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Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, And they’re showing you the door. https://xkcd.com/1357/
Relatedly, the people who are the most upset about censorship when no one listens to them never remember the other right that goes along with free speech: Freedom of Association. That means that you can mutually choose to listen, platform support OR NOT with whomever you wish.
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People not wanting to engage with other people is not censorship. Nobody is entitled to someone else’s attention.
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I agree but here we are talking about preventing potential people who would like to hear, read or see certain posts
Not really. You can just switch instances if you’re not happy with your admin’s policies. Although figuring out who is federating with whom could be a bit more straightforward.
The alternative would be giving no option of defederation and making live a living hell for mods and admins. They’re already doing unpaid work in almost all cases so nobody would profit from driving them towards burnout, which is still all too common as it is.
I see a future where the Lemmy clients can get feeds from multiple instances, and blend them for you. Let’s just consider if you’re a new user on a new instance, there’s nothing in the local feed so it feels empty, I expect clients to allow you to look at the feed from other bigger instances, to help populate your subscription list, and your comments would still come from your home instance.
In this environment, one instance censoring you wouldn’t have a big effect, cuz you would still be in the feed
Umm, all of what you are describing already exists and is basically how lemmy works. The local feed would always be empty on your newly setup instance if course, precisely because it is the “local” feed. If you want to see the feed of all the instances you are federating with, that’s “all” (or whatever it’s called on your specific client).
The all feed only populates data that your local instance is aware of. So if you have a new instance that isn’t aware of any communities, you’re all feed is empty.
Ok fair enough, but that isn’t exactly a hard hurdle to overcome.
It really is though. You have to know about which communities to subscribe to to get them federated on your instance. Which is a pain in the butt. It’s not a good workflow. You’d have to use some external Lemmy community website, convert the link into the bang link, then put it into your mobile client. And then subscribe. It’s a terrible workflow.
It’s extremely high friction, which means smaller instances are only going to know about the large communities that people bother to do it for.
Am I hopeful this workflow gets better? Absolutely! I have faith that this workflow will get better on many clients. But right now it’s high friction very high friction
lolno
You can say whatever the fuck you want, but other people aren’t obliged to listen to it or pass it on.
Talk to the hand.
People aren’t obliged to listen to it but they have no right to prevent other people from seeing or hearing it unless it’s stuffs like hate speech and racism
So, you’re saying that if I have a conversation with my friend, and I don’t let you listen in, THAT’S censorship? You have a problem with not being able to invade my privacy?
Sorry you got kicked out of whatever cool kids club it was, but you were not censored.
The correct analogy would be someone else trying to prevent you from having a conversation with your friend.
If that’s the case, then who are you unable to talk to?
People are unable see content from other people that their instance has defederated with. (Yes, you can have an account on multiple instances, but that kind of defeats the point of federation.)
So, the inconvenience of having to go from one openly available source of information to ANOTHER openly available source of information, is the same as an authority figure preventing someone from speaking their own opinions?
If you say so. 🤷🏻♂️
Why should an instance get to choose what its users can read? That feels similar to a government deciding what their citizens can read.
No one is preventing anyone from hearing it. You are free to create an account on those instances and listen to them if you want.
Nobody stopping them from starting their own instance, and federating with everyone else.
It isn’t about having something to say and being heard, it’s about having nothing to say and forcing people who don’t want to listen to listen. They’re just pissed off because the fediverse gives people the ability to exercise their right to freedom NOT to associate with them. Trolling isn’t fun without a captive audience to torture.
https://gizmodo.com/online-trolls-actually-just-assholes-all-the-time-stud-1847575210
You are also free to join facebook alternative yet people complains about censorship on it and defending it on lemmy. You are just hypocrites
Freedom of speech almost always comes with freedom of association. The thing that many people miss is that freedom of association also allows you to choose NOT to associate with someone just as freedom of religion includes freedom FROM religion. The instances choosing to defederated from the trolls are exercising their right to be free from association with the trolls. No one is stopping the trolls from spewing their nonsense or stopping anyone who wants to listen from listening.
The word “censorship” has lost all meaning
Just like “liberty”, “fascism”, “freedom”, “bigotry”, “woke”, “liberal”, “communist”, “nazi”, “supremacist”, “ethical”, “feminism”, “gender” and many others.
It’s easier to push a political agenda if you empty words of all meaning just to turn them into buzzwords that can mean whatever you want them to be in order to trigger outrage
english teachers giving you marks whenever you mention feminism:
Sorry, don’t you like it when I mention the things that you don’t agree with? Should I just have mentioned “woke” and “communist” to make you feel better?
that’s not what I meant, I was joking about how english teachers seemingly give you free marks when you mention feminism or patriarchy
Oh
Yes, because lot of people try to avoid complains about censorship by naming it other names
Because this is not censorship. You’re free to browse any defederated community. You’re not censored, they’re not censored. All the content is perfectly viewable on the fediverse.
Go join another instance. You can’t enter somebody else’s house and complain about how they don’t want to invite the neighbor over as well. That’s not censorship. Go to the neighbors house if you want to hang out with them.
But you’ve been explained this multiple times, so I’ll leave it at this. Ignorance is not bliss.
A server operator who chooses to federate or not federate another server is well within their rights to do so. Their server, their rules. If you don’t like it just browse the defederated server yourself, no one is stopping you.
