, involving the closure of all airports and shutting down all international shipping by 2050, while pricing 40% of traffic off the roads and banning beef+lamb. That (along with many more less-drastic but still significant restrictions) is what it would take to reach 'net zero' with current technology.

And that was written in 2019, when people were generally a lot more reasonable than they are in the post-Covid world.

(Do they even realise what they're proposing by 'no international shipping'... Amongst many other things, that means zero microchips for the UK, let alone complete technology products such as phones, TVs, or EVs)

Meanwhile in the real world (here in the UK), we've got a massive cost-of-living crisis, a collapsing healthcare system, a disaster of a property market, and a rising population that we're failing to build infrastructure to cope with. We have a a terribly incompetent government, and an opposition that seems no better. And we're living with the threat of WW3, the tail end of the pandemic, and now a banking crisis too.

Even a glance at your own link shows you are misinterpreting it.

> We currently have no non-emitting freight ships, so there is an urgent need for exploration of means to electrify ship power

It seems like you are the one "catastrophising".

> catastrophising of climate change is also harmful

What if it is a catastrophe? Should we pretend otherwise?

The word 'catastrophize' implies that the speaker is creating the catastrophe. Climate change sure seems like one to me, whether anyone says it or not.

Hypothetical history books could one day read "and in 2023 the Russians nuked New York". Probably in some African script since they'd be talking about the end of civilisation in the northern hemisphere.

While I don't want to try and defend every right wing policy, the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020. The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.

All the evidence I see is I'm more likely to die in a fire caused by soldiers than power plants.

> the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020

That's why it will be very difficult for us to find any common ground. Even though I am very much a free market guy and definitely don't agree with every policy on the left. The right down plays, ignores or ridicules global warming. How one can read the IPCC report and doesn't feel any sense of urgency is beyond me. This shouldn't even be a left or right issue.

It's because the right benefits in two ways by politicizing it:

1. Attacking the left brings them support

2. Their carbon industry supporters.

> the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020

Your argument is assumptions - that climate change isn't the biggest challenge, that others are bigger.

> The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.

What is "official reporting"?

China and Russia feature quite largely in the news. It's hard to imagine them getting more coverage.

Ok- but what if the planet isn't destroyed after all?

What makes you believe we have any control over the climate?

What makes you believe that in the sham democracy, your vote makes any difference?

> What makes you believe we have any control over the climate?

CO2 has two vibrational modes that are IR active. We release carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere that was previously bound inside the earth's crust. Humans increased the CO2 concentration from 280ppm to 420ppm (pre-industrial -> today). The science is settled. Whether you believe in it or not: Global warming is happening and humans are causing it. I understand that it is something you don't want to be true (and trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong). But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.

> The science is settled.

Well, we'll see. There are predictions of global devastation within the next decade.

> But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.

It's not about that. Rather it's about the law of slow-moving disasters.

For example, what if I told you there was a train coming down the tracks that is about to flatten you. Would you be scared? What if I told you it was coming at you at 1cm/year. Would you be scared then?

This is the law of slow-moving disasters. We tend not to notice them in practice. If the weather changes year to year on the time-scale of decades or centuries, the rate of change is so low that buildings will simply be replaced over time. In extreme cases, populations will migrate.

Ancient humans have lived in climates both much warmer, and much cooler than those we currently experience.

> trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong

I think I trust you. You seem like a stand-up guy, but understand that there is a huge amount of power to be distilled out of this. So there are a great number of people who are heavily incentivised to look the other way if there are any unanswered questions.

For a parallel example, see the refusal to acknowledge side effects including mycardiatus from COVID vaccinations.

> So there are a great number of people who are heavily incentivised to look the other way if there are any unanswered questions.

I never really got this argument: There are even more powerful and even richer people that have incentives that nothing changes: ExxonMobile, Koch Industries, BP, Volkswagen, BMW, GM, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.

> Well, we'll see. There are predictions of global devastation within the next decade.

