1 yr. ago • 0%

Should political extremism, far-left or far-right, be an allowed part of Lemmy's Fediverse?

I'm simply asking this question because of Lemmygrad.ml existing, and that there isn't a far-right equivalent of it yet. If Lemmygrad has any standing for its right to exist under free speech, where is the line drawn for other extremist political ideologies? If Holodomor skepticism is allowed, then what stops Holocaust skepticism? (as it is generally accepted the Holodomor was man-made). I'm simply wondering what gives far-left politics a right to promote such extremist views in the Fediverse, when their far-right counterparts would be Defederated in minutes.

21 comments

Lemmy is a federated platform run by instance owners. Owners have full power regarding moderating their servers including delegating that power to others. The owners can decide which other owners are censored through defederation. Lemmy, by design, is not free from political struggle. Lemmy handles power better than platforms like Reddit where server ownership is centralized.

Denying crimes against humanity is foul. Owners decide which ideas are promoted and which are denying history through federation with owners. Spaces for denying crimes against humanity will continue to exist. I would like to be in those spaces as a thorn to remind others of their awful ideas and possibly present better ideas.

Under present conditions someone must own the hardware to run the server. The owner cannot reasonably allow all content. Constituents of an instance place trust in the owner to censor in a transparent and responsible manner. Those same constituents can leave an instance for violating trust with regard to censorship. Freedom of association is an important component of Lemmy.

Far right and far left are a spectrum. I describe myself as an anarchist which is considered far left. As an anarchist, I see the fediverse as a possibility space for democratic control and power distribution over horizontally aligned hierarchies. I am excited for the possibilities to end domination heirarchies. My political alignment is tangent to the systems for power established by Lemmy.

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- Well said, all of it.
  
  There's nothing the Fediverse as a whole can do to prevent extremism, by design; what we can do is choose not to interact with it, or to interact antagonistically with it
  
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This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It's quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That's the whole point. There's no centralized server where someone can decide "Oh, we're just gonna prevent this person's physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet".

If there were, it'd be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don't moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.

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I keep seeing these posts about whether something should be "allowed", and keep asking myself how people could so fundamentally misunderstand the fediverse when I've only been here a month and can see this is a silly question.

How are you going to stop an open source, federated community from having instances where far right or far left stuff happens? You can't. All you can do is decide who you federate with on the instance you own. So join an instance who is careful about its membership and defererates instances that have far right or left activity. That's all you can do.

There is no "king of the fediverse" making decrees about what is/is not allowed.

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The problem isn't political extremism in either of those cases, the problem is authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is just bad, no matter who does it. As others have stated, there is indeed no king of the fediverse.

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I mean, how scary is the far left? They want to feed too many hungry kids? Make healthcare affordable? Respect basic human rights? It seems disingenuous to compare the left to the right, I mean one side is too nice and the other wants to tear down democracy.

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- Damned communists wanting everybody to (checks notes) live in reasonable comfort, without fear of destitution and homelessness
  
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Isn't Truth Social (Trump's thing) technically part of the fediverse, since it runs on Mastodon? I don't know if they're a far-right equivalent of lemmygrad since I haven't spent time on either but it seems like a fair parallel.

Personally I'm not a fan of eager defederation. I'm skeptical of the benefits of deplatforming and I think that casual use of the banhammer, even if the subjects deserve it, is corrosive to our own ability to think clearly.

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Good to define terms for this. Does extreme left mean people who think that a living wage should be a thing? To fox news it does.

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Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I'd rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.

Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they're all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.

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- Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.
  
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- Eh... I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don't think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
  
  I don't think that level of intolerance should be tolerated, regardless of whether someone is on the right or left of the spectrum.
  
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- Unless you're Jewish, the far left has had a huge blind spot for anti-Semitism over the last few years.
  
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  I'm not saying that all leftists aren't bigots or that bigotry never happens in leftist spaces, but bigotry is the rule in fascist ones. Fascism is bigotry, it's a core part of the ideology itself. For that reason they're not comparable.
  
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Just asking a question, huh? Second one of these threads I've seen in my feed today.

Neocons testing the waters, to see how far their hatespeech will get them.

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If you explicitly define what far-left and far-right means, you could probably have a straightforward answer. You mention holodomor skepticism and holocaust skepticism as some kind of far-left and far-right examples (unless I am misreading your comment), but I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR, but I am not at all sure. Maybe my internet experience is in some kind of enclave composed of SF literature discussions, 8-bit computers and King of the Hill clips, but I really don't run across holodomor skepticism at all.

Of course, I know what holocaust skepticism is (the denial that millions of Jews [and a whole bunch of gays and Christians and Roma peoples) were systematically killed by the German regime during WW2, as directed by Hitler), but that's only because the types of people who would embrace (or worse) holocaust skepticism are feeling more emboldened by the current political climate.

Personally, I define far-left and far-right as being 'armed militants' and/or 'large groups of people calling for the eradication of one or more types of people.' 'Types of people', in this case, means 'people who are born with a certain characteristic that is not changeable, such as race or sexuality' Currently, we have armed militants protesting libraries (libraries, of all places!) but I have yet to see an armed militant demanding government-funded healthcare or seizing the means of production. Therefore, you will have to forgive me if I don't buy into the 'both sides' equivalence that your post requires the reader to hold.

When the far-left becomes as bad as the far-right, we can (and should!) talk. Until then, miss me with that shit.

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- I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR
  
  The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine; there is some argument as to whether the intent was to kill off Ukrainians to stifle their independence movement at the time, or if the greater USSR just didn't care about them at all.
  
  Regardless, most of the crops grown in Ukraine at the time were shipped out to other parts of the USSR, leaving little to eat in Ukraine, and causing millions of deaths. Total death count is also iffy, but certainly rivals the Holocaust.
  
  Compare the Irish potato famine, where Britain enforced export of potatoes from Ireland despite widespread Irish famine. Same thing, larger scale.
  
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