What is the point of the fediverse having built-in censorship to ban ideas, views, and opinions? There could be a direct connection between why Mastodon does not attract new users and the totalitarian censorship of the fediverse pushing a monolith barbarian culture.
Looking through posts on the different fediverse services, it seems anything built on ActivityPub will only turn stale in 5 years because it is designed for people who can’t function in society where random individuals can freely reject their statements, so they need the internet to hide away from life.
You guys who are guessing at what behavior this guy is describing as “censorship,” and basing your advice to him on your guess, need to learn to read the modlog.
@OP, not every instance is like that. lemmy.ml is notorious for censoring discussion as a way of the moderator picking a “correct” point of view and enforcing it. It’s weird. Don’t go to lemmy.ml and you mostly won’t have issues with it, although some individual political communities may tend to do it, depending. But it’s not a feature of all of the fediverse. It’s just sort of an unfortunate side effect of the way moderation is structured. Mostly, the culture here isn’t like that, though. Mostly. Sometimes it is.
I am looking at the modlog and see nothing, what am I missing?
Precisely lol.
OP was not the one “censored.” They participated in a comments section about keyboards, and the mod was going around deleting comments about FUTO saying “offtopic,” and OP asked why is someone censoring comments. That seems like a pretty fair question to me. Especially since some of the comments looked on topic to me, and then there was a second post “What are your thoughts on FUTO?” that also had some apparently-innocent comments that I guess the mod disagreed with deleted.
It sounds, to me, like OP has a point, and lemmy.world is doing its thing and just charging ahead with whatever the most stereotypical possible take someone could have on whatever issue is at hand, after seeing it and spending 0 seconds thinking, and then yelling at anyone who disagrees with that take. Maybe I missed something, but that’s what it looks like to me.
Edit: Well now OP is starting to sound like they’re maybe talking about some of those more special and exciting opinions, about other human beings, as the ones being censored. I’m still not as sure about it as are some other commenters, but I’m at least not sure anymore that OP isn’t talking about that.
FUTO isn’t open source, and the community in question was !opensource@lemmy.ml, making FUTO offtopic.
Like I say, it sure sounds to me like OP has a point. I also think this probably wouldn’t happen on a server which didn’t have a strong tradition of the mods determining what opinions people are and aren’t allowed to have.
People also have a point who are noting that OP is ticking some of the boxes of the “right winger complaining about censorship” bingo card. Personally, that’s not really offensive to me if it’s just someone saying what they think and asking if they’re allowed to say it, but it’s definitely poking a hole in my “yinz are freaking out, he’s just talking about keyboads” theory, I will admit.
We didn’t guess.
?
OP has never been moderated themselves. They participated in a comments section about keyboards. Some of the comments about FUTO were deleted because it was deemed offtopic, even though it kind of seemed on topic to me. Then, there was a separate post about FUTO specifically, which also had some stuff deleted from it. So it doesn’t seem like the issue was the on-topic-ness, after all. Maybe I missed something in my cursory glance over everything, but it definitely looked to me like the moderator was picking what point of view was “correct”, and deleting comments that went too far in the opposite direction from that. OP asked, “Why is there so many censored posts about keyboard apps?” which sounds like a great question.
What did I miss? I could have missed something. What did you see that OP was talking about instead of that?
I think your first sentence of reply has a mistake, maybe a word is missing, it is not clear. Or am I not understanding correctly?
You guys need to learn to read the modlog.
You guys who are guessing at what behavior etc, need to learn to read the modlog.
You guys who are guessing at what behavior etc, and basing your advice etc, need to learn to read the modlog.
Probably my sentence structure was confusing.
Nope, not even you guys are good to their eyes. When will you learn?
Happy now? There needs to be a non-offensive second person plural. I didn’t mean anything by it, I just geniunely don’t know what I should say that would be satisfying.
Edit: More correct yinzer
**Nope
This is a reply I recieved from them. Unless your instance allows transphobia, then maybe yeah, I was wrong, you wouldn’t “censor” them. Or maybe you’re gonna pretend that “criticizing transgenderism” isn’t some obvious dogwhistle, and I hope not.
It was obvious they weren’t just talking about your typical “lemmy.ml is censoring me” post. They also mentionned mastodon censoring them, which to me is a pretty red flag, since mastodon is not usually known for this behavior unless you’re right wing adjacent.
Edit: Fine I’ll try spelling it out. If their question was about the lemmy modlog in the keyboard post, why wasn’t it mentionned once or given as an example? Why was Mastodon mentioned and why were they giving “transgenderism” as an example?
There’s a school of thought that if someone is transphobic or similar, that you can still talk with them, and explain why they’re wrong. They probably won’t absorb it the first time. But, if you forbid anyone in the world from ever having that conversation with them, or for that matter if you approach the conversation from the point of view that the transphobic person is being “bad” when they express sincerely to you what they believe, then all you’re doing is making it a lot more difficult for them to ever adopt any point of view other than transphobia.
There’s another school of thought that, more or less, we don’t give a shit if someone is “sincere” about transphobia, that’s messed up, and I don’t want it on my network. Particularly since giving people an “innocent” way to express it and talk about it will open the door for right-wing bad actors to “innocently” express bigotry on your network.
To me, both of these schools of thought are valid. I’m comfortable talking with people with a wide range of opinions I really don’t agree with, at least for a little while. I actually lean a little more towards the first school of thought, applied to a whole lot of ignorant stuff including transphobia. I think Lemmy is pretty unanimous on the second school of thought. That’s fine, and I guess I understand why it has to be that way on an anonymous network that’s subject to all sorts of attempted abuse. But I do think the first school of thought is valid, too, as a general rule about dealing with people.
Maybe OP thinks so too. Or maybe they’re ignorant about “transgenderism,” from Lemmy’s point of view. Or maybe it was just an academic example, a pretty accurate one IMO, about a point of view that you cannot express anywhere on Lemmy outside of a few pariah-for-good-reason instances. Or maybe they are a secret right-winger who’s cleverly smuggled “transgenderism” and “censorship” into this conversation, and the whole thing of keyboards was just a ruse to be able to start talking about it. I don’t necessarily assume that third thing, though. It sounds like everyone else here is. I thought we were talking about keyboards. OP, are you talking about keyboards, or trans issues, or what? What are some examples of stuff you would like to be able to talk about on Lemmy that you can’t?
I read your post, so don’t take my short response as me not reading through it or understanding your point.
But that user clearly passed the point where I could ever give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re using a clear right wing dogwhistle, and I don’t think they’re asking it innocently. I don’t think they used the keyboard thing as a pretext, but that the question they asked goes above the keyboard thing and reveals how they think about “being censored”.
Fair. The “Your side screams censorship” comment was something of a tactical blunder, too, if they wanted to be able to make the claim that this is all about keyboards. It does make it sound like they’re trying to back their way into making a political point primarily.
I also didn’t really read their whole post initially, I saw the basic gist and looked up the history, because I was mostly interested in the reality of how they were “censored” more than what they had to say about it. Then what I saw in the comments looked like the most knee-jerk of knee-jerks. But reading their post in detail definitely makes it sound a lot like they want to be racist but can’t. Whether that was their intent or their desire or not, I don’t know.
OP: If you pick a fight with the whole room, you’ll be in a fight with the whole room. There’s actually a significant sense in which I agree with you, probably putting me vastly in the minority on Lemmy, but you being deliberately disagreeable is going to make it harder for you to be able to succeed making your point, and also make a challenge for anyone who agrees with you to any extent.
It will also cause a bunch of conflict, though, so if that was your goal, you are succeeding.