We've already 'seen'. The science is, of course, based on an enormous amount of empirical evidence. We can always just say, 'we'll see what happens next', but it's a bizarre argument - on that basis you never act.

>I understand that it is something you don't want to be true...

Speaking this way breaks the conversation.

I would say that the downfall of climate change will be that the parties "on the left" don't believe in it, not really.

Who is calling for pure socialism? The only people I hear mention it are reactionary anti-progressives.

> What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules?

It's one of the larger instances but the top heaviest constitute the majority by far and they all enshrine these policies.

I don't think you're really answering my criticism. You're lumping my "retrograde" progressiveness in with the well-worn wheel of timely revolts against the corruption of the past. I'm saying that both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism and that the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few.

One could also argue that the left has widened from being at the service of white male workers to a much broader range of minorities. That is, it is at the service of more people, but white males have lost the exclusive control of it.

There seems to be no middle ground anymore for white males that exclusively want to address labor issues. Perhaps it is true that to push for progress in labor, the root problem of the power dynamics must be addressed (i.e. you can't be colorblind here).

well if there's no way to spin anything without getting entagled in some sort of intersectional original sin, then it's devolved in Jacobin Terreur.

You have made your decision, then.

Can you elaborate? I’m suspecting you mean “If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem” which is unfortunately the level of narrow minded zealotry that’s so damaging

"You're Not Part of the Solution" is enough.

Imagine this is a conversation in a novel or a movie.

> You have made your decision, then.

Is this something the hero says? To me, it looks like something the villain says.

> it's devolved in Jacobin Terreur

Can you give examples of that happening? I don't see any at all. I mean actual violence and terror.

These wild claims are becoming comical. The other day, it was the Cambodian genocide. Are we just picking catastrophes and arbitrarily saying they are happening? What's next? The Fall or Rome? The 10 Plagues from the Bible?

No mean to insult, but this is a bit of an “in the spectrum” reply. I’m not claiming guillotines are being erected on public squares, of course it’s not the case. On the other hand, the aggressive nitpick and overzealous strawmanning of anyone not carefully following te political doctrine is quite similar. Is it too difficult to see or are you also acting in bad faith?

But what is "The Left"? People arguing about politics on Mastodon? "Instrument(s) of control in the service of the few," seriously? What control do such people even have, outside of a Mastodon instance that people can just...not use? It's such grandiose language for such a petty complaint.

If you want to talk about instruments of control in the service of the few, how about we talk about the forces that keep healthcare expensive and poorly distributed in the U.S.? Or are working to ban books and art performances in Florida (and elsewhere)? How about the instruments of control that have been invading Ukraine for over a year? These seem much more tangible and consequential than moderation decisions on a website no one has to use. Perspective is very important, lest we fall into the false equivalency trap.

The instruments of control are distributed in a very lopsided manner, to my eyes. "The Left is CONTROLLING PEOPLE on Mastodon" doesn't really cut it. If you don't the policies of one instance, join a different one. Or make your own, and you can make your own policies. You can decide what level of control you want on the social media you choose to interact with. And if some instances have rules you don't like? My advice would be, ignore those instances and don't worry about their rules. They only affect you if you allow them to.

"This, this and this are bad so the topic we are discussing doesn't really matter. Just deal with being excluded and demonized" It's disturbing that people excuse this toxic pattern of online disenfranchisement that repeats itself over and over again.

There are tons of social media websites out there that would exclude and demonize me. But I don't visit them, and I don't waste my energy complaining about them. Why would I? It isn't healthy to obsess over people who would exclude and demonize you. It is, in fact, itself a "toxic pattern", as you put it. I don't want to expend my finite mental resources worrying about, I dunno, Truth Social or Stormfront or other such places. It isn't some grand injustice that they exist and exclude different people and points of view, it's just how the decentralized nature of the WWW (and people, generally) works.

> It's one of the larger instances but the top heaviest constitute the majority by far and they all enshrine these policies.

So can you provide any evidence? Name this instance?

