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.
That sounds like it would immediately exclude a huge number of potential participants from doing something similar.
The media storage is dirt cheap but it grows with the instance and users. One major issue some instance admins have is a lot of users uploading a lot of data.
My instance is very small and also blocked registrations to EU.
I expect to have enough capacity left over in my existing cluster to also host lemmy.
A given community can pool money on a server of their own, and federate it with other communities' servers if they want.
I remember people doing it with TeamSpeak, Minecraft, Counter-strike, etc. server, its the same !
The great thing about federation is that you don't have to host an entire community; just a slice of it.
The public timeline of all instances is by default public, without authentication. So technically you could scrape them.
Also I must advocate relaying. ActivityPub relays are very simple servers that receive all posts from any subscribed instance. Not just mastodon either, multiple AP services supported.
And then relays those posts to all subscribed instances.
Relaying does wonders for the public timeline of a small localized instance.
> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
Code of conduct links to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Their rules are a lot stricter than Reddit’s. I’m not sure how that in practice works with it being federated, but assuming their rules are enforceable and enforced it looks like they’re just not interested in that content.
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 niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion, including porn and other forbidden topics like drugs. It's just unfortunate that the company currently ruling this niche is so morally bereft that they can't tell the 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.
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.
The problem is that having uncensored speech doesn't scale, because eventually you'll become big enough to attract media scrutiny, which inevitably cherry-picks the worst parts of the user base. This cause 1) advertisers to pull out and 2) starts attracting more of the wrong type of users.
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?
The US has the freest speech that I know of (granted it’s also the only model that I’m so familiar with), and even it has plenty of restrictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
And no, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater is not illegal and is protected by the First Amendment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Including illegal things?
In Saudia Arabia it is illegal to say, God does not exist. (and in germany under special circumstances, too - meaning, if enough people would get angry at you saying that, it would be illegal for you to say so)
This used to be the case years ago but Reddit is anything but open now. It's a giant echo chamber and if you harbor unpopular beliefs or opinions you are not welcome.
As for CoC: I believe it's more of a signalling act than a reaction to past issues. Just like the KKK would add "no race mixing" to the rules, a left wing open source project needs to signal to their in group, and their main way of doing that is to say "no harassment based on [some criteria]".
I don't have an issue with it if anyone finds inclusivity to be the most important issue, but it is a progressive policy, not "core to democracy". Please stop moralizing your personal political convictions. No, you're not a good person because of random political beliefs you happen to have, no, people who don't share those beliefs are not bad persons, and no, democracy does not rely on everyone sharing your beliefs.
Democracy does not require Universal Suffrage.
Also fun quote from Wikipedia: In its original 19th-century usage by reformers in Britain, universal suffrage was understood to mean only universal manhood suffrage
If we're to take reddit as an example moderation happens by individuals rather than all members of the community. And as such it is open to abuse whether it happens or not.
I thought about this for a long time and decided to write up what I would consider to be an acceptable framework for any given social media platform which would:
1. Help define the Overton window in a more organic fashion
2. Allow the platform to function within different jurisdictions.
3. Remove the overhead of central administration and opinion checking.
If it helps, I wrote it up here: https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...
I wonder if that's even the case, or if the range of allowed opinions is rather set by advertisers and investors. If Reddit had a very large, very lucrative Pro-Life community that essentially "kept the lights on" by providing high ad revenue, I doubt that they wouldn't cater to that community's wishes. They lean strongly to the left, because their audience does, and they want their audience to be happy so they stay and watch ads on their site.
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, but what happens if and when they encourage harm tomorrow? What if the rules turned against you? Wouldn't you want to be able to speak out?
This just feels like a rehash of the "think about the children" argument. We should not base human communication on the idea that some grown adult somehow somewhere could have such an adverse reaction to your content that they suffer serious mental or physical harm. Especially when said communication is hidden behind NSFW spoilers and other appropriate trigger warnings. Nobody could have possibly stumbled upon r/watchpeopledie and thought it was anything other than what it said it was.
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)
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.
I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario.
And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t. When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites.
The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms.
People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.
I don't feel the need to make an ethical argument for or against HN
That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
When we ban an account, we don't use shadowbanning it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2].
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing [email protected] is the best way to do that.
Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.
The tell in comments like this is that they are linkless. Supplying the relevant links would reveal the rest of the story and let readers make up their own minds. That's why they're conspicuously missing.
I'm on HN because dang and the others in charge of moderating repeatedly make good faith efforts to explain their moderation philosophy and keep the rules updated and visible.
