Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

Yeah, exactly. I immediately knew when I saw "federated" in the title that my job was to drop this link in. This comment seems like the right spot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

Lacking global moderation, eventually every one of those subreddits will end up in Lemmy. Also somethingawful/4chan/8chan style "asshole feedback loops".

Everyone at HN likes to claim they want free speech and hate moderation, but in fact moderation is the foundation of our discourse.

> why would you want to see offensive slurs by default?

If I don't want to see offensive slurs, I won't associate with people who use them. Let me decide what is a slur or not, and let me decide who to associate with.

"This is an Antifa instance" stickied on the front page by an admin no less. If I wanted a politicized cesspool reddit-clone I would just use Voat. Fail to see the point.

> With Mastadon (sic) if say I'm on another instance and the host of that instance blocks yours...

First: Mastodon, with an "O".

Second: I already had this discussion before. This "blocking" of instances is something that is going on only on Mastodon, AFAIK, because most of the current members are conflating the idea of federation with tribes. They want to be insular at this point. This will change as soon as there are more people using ActivityPub like email or Matrix and stop associating the instances with the identities/ideologies of its members.

So, no. You won't have to "setup your Mastodon" instance to get around this. You can do it, but you also can just find a more professional hosting provider that is not managed by a fourteen year old or tweenagers that love to spout their love for diversity and yet can only tolerate any conversation that is exactly aligned with their existing preconceptions of their uniform peer group.

> What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate?

What if you live in China and they block the decentralized service altogether? What if they use the decentralized nature of the service and set up honeypots to find dissidents? "Decentralized" != "Private" != "Secure"

> What if an instance crashes (...) the admins can't be bothered restoring it.

If it is important to you, then (a) you run your own service or (b) you pay someone that actually cares about this. With a decentralized service, the only alternative you have is (a). Then not only you have to make this choice, but also everyone that you would like to join the network.

My point all along is that federated systems are already enough for those that do not "want to be subject to the whims of other people", while decentralized systems shut out those that don't care about it or would rather trust/delegate these concerns to someone else.

"Decentralized systems" bring no benefit that can't be had by federated systems and remove all sorts of free options from the potential users. It is limiting instead of liberating.

What you say has a kernel of truth to it, but I think you are thinking of the wrong tool for the job. There was a well studied psychological phenomenon (sorry I can’t recall the name of the researchers at the moment) where if you put people of similar ideology in a room together and let them converse for a period of time, they will come out of that room holding more extreme views than they went in with, down to holding views that are more extreme than the view of their most extreme member going in. This happen every day on Reddit. Take /r/conservative. Theoretically, a great place to get a conservative point of view and discuss how it might clash with something opposite it. In practice, it has become a safe bubble. If you express a strong liberal viewpoint or identify as a liberal, you will get banned. Ask how I know. And at that point why would anyone outside that bubble go visit it, and why would anyone who is there leave? It creates the exact opposite effect of what you are describing.

Also, again, I am happy to fund research on why men beat women (or any person of any gender beats any other gender, though let’s face it, most times domestic violence is by men against women), but I don’t need 1000 angry men trying to justify to me and each other why it’s ok.

And that’s my point: the web allows us to give voice to those who haven’t been heard before. If a former Nazi wants to explain why he did what he did and why he walked away from it, we should give them voice and listen. If a current incel wants to detail his struggles and ask for help, we should lend an ear. But what help can be given to a man who beats his wife by 1000 men who do the same and think it’s totally justified? What possible good comes of helping them reinforce their beliefs while providing tools to exclude all external points of view?

Lastly, yes it is true that some points of view are just wrong. There are in fact bad ideas. Eugenics is a bad idea. Racism is a bad idea. Misogyny is a bad idea. We can let the academics study it and the therapists try to fix it, but we absolutely do not need to entertain it, pretend like there is some valid point of view there, or give it a platform just so someone can turn around, point out that the existence of the platform means there are two sides to the argument and demand more equal representation. If you really want to help, try going on those fringe subreddits and offer to pay for therapy for those young men. If they take you up on that offer, yes you’ve done a good thing. But in my experience you get a nicely worded message from a mod saying that you and your ideas aren’t welcome here.

Edit: also, I don’t give a fuck if you are in pain because crushing system, etc. If you beat your wife, you deserve a beating. If you think it’s sometimes justified you deserve two. Don’t make your problems someone else’s pain. It doesn’t make you justified. It just objectively makes you an asshole.

Edit 2: Daryl Davis is a black man who has been befriending members of the KKK and successfully convinced over 200 of them to leave. That does not justify the existence of the KKK, just shows how difficult it is to do this kind of work: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...