> both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism

It's laughable. Look at the people in power. What progressive is in any major office: Look at the President, the Minority Leader of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, Democratic Governors, etc. etc. All are mainstream Dems, hardly a progressive to be seen. Meanwhile, a majority of the GOP in Washington voted to overturn democracy and as sided with the rioters who attempted a coup.

> the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few

What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.

The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.

> So can you provide any evidence? Name this instance?

I've already shared the specifics I'm comfortable sharing. I have zero desire to start a witch hunt.

> What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.

You're perfectly demonstrating exactly the behavior I intended to point out. "Other-ing" the opposition into the Sith is not productive and the Left is as guilty of this as the Right.

> The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.

Through race essentialism? Or by what means are you specifically referring to? The common platform of the new left is that all white people are guilty of the original sin of their skin color. A platform based on enforced shame is not a platform for collaboration.

None of that is happening. Those are substantive criticisms. You are not immune from criticism, and complaining about it is a way to avoid addressing the merits.

Instead of meta-analysis of what you think I'm doing, please kindly respond to the content of my argument. "None of that is happening" is neither specific or substantive.

> What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line - in reality it was the boring, normie mainstream liberals who dragged the online activists into supporting that in the first place, not the other way around. Until just a few years ago they supported anti-trans viewpoints that were way out of kilter with mainstream society and demanded trans women shut up about harassment campaigns that went just as much against mainstream norms and values as the harassment that the online left is apologists for today. There's a good chance this changed through younger people with different views coming in, but they had those views in the first place because society as a whole had already shifted.

The difference really, genuinely, and consistently is just toxicity, extremism, and a refusal to accept that anyone who deviates even an inch from their views is a decent person. Those are the things that have stayed constant even as the arguments and the targets have shifted. The culture shifts easily from expecting trans women to shut up about TERF harassment campaigns to justifying harassment of streamers who play a game based on a franchise by someone who liked tweets containing TERF views because the cruelty is the point. While the views go beyond what mainstream society is willing to accept, the direction is extremely questionable. (For example, there have been multiple ugly Mastodon disputes involving server operators trying to shut people up about the long trail of rape allegations that follow one specific trans woman around, pretty much all from other trans women. Paying attention to them is supposedly hateful and an attack on trans women. Again, this is one specific person who's allegedly doing it, the same one every single time - not trans women as a whole.)

I find this version of the story very odd. I'm in my mid-20s and figured out that I was trans about 10 years ago. The main reason I didn't get swept up in the anti-SJW craze of the time was because "SJWs" were firmly supportive of trans and non-binary people, while many of their opponents were either indifferent or comparing us to attack helicopters. Are you talking about more than ten years ago?

Ten years ago is actually pretty much spot on for the time period I'm talking about - this was after the point at which trans people were just outright not welcome full stop (which is still surprisingly recent) and in fact one of the big ways the activists justified their views was by finding young trans people much like yourself with no existing ties to trans communities or activism, welcoming them in so long as they went along with the activists' existing views (including support for those who still wanted trans people not to be welcome), and pointing to them as proof their viewpoints totally weren't anti-trans. A lot of the prominent trans voices from that era were just a few years older than you and burned out hard once their worldview and contacts expanded beyond that of the narrow activist community and they discovered the activists wouldn't listen anymore if it brought their moral superiority into question.

The word "TERF" to describe the people and worldview that wanted to exclude trans people and trans rights from social justice activism wasn't even recorded as existing until 15 years ago, not because those views didn't exist - they're traceable in basically their modern form all the way back to like the seventies and are oddly pervasive - but because they succeeded well enough that even discussing the idea that this was a bad thing didn't start to become a part of activist discussion until then. This whole shift in viewpoint to that becoming unacceptable is incredibly recent.

Also, in general ordinary non-terminally-online people were much, much less anti-trans than both the "attack helecopter" anti-SJW side and the anti-trans campaigners that social justice activists were meant to sympathise with, though that may not have been obvious since one of the big things that was unacceptable was actually talking about what anti-trans people on the same side were doing and the real-world consequences (including stuff like laws they lobbied for). Admittedly, I'm from the UK so my experiences may not be representative of the US and other countries, but we are supposedly "TERF island" so that cuts both ways.

