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

dev.lemmy.ml

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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. > Definition of bigot > : a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices > especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot

Not sure what the 'no' is in regard to. That's entirely aligned to my comment. Or did you think obstinate devotion to opinions and prejudices only manifests in the the group of people you happen to disagree with?

You focused on unwillingness to change one's opinion. That's certainly a definition, but the more common one in use is about prejudice, especially prejudice based on inherent traits like sex or race or sexuality. I'm sure you're aware of that, which is why it's confusing that you're acting as if you're not.

I don't dispute that it's extraordinarily difficult to get people to change political opinions, especially on the fringes. That was never my contention, I made that pretty clear with the example of bigoted communities I chose being white supremacists. Not sure how you could misread that, unless you wanted to.

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends.

>Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends. Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.

The fact is that extreme right people did threaten me, my family, my friends. Today and in the past.

Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lump porn (presumably also artistic nudity) along with hate speech, racism and so on as banned discourse. You're not even allowed to have a sexual alias. This is not necessarily a bad thing for users - I often wish for a place similar to hacker news but with a wider range of topics - however, it almost certainly means they will never reach Reddit levels of popularity. I do think that Reddit fills an important ni…

"difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech" Do you have a crystal clear definition then, on where is exactly the difference? I doubt there exists one.

Yes, real world problems are hard.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though?

We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.

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

#514
post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, bu…

I think there is a dichotomy here, one is rules, the other is ethics, both are different discussions. For instance, can an ethical case be made for watching people die? Is there any benefit to be gained from this beyond the first novelty factor. (A rhetorical question, just to note that the ethical debate precedes rule making)

Ideally an ethical debate would precede rule making. But last I checked nobody who didn't already work at Reddit was involved in making those rules; there was no site-wide referendum, no discussion with users, no warning that these decisions were being made.

Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI').

I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t need to have a discussion with a guy who beats his wife because he never got help for his PTSD to know it’s wrong. Giving it a platform treats it like a point of view and not a gross fucking crime. I don’t need to talk to a Nazi to know that gassing Jews and gays is wrong. People seem to think that there are some unexplored ideas here that merit further discussion. We have already established that this shit i…

You might not need to talk to that guy to know beating his wife was wrong. But talking to him may make you realize he’s in a lot of pain, and that he’s been hurt by a system larger than both of you. That doesn’t absolve him of guilt but I think pragmatically it gives us a better shot at preventing such things in the far future. You don’t have to browse Nazi forums to know that gassing Jews is wrong. But you may start…

> But you may start to discover the reasons why these (mostly) young men are so angry, which I posit allows one to do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies.

The hypothesis that forums dedicated to the spread of neo-Nazism can be effectively used in such a way actually help the world do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies is largely unproven.

Unlike the fact that the dissemination and social reinforcement of Nazi propaganda is an efficient way to help people in a lot of pain 'realize' that the 'real' cause of their problem is Jews.

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

#516

How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on how being "federated" solves the hard problem…

I don't view lemmy as I did voat. When I saw lemmy my first thought was that I wanted to host my own instance of this once federation works. I'm already hosting mastodon and synapse instances for the community. I believe strongly in hosting small federated community instances. This hobby costs me about 80USD/mon.

> costs me about 80USD/mon

That sounds like it would immediately exclude a huge number of potential participants from doing something similar.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This only works for small communitie That's simply not true Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not because the websites posting the ads are moderating them in a good way Let me decide, is it really that scary? My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and delete everything else It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts automati…

> Ad blocking works because I decide what to block Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with. I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea. I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sor…

p.s.

Marco Tullio Cicerone would have laughed at you that downvote comments just because you disagree and can't find good counter-arguments .

I am from Rome and my second and third names are Marco and Augusto, after the Roman emperors Marco Aurelio and Gaio Giulio Cesare Ottaviano Augusto.

From the windows of my house in Rome I see the Colosseum.

Believe me if I tell you that you should change nickname.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with communities like that as long as you keep them segregated like reddit does with each of its subreddits. If those start creeping into your politics, memes, and video game subreddits, then yeah you’ve got a rough problem.

>Nothing wrong with communities like that as long as you keep them segregated like reddit does with each of its subreddits. Which wasn't enough as I understand since those communities would en-mass attack other communities that they disagreed with.

This is what happens all across the web, regardless of software. Raiding. IRC raids, forum raids, etc. Sometimes it's for fun, sometimes it's more malicious. Most software has ways to mitigate it. Temporarily closing new registrations, invite only registrations, throttling, IP bans, etc. Just like DDoS attacks, there is no true solution to this since that's how the public web and internet works.

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

#519
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is no one used the federated services.

more than you'd think! https://fediverse.network/

A drop in the ocean. Needs to be a couple of orders of magnitude greater to start becoming significant.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech" Do you have a crystal clear definition then, on where is exactly the difference? I doubt there exists one.

Yes, real world problems are hard. I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though? We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.

My point was, that it is hard and the lines are blurry.

But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?

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