And it's all very brand-unfriendly - there's relatively few celebrities, no advertising space to sell, no algorithm to optimize for, and nothing preventing a possible promotional post from a corporate account from appearing next to something NSFW in someone's timeline if that's who the user is following.
I was kinda interested in checking it out for a while but suffered from a bit of choice paralysis not knowing where to start, but since most of them are federated, you see content from a bunch of instances at once, so that removes a bit of the risk.
I ended up creating an account on lemmy.world which is (afaik) the largest instance by user count. Beehaw is (afaik) the second largest, and it has more of a "safety"/highly moderated approach - which is one of the reasons I wanted to distance myself from Reddit, so I crossed that one off my list.
This map was posted on HN if you want to examine the relative sizes of the instances and see the lay of the land: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
browse around, see how you like it
Of course, when regulatory moral panics take hold of it, they never say out loud that what they really protect and defend is commercial use...
Why do you consider that good? There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find disturbing content, why does it have to something you can just stumble upon?
Because what's disturbing to me is not disturbing to someone else.
Because, just like when I walk in a city, I run into interesting and surprising and occasionally things that test my sensibilities.
This is good because nobody can decide on my behalf what I should find disturbing or not.
Communities that harbor disturbing content *will not* scale because the majority of people are not interested in these things so the stakeholders of these venues rightfully police their domains to make them as inviting as possible to as many people as possible. I’m not sure what you’re actually arguing for here. Do you actually want to happen upon beheading videos or CSAM while you read this site or something?
They have a right to enjoy the content they choose, as long as is it law-abiding. Regardless of if that upsets your sensibilities or not. Frankly, aside from trying to pull the age old “think of the children” routine, do you even have a point? You are arguing that harboring (legal) disturbing content is tantamount to CSAM and should be censored because it “will not scale”, meaning you are focusing on a for-profit lens. Despite the fact that the conversation topic, the Fediverse, is not for-profit.
Why does someone enjoying their time in a legal way bother you to the point of indirectly accusing them of viewing CSAM?
So you'd be happy if I surrounded your house with huge billboards covered in pictures of dicks, and puppies being thrown into scrap metal shredders?
We can't be censoring anything we find offensive, or even worse anything we think might offend someone else. Trying to draw a line for what is legally banned content is enough of a gray area, there's absolutely no way to draw a line when the metric is what may offend someone.
You’re being awfully charitable with such a contrived interpretation of the comment above mine. Fact is they didn’t say what bad stuff they think should be allowed in prominent online spaces frequented by children and vulnerable populations, legal or otherwise. Having read enough about the salacious corners of the clear net, it’s rather safe to assume CSAM is among the bad stuff this person was vaguely referencing. It would be helpful if they provided an enumerated list of the crap they enjoy seeing but that would also require them to expose themselves. Do you see the contradiction and need to read between the lines here?Every platform, even moderated one’s, faces this problem: Twitter, Facebook, instagram, Reddit, all of them. I’m not encouraging people to seek this stuff out, and your accusation that I am stands in stark contrast to the charity you gave the person above. Concerning. Regardless, if that’s their thing I hope they walk right into a honeypot.
>You are arguing that harboring (legal) disturbing content is tantamount to CSAM and should be censored because it “will not scale”, meaning you are focusing on a for-profit lens. Despite the fact that the conversation topic, the Fediverse, is not for-profit.
Bad faith argument and patent misinterpretation. Reddit, the front page of the internet, is mentioned in the context above and largely what I’m arguing in regards to. To be explicit, Reddit is not a federated platform and is for profit, and it’s reasonable to speculate on the intentions of the platforms leadership, especially when they state explicitly that they want more money. I’m not interested in arguing about what grimy stuff nobodies get up to on the fedoverse. It’s probably a lot like 4chan or the sites that spring up when abusive groups get hit by a ban wave on larger platforms: gab, truth social. The fefiverse will likely remain fringe for the foreseeable future for this very reason and isn’t an interesting discussion due to the limited audience. grimy people drive valuable/helpful users away necessitating the removal of said bad actors. Also, I’m not interested in the profitability of platforms. I’m interested in the health of the communities and grimy content pushes normal people away reducing the health of the community. I don’t care that the person above wants to look at grimy stuff, I care when the same people want to see their perverse interests made mainstream which is exactly what many people are arguing for, with concerningly vague terminology, in this thread. Gross.