Weird excuse for rampant racism the "new" progressives are pushing.

>That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

I think it would have been worth it to give this more than a moments thought. A quick glance at 20th century events shows fascism and communist dictatorships being seen as more fashionable and modern than flaky Weimar republics and crumbling empires. The next 50-80 years nevertheless showed history bending haphazaradly away from these trends. In the least, taking for granted that what follows is inevitably more progressive seems a tad rash.

What's far more interesting is examining the thoughts and actions of the inglorious bastards, both young and old, who at the time recognized early on that This Was Not The Way, and with what critera they did so.

Fascism is explicitly and deliberately regressive. Its incarnations have all focused on building up the image and importance of both traditional values and a legendary heritage (often Rome or a Roman offshoot) which people are supposed to aspire to returning to and continue into the future.

I think what OP is describing is the modern let's turn away from liberalism and in some cases embracing race essentialism

It's too bad that the word "liberal" got intertwined with "left politics" since mainstream Democrats and Republicans are both "Liberals", or at least subscribe to the "liberal intellectual system". It's about how knowledge is created and validated through public criticism and checks. No one and no ideal is above this system. It's about skepticism in that NO ONE get the the final say on anything and NO ONE has personal authority. A claim to knowledge can only be made if it is falsifiable and can be debunked.

This is where modern Progressives (or wokes) diverge from Liberalism. It is a politics of radical egalitarianism and fundamentalism. The idea that certain people have access to certain knowledge and "other ways of knowing" that makes them the authority on a subject and them and only them should be listened to. And of course, using unfalsifiable methods to achieve this as evidenced in their most popular literature that states "All white people are racist and denial of this is evidence of their fragility, which is racist". This language trick is used over and over. And of course, creating a grievance hierarchy that intends to flip Liberalism on its head since clearly the Liberal intellectual tradition was created by and for white men to maintain their power over everyone else. Of course ignoring that all of the so-called "progress" we've made (women's right, gay rights, civil rights, etc) are from the Liberal tradition.

Some people are bigots. But many people that are labeled bigots are simply skeptical liberals, which are often called fascists now.

This is true to a point, but it completely disregards the historical phenomenon of the "witch hunt". McCarthyism seemed to originate in a "good place" at first, to most Americans (patriotism and anti-communism). It went so far off the rails that it did great social harm. The same phenomenon of becoming so strident in your position that you persecute "the other" (whatever "other" currently happens to be) is the same phenomenon that leads to things like the Holocaust and burning people at the stake at the extreme end. These extreme social moments in time originate from places of apparent good intentions at many moments in History. These pop up amongst the regular rolling generation gap phenomenon whenever polarization gets too extreme.

Wise people should fear times when people on the ends of the political spectrum do not talk _to_ each other, but only _about_ each other. It should be VERY apparent that we seem to be getting to such a social time (exacerbated by technology driven bubbles), and anyone who dreads the next Burning Times is a wise person.

That's true of the instance you were looking at.

That's pretty ridiculous and doesn't match my Mastodon experience at all. What instance was this?

Same. Today world is some bizzaro dimension. For example, 15-20 years ago we had conservatives yelling video games are the devil and they need to be censored and some topics not even touched. Now I see same shit from "left" (it's not progressive, it's some fascist facsimile of it) and weirdly enough, a lot of gaming journalism that seems to hate their own audience now.

> The reason given was that white people must not be able to opt out of the BIPOC experience of political outrage.

...or the modern left being by far the most racist ones out there

> For example, 15-20 years ago we had conservatives yelling video games are the devil and they need to be censored and some topics not even touched.

My memory of the 2003 to 2008 time frame is different.

I recall mainstream complaints about GTA 3, released 2001. Famously, Senator Clinton asked the FTC to investigate GTA 3 over the "hot coffee" mod in 2005.

There was also the 2005 California Law [0] that banned the sale of violent video games to minors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

Before that we also had various moral panics, like the one about roleplaying games pushing "the devil".