If Twitter and Reddit moderators were as public as dang were I would feel far more comfortable relying on them to make decisions for me.
Most things in the world outside of pure mathematics are subjective. If you’re looking to do nothing if it involves subjective decision making, nothing would ever get done.
All around us, all day every day, we look at a problem, we take the best info and expertise available to us, and we make a judgement call.
The fact that almost always some level of subjectivity exists doesn’t mean we do nothing.
New platforms do solve the "oh no I've been deplatformed from Reddit" problem for... people who've been deplatformed from Reddit, so certainly it has real value for them. If Reddit swings the moderation hammer too hard, that could be certainly become a draw, but as it stands Reddit has actually banned very few communities, considering.
Getting people to use a new website in any significant numbers is really hard, and there aren't that many examples of communities that have managed it in the time the internet has been alive. It's impressive that any have managed to stay relevant for more than a couple years.
1. It needs to position itself as something other than not-reddit
2. There are a lot of issues Reddit really doesn't solve. Reddit encourages short, pithy, drive-by posts without much in the way of engagement at all. Compare old newsgroups, old forums, or even the average post here, compared to the average post (even in a niche sub) on reddit. Reddit:??Mysteryreplacement::Twitter:Blogs. I don't know what ??Mysteryreplacement will be, but there's certainly room for it.
If you find yourself collecting them too, ban them.
I think it is important however to have a strong emphasis on the separation of the servers from the protocol though - no one seems to care that Nazis could use email to have their own mailing lists.
Everybody use to run a PhpBB or alternative for their own community. I remember being part of multiple of them in the early 2010. A lot of them got replaced by subreddit or facebook page, and this is what the fediverse can replace. Not the whole of reddit or Facebook, but if you want a place for you and your friends to organize your dnd party, run your minecraft server, talk about passion X or Y, the fediverse can do that :) .
Open Source doesn't need 'masses' in order to 'be successful. A lot of people make the mistake of applying generic economics to Open Source and related communities.
A federated mastodon or Lemmy instance is successful the moment one or more people use and enjoy it, nothing more. It does not need to have huge audiences to advertise to. It does not need to have Big Data to mine and sell. It doesn't need to pay employees, offices and bonuses. All it needs is one person enjoying it. Or two people having a meaningful interaction, to be successful .
If you make the mistake of discussing this on any other Canadian related sub where the /r/canada mods frequent, they'll ban you for life and say that you were "brigading."
Am I missing something?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/about/moderators/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/metacanada/about/moderators/
But hey, that's the beauty (and ugliness) of federation: I don't have to like it and I can just start my own server. On the flipside, it also means I need to be beholden to a considerable amount of social rules, some of them unwritten, if I want to federate with the majority of the servers out there. I know how it goes, I've seen it first-hand when it comes to ActivityPub instances. That's how you get cliques.
>That doesn't mean I stand with Antifa.
Do you know what antifa is short for
After all, it's all in the name!
https://ifunny.co/picture/we-call-ourselves-the-anti-bad-guy...
If those start creeping into your politics, memes, and video game subreddits, then yeah you’ve got a rough problem.
Which wasn't enough as I understand since those communities would en-mass attack other communities that they disagreed with.
See: 4chan. It wasn't always like it is now, but since /pol/ grew to be so big, now pretty much every board has a sizable or majority far-right contingent. It's even worse on Voat.
If you tell someone NEVER GO INTO THE LAST DOOR ON THE THIRD STORY, they’ll endlessly wonder what’s inside. If you show them that it’s your amateur paintings, they’ll never care again.
We want to act like we are purely rational beings, and maybe some of us operate on that level consistently, but those of us that do not, even for a moment, are ripe to have their animal brains taken advantage of for evil.
No. Please let's stop with the "both sides" fallacy.
This is what the parent poster wrote:
>> the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen
There is no "argument" being debated here. Only victims being harmed (more) by the sharing of the pictures.
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 is not what we want. Those in doubt can read accounts of domestic violence victims or a couple of history books to educate themselves.
If you don't want to talk to those people, then don't. But to stand there and claim to speak for all of us and claim you are the authority on what topics are authorised for discussion is such an disgusting level of narcisistic meglomania that needs to be stamped out.
You're just a Totalitarian, and you should be put on a podium along side your historial commrades (and their outcomes) for all to hear and see.
This shit has happened before, and many millions were silenced into the siberian wastelands for it.
Ah, yes. "We were wrong about morality all those other times throughout history but THIS time we're right! Forever and ever!"
Also, the things being banned are nowhere as far outside the Overton Window as your strawmen.
