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.
Yes you can. And you can also avoid that while insisting on only viewpoints grounded in facts and valid data.
Put another way, science is not an echo chamber.
@Sludge @sean IMHO the echo chamber is referring to the algorithms only push the information you like, or the algorithm assumes you like.
However, Mastodon is returning the timeline back. Users HAVE TO find interesting accounts to follow. They are responsible for own timeline, instead of staying in the bubble, created by recommendation systems.
There's something to be said when a platform containing conservatives, liberals, social liberals, anarchists, and socialists/statecommunists counts as "echo chambre" purely because "women don't need voices and minorities don't deserve life" isn't tolerated.
🙄🙄🙄
@sieri @sean Worse than that, most people don't even know that they are not seeing everything and they are rarely (if ever) confronted with differing views because we aren't aware of what the "others" are seeing on their wall/feed/whatever.
Resentment against the "other" therefore has a chance to grow and fester unopposed before confrontation inevitably occurs, and by then it's too late for rational discourse.
Is it even possible there's anybody who's not aware of right-wing views?
Most sane people are very aware and have rejected them.
Rational discourse ends the minute someone claims that people of any identity don't deserve to exist, or to have the same rights as anyone else.
Fascists can and will speak on their own platforms, I don't have to listen.
@sean @sieri You might be aware of the general details of right-wing views, but if you don't know the specifics of the talking points of the day, you can't debate the issue with, say, your next-door right wing neighbor, can you?
In the past, if an extreme point of view made its way into the news, everyone knew about it. Everyone could talk about it and extremists would know that they are a minority. Or at the very least, they could have a chance to update their worldviews along the way.
Filter bubble refers to the idea that the info we see online is incomplete, usually because helpful systems try to show us only what we want to see, which some consider to be harmful because it supposedly provides a distorted view of reality.
Mastodon servers that contain people with particularly odd perspectives are sometimes blocked from other servers on the network (fediblocked).
see the about page for your server
@sean "Faschisten hören niemals, auf Faschisten zu sein
Man diskutiert mit ihnen nicht, hat die Geschichte gezeigt" (Danger Dan)
"fashists never stop being fashists,
you don't discuss with them,
History has shown"
@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.
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