And for many years (still rears its ugly head from time to time) "the game violence causes real violence" garbage.

> Before that we also had various moral panics, like the one about roleplaying games pushing "the devil".

Ahh, ok. So the moral panic of the early 80s, about 40 years ago.

The "video games cause real violence" argument was personified by Tipper Gore in the 90s, more than 30 years ago.

I don't recall anything from 15-20 years ago particular to conservatives. It has been mainstream since the 90s.

Be careful here. The "modern left" is not the ones in the US actually pushing laws to (by legalese and administrative decree) effectively censor opinion and material under the guise of being "too woke".

These days, any social media that allows "silos" eventually settles into such, and they are gate-kept. The strong silo-ing is also IMHO a byproduct of the modern social web of binary upvote / downvotes that fuel algorithmic feeds, a feature not present in the early days of the web, and (my theory) one that tends to reward the "strongest" opinions, which also tend to be the most extreme. "Left" or "right" isn't the problem I see regarding social media, instead it's the overall design. I don't know if Mastodon has avoided this (IMHO) cardinal sin or not.

You sampled one instance in a fediverse with thousands upon thousands of instances. Do you think none of them have a community more aligned with your worldview?

Most likely, yes. Those with a different worldview are cut off from the fediverse and many client apps blacklist those instances that gain momentum from being usable in the client app. For example, Gab.

Do you have a link to the instance(s) that were blacklisted you're referring to?

The blacklist is visible on the about page of each instance. Feel free to go sample a few. The first one I tried had literal swastikas in the user name of the first post. It went downhill from there.

> Those with a different worldview are cut off from the fediverse

I find this happens most often to people with a worldview that is objectively incompatible with civilization.

Evidenced by the fact that they disagree with the progressive orthodoxy of the moment.

I find this to happen between groups of instances which audiences has different stamps on the front cover of passports.

In case that is going to turn out to correlate with “worldview[s] that [are] objectively incompatible with [the other] civilization”, … what could it mean …

They are more than welcome to spew their incompatible worldview on Twitter. I don’t understand why anyone would be upset they don’t feel welcome on Mastodon; they got everything they wanted on Twitter from Musk.

Civilizations were built on slavery, imperialism, xenophobia, exploitation, theft, appropriation and intolerance.

Isn't that the free market you want? You can build your own client (even by forking!) if you disagree.

In my experience, the blacklists are all pretty sensible. Mostly porn, neonazis, that kind of stuff.

I haven't opened Gab in a while so I just loaded the front page, and I can see why Mastodon moderators don't want to deal with them either. The content is not as blatantly illegal as many other blacklisted sites, but the front page is incredibly toxic and hateful. I would block most of those posts if they woulf ever hit my personal instance.

Feel free to join (or set up) an instance that doesn't employ blacklists, though. The default Mastodon configuration comes with an empty blacklist so I'm sure there are servers out there that will let you access Gab and other blacklisted servers if you wish.

However, other servers are allowed to block you or your server at their digression if you're boosting or posting content they don't care for. After all, freedom of speech does not imply any obligation to be heard.

its kinda easy to be labelled neonazi these days

Is it? Hasn't been a problem for me.

That's because you're not in the "basket of deplorables"

That would seem to be a very easy place to avoid.

How? One's political views are largely an expression of innate personality traits. And, as we have seen, the basket of deplorable includes anyone who is not explicitly left wing.

"the basket of deplorable includes anyone who is not explicitly left wing."

Nah. It tends to include neo-nazis, neo-confederates, racists, sexists, white supremacists, kiddy diddlers, and the like. It's not a particularly difficult group to not be a part of.

No. It includes anyone who is opposes left wing ideas and is effective.

Nah. It includes some of the most disgusting members of society. Curious how you rise so adamantly to their defense.

You're attitude to people is absolutely toxic. Why are you surprised that people side against you?

I'm not surprised. I consider it a badge of honor that neo-nazis, neo-confederates, racists, white supremacists, sexists, kiddy diddlers, et al, side against me.