Dismissing an argument based on rhetorical sophistry is keeping your head in the sand while trying to get others to do the same. It’s reckless.
You don’t have to browse Nazi forums to know that gassing Jews is wrong. 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.
I'd look at fat-people-hate and beat-women subreddits more like bank robberers planning their next attack on a bank, discussing weapons, and having a good time looking at viedos of robberies from the past.
Then you can visit them and tell them "But it's wrong to rob banks, it's not your money and think of the poor people working in the bank, they'll get PTSD".
Or you say "Let's discuss the big underlying systematic problem that is larger than all of us, and makes you rob banks, and how to solve it"
Then you get banned from that subreddit, and the bank robberers continue enjoying robbing banks.
Bank robbers don't rob banks because they enjoy robbing banks. Bullys don't bully because "omg wow have you tried bullying it so great".
I'm all with you that bullying sucks, but if you want bullying to stop, you better damn well understand the motivation. If you reach for "they are just evil people", you're not thinking hard enough.
Say you build walkie talkies, and a member of the KKK shows up and says he needs 100 of them because they are rioting in a black neighborhood tonight and need a way to coordinate their plans. Do you say “sure in fact take some for free!” just so you can listen in to understand exactly how they are terrorizing their black neighbors, or do you tell them to fuck off because you don’t want to provide tools to a hate group?
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.
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...
As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time (along with explanations for why eugenics is wrong and why we think there aren't substantial sex differences that make the sexes on average more suited to different things) the fact these kinds or things are censured and censored everywhere is immensely frustrating.
The only things I can find are sites talking about why racism is true or sites talking about why it's wrong, but I can't find resources talking about why it's false!
If you happen to have links about eugenics/racism/sexism that talk about their falseness (I mean, I presume you have actually seen arguments against them that makes you so sure they are bad/false?) then please let me know.
Racism isn't useful and isn't actionable at a policy level.
Let's suppose there is some trait X (could be IQ test score, high jump ability, whatever) that is statistically variant by rigorously defined race. Group A scores on average 98, group B scores on average 103.
The median difference between groups doesn't actually matter, because individual scores are spread on a normal distribution. Therefore some percentage of individuals of group A will score higher on trait X than individuals of group B even if on average they do not.
So how can you effectively filter out individuals for entry into some special program? (for example, the high jump event in the Olympics)
Well, you have to test each individual. And if you want the very best, it behooves you to test each individual as fairly as possible, because there's always a chance that you will sample an individual from group A who is a super star, and also find an individual from group B who is a dud.
And it is the same for any other trait you would like to filter for.
Racism is an attempt to find a convenient mental shortcut so that it may provide cover for hatred of an out-group. But racism is ineffective and stupid.
That said, it would be rude to ignore the effort you've made, so:
The main actionable things the HBDers I've spoken to want include no longer automatically treating mismatches between demographics in employment, prison, etc as a problem and introducing testing for those coming emmigrating into their country.
Also, there is a weakness in testing, namely that even racialists think things like intelligence are partly non-shared environment, so if you set a lower bar filter from a population with lower average IQ, then while the people you get will meet your threshhold, their children would often not (assuming this supposed genetic difference exists), which is relevant to immigration rules.
So are we going to kick out in-group children from the country when their IQ scores aren't high enough? No? Then that is a a bad argument.
Also, I have been trying to avoid the whole debate on what IQ test actually measure...
The article is perhaps extreme and overly performative, but I think the central idea of "races" not surviving the near-future is a good one.
If race realism is correct then job quotas, immigration and education policy will cause a fair few problems, and if it's wrong then the very large amounts of suffering enduring by some ethnic minorities will be fixable.
So while this is far from the most important issue (that goes to things like ageing, possible dysgenic trends and the possibility of true AI), it's still pretty important by the standards of modern policy debates.
http://nathancofnas.com/comments-on-my-rationalwiki-page/
and
https://medium.com/@NoahCarl/some-comments-on-the-rationalwi...
Frequently found are lies, deliberate misrepresentation, mocking, bullying.
Would you mind if I flagged your post?
White supremacists might say they want a meritocracy, but most/all of them actually don't. They just want to create filters slightly more subtle than "no X allowed" signs for their establishments.
As I mentioned, if you are going to test, it needs to be fair and accurate, or else it isn't useful. If you want chess champions, you don't hold a quiz on trivia, you stage a chess competition.
It seems like you and the word meritocracy have some issues. I never brought it up and frankly it has nothing to do with my argument. You inserted it into the conversation, then immediately played victim. I can’t tell if you are trolling or legitimately can’t figure out what we are talking about here so trying to switch the subject to your own grievance, but in either case, please stop.
