Seeing some posts talking about fediblocking turning Mastodon into a "filter bubble." No. We absolutely do not need abusive or fascist views to have a high level of intellectual diversity. Full stop. That hate can fester somewhere else.
After 20 years of social media, the experiment has been run. Hateful people are unconvinced by rational argument, so there's no point engaging with them.
This is a rotten, disingenuous, meritless argument, from A to Z.
Fascism is to be defeated, not debated.
@sean That. The real world is *full* of filter bubbles of various sorts, and overall it's a good thing.
You don't invite the KKK into your living room either. And sure, that means your living room is a curated bubble, but mostly that's a really good thing and you should keep it that way.
My living room *should* be a curated bubble. If I want ugly hate-filled talk, I can always go find it somewhere else, not by hit by it at random times as I'm trying to live my life.
Your analogy of the KKK is perfect, though perhaps not in the way you think.
My dude, us black folk didn't get taken out by the KKK because we accidentally invited them in like vampires.
We never got the opt out choice, and y'alls insisting on one will absolutely make this place boring, insular, and useless
@jrm4 @sean Dunno. Every so often I look at the "federated" feed when it has about-to-be-blocked instances. Like, an instance has just been federated and will no doubt be defederated, because it's a firehose of NSFW pics or nasty drama or whatever.
The feed isn't very useful at those times. And that's just with a couple of those hosts, not *all* of them.
Spam filters and email filtering are all that make email usable. To me that seems like a good comparison.
@jrm4 @sean With email, we limit signups, block misbehaving hosts and content-filter incoming email.
They all work quite well. Email without them is possible. But basically nobody does it because it's unusably bad. Whether it's made email boring, insular and useless is a matter for debate, but personally I'm for that level of opt-in.
It *is* hard that it's made email more expensive - it's "free" if you're advertised to, or costs money. But if it's *really* free, spammers kill it.
Okay -- see, that makes sense. You're not judging *content* or *political leaning* -- you're looking at "abusing the platform in a disruptive way" independent of opinions and politics. That's *fine.*
That's overwhelmingly NOT what people elsewhere are saying. They're saying "shut down fascism" and don't even have a real definition for the dang word.
@jrm4 @sean Weirdly, it's *not* nonjudgemental.
Spam's legal in the vast majority of cases. We just don't want it. But most people hate it. Same deal with crazy people spewing incoherent nonsense -- email has tools to block people, or it gets unusable. But that's *not* content-independent. We have filters to say "most people don't want this."
It's locally/randomly judged, by random email users hitting "block" or "flag", kinda like random Mastodon admins going, "nope, don't want it."
@jrm4 @sean I agree, it's not anything like a perfect fascism filter. You're right, we don't have one of those.
But it's also not full unrestricted free speech. Full unrestricted free speech gets clogged up with people selling bad products and/or bad ideologies, instantly.
But by having local-ish admins where you can say "I trust their judgement," we get back to there being *some* consequences for awfulness. At a minimum you can stop listening to them.
How would I define fascism?
There's a technical definition:
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
Online, it's racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, denial of human rights, and the advocacy of political violence in service of those ends.
@sean @jrm4 @codefolio That's a great checklist for humans, but try defining any of those in terms of keyword filters.
I'd rather there be discontent followed by some imperfect resolution by humans about who (users) and what (posts) are/aren't allowed and the consequences, because even the most advanced ML filters don't know about irony, reclaiming slurs, quoting for purposes of debunking, etc., and a lot of friction so far seems to come (afaict) from white people zealously misapplying rules.
@jrm4
Fascism is inherently hard to precisely define because since WWII it's been taboo and so fascists have focused on plausible deniability. Only banning fascists once they stop caring to try hiding it is how you get fascists.
I think you can make a point about the fuzzy "comfort" shit without worrying about whether people are being unfair to fascists.
@codefolio @sean
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