Rumble, voat, parler, gab, even as I feel like the left has left me these days, these places still largely look like dumpster fires to me.

The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful.

I don't know what's worse - the endless corporate censorship or the insanely explicit content, outright bigotry, and anti-science quacks who fill up spaces rebelling against it.

My ethics says the Corp censorship is far more problematic (when taking in the big picture) , but as someone wanting to participate in a free and constructive community it leaves one with no where to go.

Social media was a mistake. Allowing tech companies to become as big as they are were too.

That's just because a significant amount of people are awful. And now everyone is on the web, including the awful ones.

It's not social media, it's us.

Silicon Valley corporations, whether for profit or by ideology, have pushed nazi/conspirationist propaganda to everyone in the form of recommendations for many years. To be fair, so have traditional media outlets, neither of which is excusable in my view.

If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship. If you want free speech, you're going to get the bigots, cranks and bad actors. "Speak(ing) and think(ing) in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap" requires curation and tone policing, which is censorship. Otherwise, the bigots and the cranks are also free to speak and think in the same way as everyone else, ruin the community and drive everyone else away.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have to pick one.

There are alternatives to rules, moderation and censorship that are still effective at filtering out undesirables.

As far back as more than 25 years ago, usenet news readers had kill files, scoring and filtering at the client level.

For various reasons, the mainstream social media platforms chose not to give their users these tools, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

People are called bigots for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry. And it's done intentionally to weild power over wrong-thinkers.

The bad actors are at all levels and of all persuasions

There are a number of problems with the model (including finding such a server). But censors flexing their agenda isn't a real problem in my experience.

Also what can't you say on, say, Twitter that you want to say?

If you're a conservative or so you will probably have a hard time finding an instace you feel at home at, but the defederation of mastodon instances from instances that allow hate speech, racism, homophobia, etc. are precisely what prevents it from being a dumpster fire.

The Fediverse is not without issues but I think it is an example of fuctioning decentralized social media.

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If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor?

If these offshoot communities full of outcasts are as horrific as he admits, why shouldn't we ban the people that make it that way from our communities?

Why is he so willing to trust these same people when they say they're fighting for "fairness"?

How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?

This author has a very, very strange worldview.

Isn't the insight we're to take regarding witch hunts, as moderns able to look back across history, that the people accused of being witches weren't witches, and what was really happening (among other things) was violent intolerance for those with a different way of life, and the indiscriminate use of power?

That's what makes witch hunts wrong in any metaphor.

> How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?

Because intolerance is wrong, certainly to the degree we see now. I'm sure you might feel like responding with "they started it" but not only has the author covered that, it's also no excuse.

"Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.

Well, hang on - there weren't any people who could literally turn you into a toad, but I'm sure there were as many witches (people who believed in that stuff) then as there are now.

There weren't any witches the way witches were defined back then, which was people who entered into pacts with the devil to gain satanic powers to wage war against Christianity and undermine the community. It was a conspiracy theory not unlike the satanic panic of the 1980s or the red scare.

I'm using Popper's definition provided in his short but often misquoted (certainly on HN) paradox of tolerance, that violence and other coercive means should not be used against those who are willing to debate and not use violence to further their arguments/goals. The content of those ideas is irrelevant.

> In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want.

Who made you the moral arbiter? As J.S. Mill points out repeatedly in On Liberty, those who will judge what is right and wrong with such certainty that they would deny others the right to speak contrary to these "certainties" are only saying that they are certain of what they say, and they are not infallible.

> The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad.

The targeting of anyone based on disagreement or some misplaced certainty in a hierarchy of morality based on disagreement is what makes a witch hunt bad.

The problem with society is the promotion of the rat race and attempting to fit everyone into little categories. You cant.

I have been in many scenes including gaming, cars, mechanics, machining and i can find vibrant communites away from the big tech just as i can within it. Why do I have success yet you or others cant?

I find that the main problem with the internet is that people want to be entertained in their downtime. They want to be amused, occupied and interested. Whether that be to stalk others in the privacy of there own zone, or to create a fantasy to fill in time.

That personality trait is the problem and creates the situation for these viral communities to breath. Trolls gonna be trolls. It creates the awkward social dystopia we find ourselves in. Going to school, university, getting a job and becoming a contributing member of society is not equivalent to meaning and happiness. What happens when these people get home at night and realise their life is meaningless? This.