It’s like visiting someone’s house and complaining they don’t have organic coffee. If they don’t have organic coffee they aren’t stopping you from getting organic coffee, they just choose not to have it.
After looking through the comments here, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just don’t understand what you’re saying, because you seem to be under the impression that “defederating” means that noone that isn’t subscribed to the defederating instance will have access to the content anymore. (e.g. Instance A cuts ties with Instance B and C so people with accounts on Instance B and C can no longer read what is published on Instance A)
This is not how it works.
You can browse all instances without even having an account on any of them so absolutely noone loses access to anything. The only thing you temporarily(!) lose is the ability to WRITE anything on the defederated instance, but you can just make an account there anytime you want.
So when Instance A cuts ties with Instance B and C, people with accounts on A can no longer WRITE anything in communities on B and C, but everyone can still READ everything, and if you happen to have an account on Instance B and want to write something on Instance A, you can just create an account there.
Spending ten seconds on creating an account is not censorship.
Yep, and Connect for Lemmy on Android has a really wonderful setting where you can browse other instances without an account and view communities that are local to it. Apps make it easier to handle accounts too now. Liftoff has been the best in that area.
Not really. These aren’t monetized sites, but just individuals inviting guests to use their instance over self hosting their own, and there’s other instances people can move to.
Each instance is better seen as individual forums than a reddit type centralized site. Some forums allows cross account logins, and some you have to create another account. And defederation doesn’t cause that instance to cease to exist like banning a community or subreddit does.
Money is not the only reason why people/ businesses want to censor stuffs. It can also be because of politics or ideology
Yes and no. The people still have the voice, you’re not preventing them from talking to other people, you’re just preventing them from accessing your instance.
Centralized websites like Facebook, Twitter, whatever. That would be censorship if they remove somebody’s voice.
Decentralized instances, are closer to private communities. They’re focused, and they create curated viewpoints.
If the federated universe gets dominated by one or two powerful instances, then yes it would be censorship, but if people are using it at a decentralized fashion: it’s just communities expressing preferences.
Censorship is not only about completely remove somebody voice. Limiting the visibility of somebody voice is also censorship. It doesn’t matter if people are centralized in few instances or not , you still are limiting opinions that re not off topic from reaching certain people.I think some stuffs should be censored like clear hate speech and racism etc.
Limiting the visibility of somebody voice is also censorship
It’s not (always). Especially if the people “limiting your voice” are the ones giving you the platform to reach other people in the first place, usually out of their own pocket or thanks to donations. In the fediverse at least you can always set up your own instance.
If there’s somebody outside my house putting up a big display about some political issue, me closing my window blinds is not censoring them. Yes their message is no longer visible to the people inside my house. But they can still talk to anybody who comes to the public space. As long as they have access to the public space I would argue it’s not censorship
Free speech and censorship only mean something when the government is involved. Free speech is freedom of consequences on speech and opinion from government retaliation. Censorship is the same, it’s a tool used by governments, for the better (like censoring Mein Kampf) or the worst (like censoring LGBT books). Other than that, Lemmy instances not being run by the government, the owner is free to not want to associate with you, if your core ideas clash. You’re free to sign-up on other instances if you don’t like the ones you’re on, or even setup your own.
but you want to make sure all your dog whistles and doubletalk are still welcomed.
You’re stupid, go home kid
“Boo hoo, people aren’t being forced to put up with my stupid shit, waah!”
You can try to spin it in a different way. But it’s still censorship
No it isn’t, kid.
Get fucked.
It’s our right to live in a safe environment without Nazi fucks.
You have an entitlement to speech, you’re not required to be heard or listened to by me.
Who the hell talked about nazis.I’m with censoring hate speech and i don’t believe in total free speech. Did beehaw defederated with lemmy.world becauae of nazis? Yes you don’t have to listen to anybody but you have no right to decide for other what to see. That’s why i’m against defederation and with the ability of individual users to block whatever they want
Yes, it is, but I’m not a Libertarian - some censorship is good. Fascists, trolls, and child pornographers deserve to be censored.
I completely agree with those cases
Get over yourself.
I would say that for an action to be considered censorship in the strictest sense, it would need to be the suppression of information as imposed and enforced by a monopolistic authority.
If the State were to declare a book banned, that would be censorship because the State establishes itself as the single totalising authority over the people in the territory it governs. Should you contravene that ruling and possess the material in question, you’re opening yourself up to the threat of violence until you start respecting it. You’re not able to opt-out, the single authority imposes itself and its ruling on you.
Meanwhile, on federated social media there are many concurrently operating instances with different rulesets and federations. If the instance you’re part of decides to defederate with another, then you can move to another instance which continues to federate with the defederated instance in question if you’re unhappy with the decision. You’re able to opt-out of that ruling without consequence.
Plus, even if you decide not to move instance, the content hosted by the defederated instance will still be available through the instance itself.
Defederation doesn’t meaningfully suppress information, whereas censorship does.
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I’ve been thinking about this at depth. I think the public square, as we would consider the free speech zone in real life, is the closest analog to the activity pub feed itself.
As long as people have access to the activity pub protocol, they have free speech. The instances choosing to subscribe or not subscribe to that activity feed is not censorship
So if somebody received a court order saying they could no longer use activity pub, that’s clearly censorship.
