Wollff

A more accurate analogy is tolerating the abusive person because you don’t want to completely lost contact with many other people you care about

Thing is: Communities also can leave. If the community cares about its mods in the same way the mods care about the community, a move toward an alterantive medium is not a problem.

Of course that's not how it is. The communities at large to a good part don't give a shit about the people who moderate. The relationship is often entirely one sided. A community which cares, leaves with the mods. A community which doesn't give a fuck, stays.

Do you notice a pattern?

Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.

There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.

As I see it, that's a big part of the problem: For the last century "a writer" was always "the literary type". There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn't hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.

And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.

In that context, I don't think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire "a real writer", there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.

For me what I appreciate most about current lemmy, is the difference in approach between an "early adopter crew" and "mostly mainstream".

What drew me to reddit about 15 years ago was the notable difference in climate between it, and a lot of other more mainstream social media platforms. That difference withered away over time, which, in hindsight, lead me to run.

That "running" happened within reddit: First I started off my interaction with reddit at the frontpage. Until the frontpage became a cesspool. Then I made my own frontpage, with subs that were funny and interested me. Until every sub that even had the potential to hit the frontpage, suffered its own slow decline toward "YouTube comment section discourse". So the subs I frequented and participated in, became more and more niche, smaller, and more specialized.

It's not that my interests shifted all that much, toward "a few extremely narrow and specific things". In hindsight it seems clear that I was just running away from the "commercial giant mainstream social media thing", that most of reddit was becoming.

Running away from reddit is only the last step in that long process :D

I think all an individual entity can do to push a protocol into irrelevancy, is not using it...

Yes? Have you ever tried shoving something back from being on the internet?

That happens at times on the internet. I have to agree with the general impression though: I have only been here quite shortly, but the feel seems closer to "the reddit of olden days" for the general tone and feeling. Mostly a good thing.

Your argument is to say they are incorrigeable and there’s no point in talking to them and the only thing we can do is to shove the problem under the carpet.

That also sums up my position.

If you do that, the problem will only accumulate.

First of all, I don't think that's true. If we ban advertisments for Coca Cola, we just push the problem under the carpet, and Coke fans will only accumulate?

That, of course, is nonsense. When everyone else is allowed to do normal marketing, while you are not, your product, idea, or ideology will slowly start to fade, fizzle, and die out. I mean, if what you are saying is true... Do the Nazis also think so? Do they understand your argument? Do they think that their groups, their views, and their representatives should remain banned? After all, your argument goes, this is what will make them "accumulate".

For some reason the Nazis themselves don't seem to want that. They want to be on national television. Literal Nazis want antisemitism on all channels, and holocaust denial taught in schools. They apparently don't understand your argument, that ideologies accumulate and win, when you suppress them.

I suspect that Nazis are correct when they themselves reject your line of reasoning.

You’re not changing anything. You’re literally making things worse by banning them.

I think this is the misunderstaning here. There is no "changing anything". This is not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of keeping certain views out of public discourse, is to limit their exposure, in the same way that quarantine limits exposure to infection.

You can have a Nazi who sneezes his ideas into the minds of everyone on national television. That will infect a lot of people. Or you can have a Nazi who has no outlet, but meeting in a basement with his 5 friends, talking about Nazi things among themselves. Those are two extremes. Which is better? What situation should we aspire to?

Of course we are not banishing Nazis from existence. But we are banishing Nazis from looking very cool on national television. If you let them, they will try to do that. Should we let them? What is the benefit in letting them do that?

If antivax views weren’t being removed, way fewer people would believe in them.

If google removed Coca Cola ads from their service, more people would buy coke.

I don't see the problem. I don't have a right to my screen name. Anyone can use variations of that name to post anything they want on any platforms they want. I can't stop them. And I should not be able to stop them.

If my precious online identity gets hit in the confusion... Well, that's the risk I take if I have tied my online identity to nothing else but a meaningless pseudonym, easily faked, copied, and impersonated.

For me, this is just a simple demonstration that you can't trust the name "goat", and a picture of a goat, as a reliable identifyer. Now that I type it out, this is just stupidly obvious. Anyone who thinks that a goat picture and a nickname reliably identify someone on the internet, is just being very, very stupid in this instance.

I find it dangerous to allow someone to impersonate someone else on the fediverse (an admin too) and begin starting trouble.

I don't find that dangerous at all. I find it very disturbing that anyone would be stupid enough to believe that the nickname "goat" and a goat picture is enough to reliably identify them as the same person.

All in all, that seems like a non problem to me. A misunderstanding among a stupid minority, easily cleared up, whenever it is desired.

I don’t know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It’s hard balance to find.

By now I think it's not a balance which can be found. I think "migration to the next thing" is just part of the nature of online identity, if it's important to you.

After some time the weaknesses of certain systems and platforms will start to show, especially if they start becoming "mainstream". And then chances are good that pressure will mount, as a new platform will bring up which aims to adress at least some of the weaknesses of the previous platform. Rinse. Repeat.

The practical solution for that, is to simply search the topic you are interested in plus lemmy on google. Chances are best that you will find the most active community.

Since reddit's search feature was completely unusable for the majority of its history, for me that is just "business as usual". Though it would be nice to have a more integrated solution.