I don't know any sane person who thinks that.
Feminism was about that woman have the right to choose a role, that was traditionally reserved for men (and the other way around).
That women does not get discriminated for being women.
The fight against the idea, that women are made for household and kitchen (and bed).
But yes, that originate idea got forgotten quite a bit, to the point where women get he idea hat it is wrong for a woman to be at home and take care of the kids and not pursue a carieer.
* Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Make sure to get the NC17 unabridged book for the non-sugarcoated version. * All humans are virtually genetically identical. Can’t find a good primary source at 6am, but start with this: https://www.quora.com/Do-all-humans-have-the-same-genome-seq.... Black people are no different than white people, and you won’t find anything inherently different about either group other than some external appearance. It logically follows that discriminating by skin color is arbitrary, like discriminating say by height or eye color. * Racism is bad for society. https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Negative-Effects-Of-Racism-FJ... * Racism is bad for the economy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/racism-riots-economics-.... * A much better explanation than I can write at the moment on why it’s wrong: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-racism-wrong?share=1
I am not going to spend more time Googling for you on this, but feel free to continue the research yourself. Try searching “effects of X on Y” and “morality of Z” and “why is W wrong” if you want to see those points of view. Form your own opinion, but keep one thing in mind: the often cited argument for a lot of this stuff is that “we’ve never implemented it correctly”. I hear this a lot about communism nowadays. There are a lot of setups where the idea inevitably leads to an outcome. For example, the US political and elections system inevitably leads to a two party system. It can be mathematically proven that this is the case. Similarly, ideas like racism inevitably lead to human and economic suffering, and those who try to separate the idea and it’s effect as implemented should be suspect of making arguments in bad faith. Examine their theories more closely.
Lastly, there is only so much you can learn from short form articles on the web. Read Sapiens. Read a couple or history books on WWII. Talk to a concentration camp survivor if you can find one. Talk to a Nazi solder. Talk to almost any woman in your life. I guarantee you that your mother experienced sexism, sexual harassment, and chances are outright sexual assault, since a very large percentage of women have in their lives statistically speaking.
That said, I have done a fair bit of googling and for various reasons, which would be too much of a digression to go into, have found most of those kinds of resources unsatisfying (e.g. the idea that differences are only skin deep is trivially refutable by racists). By possible coincidence I've already looked at most of the resources you linked (e.g. Sapiens and Uncle Tom's Cabin) and the HBDers still make a more convincing case. And I think this is mostly because while the HBDers can easily read the arguments of anti-racists and come up with counters, anti-racists are not even aware of the content of HBDer stuff and so cannot argue against it.
I think the censorship of racist thought (and other outside-Overton-Window thought) has indirectly lead to anti-racist argumentation weakening due to lack of understanding of what their opponents actually think and argue.
Look closely, and you will find inconsistencies in these arguments. Oh, sure there are plenty of them but none of them seems to really hold up to scrutiny. Few will cite scientific studies (some will go as far as saying that science is censored so you shouldn’t trust it which is an obvious red flag for someone making shit up), and ones that do often misinterpret or misquote it. If you’d like we can try it out: find the best written argument for any of these points of view and we can together break down exactly where the lies and fabrications are.
Again, as with other comments above: I am not advocating for a slippery slope type of thing. I am however saying that specific groups mentioned above are widely (though not universally) considered undesirables. The specific groups: men who beat women, racists, and Nazis. Do you have a better ruler by which to measure those people and whether we should create software tools to help them communicate better/easier with each other? Do you condone any of those group and do you want to publicly defend their ideas as moral or valid? Because if not, feel free to get off the high horse and shut the fuck up.
The differences between your stance and our parents stance emerge from different world views not from different information levels or a difference in academic rigor. (Or faith!)
> There isn't really any doubt now that people can use platforms to radicalize others to extreme and often dangerous viewpoints.
What you actually said here ("people can use platforms to radicalize") is true but also trivial. They can use platforms for all kind of things.
More broadly:
It's neither proven that the possibility of radicalization is a problem related to new technologies nor that censorship is a tool effective in mitigating it. Last but not least there's the philosophical question: it's not even clear that this problem we're perceiving is something that should be mitigated on a technical level.
That is very much an ongoing research project and will continue to be for a long time as long as communities continue to adapt to new communication technologies.
Interesting... I don't think I've previously seen the argument that such communities are, in effect, an "attractive nuisance".
A similar argument applies to pro-anorexia communities, although the danger there is self-harming behavior.
