The crazies migrate to another platform and then that platform gets bigger and crazier and perhaps eventually competes with the original, more mainstream platforms.
We need some sort of “immune system” to handle these extremes, deplatforming is kinda like moving the disease to another part of the body where there is no “immune system”. Defederating might create the same effect.
I don’t know how to handle it, but we might need more “normal” average people participating in a compassionate understanding way, with those that have lost their way. Because right now there are plenty of Russian bots that encourage the wildest conspiracies and world views, but also plenty of people with idle time on their hands encouraging it also.
We will meet this challenge more and more as the fediverse grows. At this moment it’s not worth the investment to spread misinformation probably.
PieFed has not merely several but MANY concepts along these lines.
Lemmy, for ah… “reasons”, seems to have none. In fact, having a modlog but no modmail, nor any type of active notification of a moderation event occuring (e.g. content removal, locking, or banning), nor any method of asking whoever removed the content why (worse: the modlog used to say the account name that did so, but now merely says “mod”), there is a very compelling argument to say that Lemmy is more authoritian than even Reddit is, at least at the end-user level (though not for instance admins or mods).
Edit: At which point PieFed’s efforts to provide democratization of moderation are like a breath of fresh air!:-) No longer must a mod+admin team be the sole arbitraters of content - users can themselves do things like filter out all, or just a little, or none of content matching certain keywords such as “Musk” or “Trump”. And icons next to usernames help alleviate the need to always block trolls - seeing that someone has an account less than two weeks old, or posts far more than they comment (unregistered bot?), or receives many more downvotes than upvotes (contentious user!) helps inform whether or how you may want to respond, while still allowing you to read their content if you should so desire. Such tools as these (and several others) put the choice of whether to see many varieties of content or not into the hands of individual users, unlike the Lemmy + Reddit model where only a mod+admin gets to decide for everyone in the community all at once. Okay so here’s another one: if you wish, you can have PieFed automatically collapse, or even hide outright (two different settings, with different filter thresholds) content that receives many downvotes. Personally I don’t like these so I turn them both off - but they still offer me that choice, which I greatly appreciate.:-)
It might also be necessary to find new ways of discussion that do not favor short, emotionally impactful but factually wrong arguments so much. Our political discussions tend to have a lot of repetition all over the place anyway that is a waste of our collective time.
That’s the problem with ‘deplatforming.’
The crazies migrate to another platform and then that platform gets bigger and crazier and perhaps eventually competes with the original, more mainstream platforms.
We need some sort of “immune system” to handle these extremes, deplatforming is kinda like moving the disease to another part of the body where there is no “immune system”. Defederating might create the same effect.
I don’t know how to handle it, but we might need more “normal” average people participating in a compassionate understanding way, with those that have lost their way. Because right now there are plenty of Russian bots that encourage the wildest conspiracies and world views, but also plenty of people with idle time on their hands encouraging it also.
We will meet this challenge more and more as the fediverse grows. At this moment it’s not worth the investment to spread misinformation probably.
Neutralizing a few troll farms would be a good start.
PieFed has not merely several but MANY concepts along these lines.
Lemmy, for ah… “reasons”, seems to have none. In fact, having a modlog but no modmail, nor any type of active notification of a moderation event occuring (e.g. content removal, locking, or banning), nor any method of asking whoever removed the content why (worse: the modlog used to say the account name that did so, but now merely says “mod”), there is a very compelling argument to say that Lemmy is more authoritian than even Reddit is, at least at the end-user level (though not for instance admins or mods).
Edit: At which point PieFed’s efforts to provide democratization of moderation are like a breath of fresh air!:-) No longer must a mod+admin team be the sole arbitraters of content - users can themselves do things like filter out all, or just a little, or none of content matching certain keywords such as “Musk” or “Trump”. And icons next to usernames help alleviate the need to always block trolls - seeing that someone has an account less than two weeks old, or posts far more than they comment (unregistered bot?), or receives many more downvotes than upvotes (contentious user!) helps inform whether or how you may want to respond, while still allowing you to read their content if you should so desire. Such tools as these (and several others) put the choice of whether to see many varieties of content or not into the hands of individual users, unlike the Lemmy + Reddit model where only a mod+admin gets to decide for everyone in the community all at once. Okay so here’s another one: if you wish, you can have PieFed automatically collapse, or even hide outright (two different settings, with different filter thresholds) content that receives many downvotes. Personally I don’t like these so I turn them both off - but they still offer me that choice, which I greatly appreciate.:-)
It might also be necessary to find new ways of discussion that do not favor short, emotionally impactful but factually wrong arguments so much. Our political discussions tend to have a lot of repetition all over the place anyway that is a waste of our collective time.
This isn’t about debating tactics, this is about power.
Convincing a lot of people you are correct is a form of power.