You might consider being concerned if your ideas and attitudes align with those of the aforementioned deplorables. And yes, that would be the correct term.

Edit: Calling people by the correct descriptive terms is not smearing. I'm sorry you are confused.

This is all in your head guy. You started throwing all these smears around, and now having done so, you congratulate yourself for having such virtue and integrity for despising these people.

It all just boils down to a fig-leaf for your hatred.

It's not really a problem if none cares who you are.

Speaking from personal experience?

There are a lot of neonazis around these days...

And yet, somehow, I have avoided it. Curious.

You're neo-nazi!

lol, nice.

Yeah, you don't have to be an actual neonazi, just be friends with and support them and their views.

being labelled neonazi is about as easy as being labelled "libtard". The very left oriented people often have a strong sense of moral superiority, and will directly accuse anyone who does not agree of being a neonazi. in general i would say though, when you are pointing with one finger, 4 are pointing back at yourself (and by this I dont mean you, its an expression)

Except that when you're marching with swastikas, and displaying nazi signs and slogans, it's kind of difficult to claim you're not a nazi. But you keep right on assuming you have a moral position.

I was accused of white-supremacism for questioning the mask.

I think that illustrates the way these things work pretty clearly.

That's because the Overton Window have shifted to the right so much.

Perhaps, but the people I'm referring to actually promote the idea that Jews deserve to be killed for being Jews.

This is incorrect.

With some charity, you could say Gab has a different worldview. However, there are also people who think sex with children is ok. That is also technically 'a different worldview'. You see, there is a reason Gab has been cut off, and it is not just that he has a different worldview.

If you don't list the specific reason, you distort the most important part of this particular moderation. I noticed this is a fairly common myth in what seems like a right-wing frame of 'progressive politics trying to limit freedom of speech'.

If I'm a casual user without any great motivation for learning the arcane ways of "The Fediverse"... someone just looking for someway to get into this Mastodon thing I keep hearing about: a normal, everyday user. I'm going to probably go to some search engine and type in "Mastodon" or "Mastodon social network". Using DuckDuckGo, many of the first links show up pointing to mastodon.social or server lookups operated from there (assiming joinmastodon.org is affiliated). The point is that someone that is relatively disinterested in "The Fediverse" or the technology per se and just wants to participate in social interactions... the fine tuning you're suggesting may be required is probably on the wrong side of the cost/benefit ratio.

But, wanting to give your point a chance... I went to the first 10 servers that were suggested by joinmastodon. There was very little difference just scrolling their landing pages in terms of content than that of mastodon.social. Not surprising: Federation is suppose to allow this sort of decentralized sharing of the exact same content across instances. Of those, only really the instance run by the makers of the Vivaldi Browser seems to be notably toned down on the political muck.. and they probably for business reasons.

Then I went different interest specific group servers and scrolled through their landing page content. And they were also very reflective of my mastodon.social experience... many of the same Toots. The kind of community didn't really matter so much for the most part (I'm guessing a fair amount of lazy configuration to be honest).

Here's an example: birds.town which bills itself as...

"A server primarily meant for people who like birds, birding and nature in general, but obviously everyone is equally welcome here! Have fun cawing about "

And I almost was happily surprised. The top Toots of the feed (or whatever it's called in Mastodon-land) were, in fact, about birding! Unfortunately I kept scrolling. Oh dear.

"I'd find conservatives attacks on “woke” funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Woke people fought and won the battle against slavery.

Woke people went to war and defeated fascism in WWII.

Woke people fought for and won equal rights for women and people of color.

Woke people battled for rights for workers like 40-hour workweeks and safety protections."

https://birds.town/@augieray@mastodon.social/110049850172355...

Yes, because that's what I want to know when participating in a social network focusing on bird watching.

Your link is pointing to the general mastodon.social instance and not to birds.town. To see local birds.town posts, go to [0]. Looks like birds-only to me w/o any politics, tho I'm not aware of any of these birds' political preferences.

And generally, whenever there's people annoying me, I just unfollow/mute/block them - problem solved.