ETA Interesting you didn’t speak to beheading videos…
Using your simile: cities aren't lawless wastelands just because some people like living in chaos, and neither should the internet be (in my opinion). Cities have places where more extreme content can be found for those that want it but is kept away from the general public. Why shouldn't the internet be the same?
Here are some disturbing things I've run across that I'm glad to have seen:
The Wethouse, a documentary on an alcohol-allowed hostel for alcoholics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF5wNsfKo84
Putin's essay "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians": en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 (it should be obvious from the literal kremlin.ru domain and the fact it's by Putin, but you want to read this one critically)
/r/deathgainers, a community of fetishists literally eating themselves to death and being egged on by other fetishists (no URL because it probably got wiped out in the drama and because it is actual porn; see also pro-anorexia communities, which for some reason tend to be banned while deathgainers are allowed)
Blindsight by Peter Watts, a hard-biology science fiction novel that raises questions about how we think: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
The disturbing parts of the internet are more worthwhile than the Skinner boxes and can encourage more personal growth. Certainly if you're only a little concerned about the amount you drink, watching The Wethouse will change that; if you're sitting there in July of 2021 and not too worried about whether Russia will start a land war in Europe, reading Putin's essay and its echoes of blood-and-soil will change that too; if you eat too little or too much, seeing the fatal effects can be a wake-up call.
Many moderation policies would block some or all of those, though The Wethouse and Blindsight might escape. I'm glad to have seen all of them. I'm not sure whether I would have, if I had to explicitly go to the designated deviant zone and wade through thousands of gigs of porn to find them.
I liked that book a lot. It'd be a tragedy to find that being censored anywhere.
That the protagonist had half his brain amputated is pretty squick too.
The vampire stuff isn’t really disturbing at all.
uᴉɐʇdɐɔ ǝɥʇ ʎllɐǝɹ ʇ,usᴉ ǝɹᴉdɯɐʌ ǝɥʇ
Reading this, I find myself wondering who was the last American president who might have written an analysis on this level. Carter maybe? He was always underrated. Nixon probably too. Perhaps Obama could have, but by the time he was president it was already unthinkable for a US president to do such a thing.
You're also assuming that Putin actually wrote this himself. I don't think it's impossible -- he was in the KGB and FSB, analysis could be something he's trained heavily in -- but if I had to bet money it's not his writing, just his byline.
Furthermore, even it it was his work it missed the mark pretty hard, and a lot of dudes are dying due to terrible assumptions made about Ukraine and it's military.
I described it as cosmic horror where the monster is a thesis from evolutionary game theory… and the big reveal is actually scary.
About as high brow as you can get but manages it without being boorish or purple prose.
Can I find offensive jokes? Or will I just get headlines about someone who got in trouble for an offensive joke?
Can I post the raunchy limerick I've never written down for fear of being cancelled, doxxed, etc?
You can already do that on Facebook.
Whether you see any consequences is more of a function of whether someone sets out to get you for something than it is of what you write.
So you get serious educational content creators saying that a bird "un-alives" a fish.
The thing is, the phrase has an origin in a parody of censorship. In one episode of Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool. Deadpool, being fourth-wall-savvy and well aware that he is in an animated kids' show, talks rather frankly about his plans to "un-alive" the criminal they are pursuing. To which Spider-Man responds "Un-alive... you mean KILL him?!"
Mr. Pool was applying standards and practices to his own speech that were common on 80s and 90s animated programs, in which characters obviously wielding rifles would assiduously avoid talking about killing or death. And now people are using his neologism to avoid being punished on a video platform ostensibly for adults primarily.
The way in which they made it into Congress's list of heavily regulated weapons is an interesting story of inept politicians at work. I've also never understood why suppressors would be seen as anything other than a good thing, if we wanted to regulate them it'd make more sense to require them for carry guns rather than make them hard to get.
Shooting an unsuppressed handgun without hearing protection is really bad for your hearing, and carrying a surpressed pistols also much trickier if we're concerned with how many guns are legally carried in public.
Hollywood has a lot to answer for in its damage to epistemology.
Feds pictured everyone in the mafia carrying military-grade Thompsons (Tommy guns) despite the fact that they were horribly expensive, produced in small quantities, and didn't sell well. There are actually congressional record of the hearings for the weapons law that make clear no justification was given for including suppressors, it just wasn't pressed by anyone involved.