Some musings on defederation, free speech, censorship, astroturfing, and community
Some musings on defederation, free speech, censorship, astroturfing, and community
Hi. I'm dedicated to lemmy, the fediverse and a decentralized social media as a public good.
We're experiencing some growing pains. We will overcome these. I want to share some of my thoughts regarding these pains and hopefully provide some food for though as to solutions, and the solutions' weaknesses.
- Defederating is a last resort as we often say. The ability for individual to block instances could be a start to use defederation more moderately.
- We can even curate defederation lists somewhat how ublock has blocklists. "I really don't want to deal with any fascists bootlickers, so I follow the antifa defederation list" or "I disagree with many folks who defend China's actions but maybe I can do some good by engaging in good faith, so I won't defederate these instances, but that doesn't mean I won't block the most egregious users from those instances"
That said, there is a good reason to defederate for example when astroturfing is taking place. that said, when astrotrufing is taking place, there should be something of a funnel effect - outside instance showing a growing trend on certain topics, upvoting certain things en masse? Start to shadowban - not exacctly shadowban but really slow down the functioning of the site for them. Scenario: the agora starts a vote to defederate crushing-heads, a fascist lemmy instance. We begin to see a huge influx of user activity from that instance. Instead of altogether banning their participation, causing them to make sock puppet accounts on this instance, put in a queuing system so interactions with the site from that instance get processed more slowly, somewhat like slow mode on discord.
one thing about fully defederating an instance is that it invites them to create accounts on the instance which has defederated them out of spite. "Oh you don't want to hear our FREE SPEECH? well we're going to join your instance and FREE SPEECH ALL OVER YOUR ASSES"
Another thought I've had about the future of lemmy is just how easy it would be for state apparatus dividing, discrediting and sowing disunity. It's been done and they're not going to stop trying to inflitrate and muddy the discourse. This is why so many leftist instances seem very quick with the ban hammer. I mean, it explains why so many leftist countries maintain an authoritarian propaganda and censorship machine. It's highly doubtful that'd be necessary if there wasn't massive propaganda efforts from the outside.
It makes me wonder how Lemmy can work to avoid letting agitators muddy the discourse while still allowing free and open contributions from well intentioned people.
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I don't think there's any community or platform that is not susceptible to groups of people posing as normal people and manipulating discussions.
Which is why the easiest thing to do is just have the discussions. If someone wants to act as if they're just a regular person bringing up crime statistics about black people or something, just engage in good faith and present your counter. If they're genuine, you've provided a genuine response, if they're not, you're still winning because their goal is to either prove you can't ask certain questions or that people are hiding from the truth. Also, you automatically get an opportunity to influence any 3rd parties simply reading the exchange.
Even in good faith one can adopt the point of view of a caricature or bad actor.
It’s normal to take multiple stances in the process of understanding something.