[0] https://birds.town/public/local

Cool, there's a mastodon instance about government drones.

Yeah. Blocking / muting is required to shape ANY social media feed to your liking.

This is correct, but the birding server served that link to me while just perusing its default landing page.

The point I was answering was that I saw what I saw because I used a single instance of a Federated service (mastodon.social)... my counter-point here was that the instance really didn't matter. I was served, by default, largely the same toxic content across the 20 or so servers I ended up landing on.

Yes, I can unfollow, mute, block, etc. anyone that I decide isn't someone I want in my life. But I'm pretty sure I could do that on Twitter, too (could be wrong, I've not been there for a long time). Life's too short. Maybe the local feed would have been much better... or maybe the warm cozy Mastodon isn't that which competes with Twitter, but that which competes with Discourse or Discord.

I have looked at about forty instances, most of them being for specific interests. EVERY single one, without fail, regardless of the subject, was flooded with American politics, over whatever it was actually intended for. I went to a music group and had to search through two weeks of American politics related posts to find a single post on music.

In the case of Pleroma, it was much the same, but with way more fringe lunatics and right wingers. I don't want to find a community "aligned with my worldview" that shuts out people unaligned with them, I want to find a community of mentally healthy adults, and that does not seem to exist in the larger Mastodon or Pleroma fediverse, unless your hobbies include pearl clutching about perceived racism or making infographics about white genocide.

I do understand (and suffer from it from time to time, too) the reflex to put labels on bubbles. But in this case, I'm probably the wrong addressee since I'm regularly confronting myself with world views spanning over allover the political spectrum. I'm actively researching for data and arguments from other bubbles than mine and regularly learn something new through that.

With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fated activist groups sh*tposting things about each other and newspaper headlines crafted to produce anger-driven traffic. Something, which doesn't give me anything but depressions.

We're talking about the same toxicity.

I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir.

But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...:

"New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun.

Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest"

(https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465)

"Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context.

No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight."

(https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093)

"Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep"

(https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content)

"The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids.

Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*"

(https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work).

And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made.

This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically.

So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).

Interesting! I guess then my usage of Mastodon is making it the "zero toxic" thing it is for me.

- As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters).

- So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website.

- I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools).

- Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff.

- I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.

I think my main issue with your original post is that you expressed what you've achieved as a generality and not as the result of your specific, active curation of your Mastodon experience. That you can achieve warm, cozy, and non-toxic with active curation is not something I'd dispute. But I'd maintain that experience is not the default experience and I'm not sure that's so different to what you could also achieve with Twitter either (I could be wrong here, been along time since I used Twitter). To be fair, I'm not sure that anything trying to have the reach and be of similar purpose to Twitter can escape some flavor of Twitter's fate... whether that is leftist or rightist dystopia being irrelevant to the point.

And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.

You're citing examples from a fairly homogenous set of inputs, one that was largely fed by Twitter refugees. The nature of the Fediverse is that it's as disparate as the web itself; you're starting with a fundamentally incorrect premise by referring to "Mastodon" at all. If you're trying to say "Mastodon" is ideologically any one way or the other, you're hosed from the start. It sounds like our political values probably diverge pretty seriously so I won't mourn you not joining the Fediverse, but treating it like a monolith is a common misconception. If you truly care about people challenging their own beliefs, start there.

The difference is that web browsers don't block you from visiting websites that your favorite site's owner doesn't want you to see.

Instances don't block you from going to a different instance.

You're doing the equivalent of finding one web site on the internet and saying "This Internet is useless! It's only about cats and I like dogs" There are many Mastodon instances. They are different.

For each of these I'm sure you can find a toot that loves Nazis, bad data, and child sex trafficking if that's really what you look for in a social media experience. I'm frankly not surprised those are less popular worldviews.

If you follow or engage with me, you will probably feel some 'toxicity'. I like to argue with people and see argument as a productive way to enhance understanding. I follow many people with whom I often disagree. You make it what you want. Just don't get bothered by people blocking you from time to time.

