I dont like tankies or tories any more than the next person, but breaking federation is just wrong.
I dont want to have to make a separate account just to get around that, mainly because this is actually already my account for getting around that!
Its quite easy to block a community at user level, if needed, and we are not the target of any spam, but now we users have lost the option of the ability to interact forever with a corner of the threadiverse, which i think is not cool.
If its just me thinking this way, fine, i’ll just maintain several accounts, but i would hope its not, because its feeling like instances are gettinh pretty triggerhappy with the block button https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/tree/main
This makes sense. But the biggest issue is that the word “transphobia” means different things to different people, which then makes it a nightmare for anyone trying to police a space with free speech.
There is a similar problem with Homophobia but less marked and controversial perhaps? I’m a gay guy. If someone says “I hate gay people” thats obviously homophobia. But if someone says “I don’t think gay people should marry, because marriage is a religious thing” is that homophobia? I don’t agree with it but it’s an opinion. Someone can be hateful and hold that opinion, but that opinion itself doesn’t mean the person is hateful - at least to me. But another gay person may say “no that is hateful in itself”. Where do you draw the line?
Also to my understanding the fediverse doesn’t have any written rules on what is allowed. Each server sets their rules, and there has been consensus around certain rules (such as those you mention). The complexity comes in enforcing the intepretation of rules by one server on another, and the risk is fragmentation with some places defederated between others and people getting confused what is or isn’t interconnected. A may defederate from B, but both may stay federated with C. The content on A and B is visible from C but users interacting with content from C on A and B won’t see each other in C’s communities or interect.
I have no answers for this. It’s just going to be a big challenge that is inherent to this model. But it is still way better than what exists in old social media.
Yes, people used to twitter and reddit do often think thats a problem that cant be solved, but quickly find out it really is actually pretty quickly solved on the federated side of the fediverse.
“I dont think gay people should be allowed to get married” is a homophobic statement, so yeah no you cant post that publicly online on a space that doesnt allow homophobia. It gets flagged as homophobic, the person who flagged it’s moderators immediately talk to the person who posted it’s moderators, and they’re asked to remove it and either warn the poster from ever doing it again or if they’re seen to be a bad faith account thats just trying to spread hatespeech, they’re given the boot from the instance. If the instance moderators refuse to accept it as homophobia, then a fediblock post is made and over the next few hours most instance admins read the situation that an instance is refusing to uphold the pretty clear cut no homophobia stance and say hey if you dont start enforcing your own rules that you list on your site, we’re going to have to assume you’re a badfaith instance, a danger to our communities and defederate from you. It really is that simple. Same with transphobia, casteism or racism. People are welcome to hold hateful viewpoints, but you cant start trying to debate them or push them on a site that doesnt allow it in its rules.
The Fediverse, ActivityPub, was built by transgender people, the moderators of many of the key instances, are transgender, the federation is deeply transgender and the “No Transphobia” rule is pretty concrete in the same level of rock hard as “No Racism” regarding what most good faith instances accept those things to mean.
Thats why its a rake in the grass for new instances, especially ones that are UK based due to their abysmal degrees of transphobia in their media and how far anti-trans activists have sealioned the idea of “yes but what really is transphobia” over the last 8 years.
The good faith federation doesnt have free speech, the federation isnt a place of free speech. The federation bans outright most places that include the phrase “free speech” in their community rules pages because its 100% only ever used as a dogwhistle by far right instances.
If someone says, “I hate black people” that’s racism, but if someone says “race based slavery should have never been ended and black people should lose their rights to live as they see fit” that’s an opinion. /s
You see how plain off that sounds?
This is a strawman argument. I was merely trying to give an example of the difficulties in absolutism when talking about moderation. My example may not be the best one but the concern is valid - anyone who thinks moderation will be easy in the Fediverse because everyone will be in harmony and agree on what is acceptable and what is not, is naive to be honest. There are already communities that don’t adhere to the same rules and standards as others, and as you scale up the fediverse into millions of people and lots of communities exposed to each otherthe complexity will come to the fore.
Basically don’t see the fediverse as a golden bullet for solving moderation issues or coming to a happy consensus. It removes the corporate control and influence but each community will come to it’s own consensus about what is and isn’t acceptable. Beehaw is an early example of that - they wish to control and vet who can participate in their community; that is an understandable aim due to the ethos of their community but it may be very difficult to stay federated and achieve that.
The fediverse is a great concept but I suspect we’re going to see a lot of fragmentation into “miniverses” around acceptable codes of conduct and content, because a single broad consensus is very difficult to maintain at scale.
I’d say that’s pretty homophobic. You don’t need to be an outright homophobe to say or do something homophobic, or support homophobic systems.