I might be off-base, but I feel this is a very American thing to do: argue. In school there a even debate classes yes?

Much better, I think, is to have a truth finding conversation together. Perhaps coming from different sides of the story, but always on the search for trying to find common ground, the truth, science, and an open mind to be changed by those things.

And not see the whole thing as a match to be won you know?

Are you European? Wasn’t it your whole cultural tradition to argue? Perhaps your modern culture has been corrupted somehow where you can no longer have meaningful debates. The Socratic method is an argument based system.

Depends what you mean by “argument”. I wouldn’t say the Socratic dialogues resemble Twitter.

This HN thread resembles a Socratic dialogue.

> I might be off-base, but I feel this is a very American thing to do: argue.

I’m a German, back in school (20+ years ago) I was taught that arguing, when done in good faith, helps everyone. So I disagree heavily with your characterization of arguing as American.

What you are describing is argument. Maybe it is a translation problem to your language. Even here in America the word argument sometimes has a bad connotation and associated with that situation you describe where the parties are just trying to win rather than understand each other.

It was designed to be "bubbly". The fact by default its moderator of the instance deciding who their users can subscribe to naturally leads to that, for better or worse; if you don't want a nanny you pretty much have to host your own instance. Public feed fair enough, that has to be moderated but the fact mod can block who I subscribe to rubs me the wrong way.

So set up your own instance. With blackjack. And hookers.

"You are only allowed to see who you want to see if you have technical knowledge and money to set up your own instance" is terrible way for social network

So do you regularly allow those who espouse viewpoints you find abhorrent into your living room to rant?

i don't see the point in deleting my Twitter account, i just go long periods without using them depending on my mood

the very format is useless for anything other than flame wars and bait, culture wars and the occasional announcement - for all of that, going to a smaller network is pointless, it just reduces your reach and your scope; if it's worth the effort, you maintain accounts side by side

of course the most important thing to keep "meaningful conversations" is to have not the biggest but "the adequate" group of people participating, and for this... well, it's entirely specific on the topics and demographics you are interested in, the platform is almost irrelevant in the technical sense, even in the sense of its general policies to some extent as people move from platform to platform in such chaotic fashion

> No contrary views were there at all. Perhaps this is what you mean: it's your bubble, so it's cozy and non-toxic.

I'm not sure what your definition of 'town square' is: are you sure you're not looking for a town Coliseum?

Most people are not online to debate controversial topics with anonymous strangers.

It sounds like you didn’t find the conservative instance you were looking for, but I’m sure they’re out there.

Here’s the thing though: not all ideas are created equal. You want equal airtime for contrary views, but those contrary views are

1. less popular statistically

2. against the interests of the working class

The alternative worldview to progressivism is basically pro-capital, anti-minority, anti-equality nonsense.

You’re unhappy that progressives hurl insults at regressives, but it should be noted that they are not falling into the trap of the paradox of tolerance.

When one breaks the social contract, they’re no longer under the protections of that contract, and that’s what happens when the regressive ideology sends hate toward the poor, women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and other similarly disenfranchised groups.

The alternative to progressive taxation is regressive taxation. The alternative to equal rights is unequal rights. The alternative to workers’ rights are corporations’ rights. The alternative to freedom of religion is theocracy. The alternative to body autonomy is control by others. The alternative to the scientific method is assumption and ignorance. The alternative to environmental protection is environmental destruction. These contrasting ideologies are not of equal value, objectively.

In other words, if I make a statement like “people shouldn’t own slaves” there is no contrary view that should be entertained.

You want someone to tolerate the intolerance of your desired contrary worldview, but again, you should know that it’s not hypocritical for the tolerant and accepting people to not accept your views.

Twitter has gotten better. probably for the reasons you mention.

“ So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation”

Oh stop with the wo is me… you could always change your views. I mean who doesn’t like the progressive ideals of inclusion and fairness? (And no, inclusion doesn’t mean I have to accommodate racists or nazis or other alt-right trolls, it also means though, that the crazies on the left spewing hate shouldn’t apply either).

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