They would have one either way - I mean, just look at Twitter, Reddit, FOX News. Even when there weren’t such NAZI spaces bought and paid for by billionaires, NAZIs had their own websites, mailing lists and whatever.
Weakenning the freedom inherent to the Fediverse’s implementation just because the NAZIs might use it to create their own space is just indirectly constraining yourself because of the NAZIs, which IMHO is the opposite of what we should be doing.
Would you defend changing HTTP(S) and HTML to somehow stop NAZIs using it because as they are now they can be used by NAZIs to spread their message? How about e-mail? How about pen and paper?
You can’t just throw the baby with the bathwater “because NAZIs”.
If you really want to stop NAZI messaging altogether you can’t do it by Technical means, you have to do it by Social and Political means - Laws Censoring NAZI messaging - and even there, look at Germany that does it and all they seem to have achieved is that the NAZI symbology is hidden whilst a large part of the NAZI way of things is widespread in society (hence the AfD success) and some elements of it are even shared by the majority (hence Germany’s very overtly race-justified unconditional support of a nation commiting a Genocide). De facto Germany’s banning of NAZIsm hasn’t stopped the kind of Fascism like in the US right now or the AfD there, were they use the NAZI propaganda techniques and share many ideological elements with the NAZIs but just don’t use NAZI symbols.
Barring them from everywhere would be ideal, but if not that, barring them from as many places as possible would be good too. Billionnaires have too much power and they are the powderkeg, in my view, that enabled fascism. So imho, we need to reduce their numbers and wealth, redistributing it to everyone.
I defend barring fascists everywhere, and not compromising the resilence of the fediverse to censorship from fascists.
And as for social and political means… in Germany, the AfD has had fewer votes as a % of turnout, than what the Republicans got in the US. I think the real cure is to combat algorithms by the root, and to seize the power over them back to the left and anyone non-fascist (or not as insane).
I also look at it Logically and that yields a more subtle take.
My point is that thinking that ANYTHING is acceptable to contain the NAZIs (even when it hurts the rest) is forgetting that the whole point of stopping the NAZIs is to protected everybody else and their freedoms.
I’ll give you a parallel example: start by “Everybody should be thrown in Jail to make sure all criminals are in Jail”. Whilst it would work, this is obviously senseless. Once that’s accepted the discussion becomes “how far should we go to make sure criminals go to Jail” and onwards to “how many innocents wrongly in Jail is acceptable” and “how many criminals who evade Jail is acceptable”.
All that is what lead to things like a Justice System with Presumption of Innocence, different sentences for different Crimes and an Appeals System.
When it comes to stopping NAZIs the same reasoning applies - “ANYTHING is acceptable” is obviously senseless (killing all human beings would certainly stop the NAZIs, but I expect we both agree that it’s a bit too much) so the discussion is then moved to “how far are we willing to sacrifice the rest in order to stop the NAZIs”, which is the area of thinking anchoring my original point - if the NAZIs are contained (by their own choice, even), then maybe it’s not worth it to sacrifice the freedom of the rest by mangling the Fediverse if all that would deliver as a result is the near-zero impact outcome of barring the NAZIs from their own separate space in the Fediverse whilst they can still gather elsewhere.
In my view by wanting that you asked originally, a far greater number of people than the number of NAZIs would sacrifice a lot for something that will make the NAZIs lose very little - or in other words your idea amounts to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
I don’t think that “lets’ fuck up what’s important for almost everybody in order to barelly inconvenience the NAZIs” is a wise position, even if I understand the impulse to “just fuck those sons of a bitch no matter what”.
Deterring them from the Fediverse (as in not letting the use the protocol) is a near zero impact for them outcome, possibly technically impossible (it’s an open protocol and the software is open source) and possibly with a lot of negative impact for everybody else (it risks undermining the main point of the Fediverse - Freedom).
Much more important is deterring them from spreading their hate to other people (in general) and as it so happens, when it comes to the people in the Fediverse, them segregating themselves in their own server actually helps with that: other servers can simple defederate, taking away their audience, hence they’re not actually spreading their hate to others in the Fediverse.
With them not being self-segregated it’s a lot harder because it they’ll do what they are doing right now: join servers all over the place, post comments all over the place, so in response they get banned if they go too far (and then just open a new account) and others tend to try and nullify their poison by downvoting them or pointing out the with logic the stupidity and/or inconsistence of their position, all of which is a lot more fallible than just defederating the NAZI instance.
More generally, there is no perfect way to “deter them from the fediverse” (just try to actually analyse the problem space and you will soon find that there’s no foolproof method), and hence the discussion has to be about how far should we go and what the delivers the best results, which brings us around to the point I was making: having the NAZIs in their own instance does more to stop them spreading their poison the Fediverse audience than somehow blocking that and keeping on trying to stamp them down individually when they’re mixed with the general fediverse population.
True, freedom is important, but I feel like the paradox of tolerance also could apply.
Wouldn’t it then be a better idea for one of us to secretly install a ‘mole’ instance for the far-right? Once a critical mass is reached, all users from there can be banned, and someone loyal to us can make a new mole instance, claiming it’s free from their censorship. And then again, rinse and repeat.
The Paradox Of Tolerance is about how we should not tolerate the intolerant, not about what sacrificing ourselves to inconvenience the intolerant, must less sacrifice others to inconvenience the intolerant.
It’s really only about the Tolerant tolerating the Intolerance leads to an increase of Intolerance, and doesn’t really cover how far and justified is to make onself or others lose something to inconvenience the Intolerant, or in other word, the devil in the details part of any solution.
That said, your idea has merit and it has parallels to what some of the right does - for example, how the right creates spaces which they pass as leftwing to attract leftwing people and then when enough of a critical mass arises they use it to spread rightwing-distortions of leftwing ideas or even just outright rightwing ideas: look at Twitter or, even better, Reddit or even what the DNC has done to the Democrat Party in the US.
The discussion there is not anymore “how much is right to sacrifice the rest to inconvenience the NAZIs”, but instead is “how moral and ethical it is to create fake NAZI spaces to fuck with the NAZIS” - so it doesn’t involve sacrificing the rest at all - and personally I think it’s pretty damn ethical and moral to fuck with the NAZIs like that (after all, they want to do far worse to other people than merelly honeypot them into an online space that just gets closed after a while, so it’s not even close to how harshly they deserve to be treated)
How easy or hard it is to pull that off, especially repeatedly, is a different matter, as the Technical bit of setting up such instances is easy, the hard part is to attract the NAZIs to the honeypots, which is a Marketing problem.
They would have one either way - I mean, just look at Twitter, Reddit, FOX News. Even when there weren’t such NAZI spaces bought and paid for by billionaires, NAZIs had their own websites, mailing lists and whatever.
Weakenning the freedom inherent to the Fediverse’s implementation just because the NAZIs might use it to create their own space is just indirectly constraining yourself because of the NAZIs, which IMHO is the opposite of what we should be doing.
Would you defend changing HTTP(S) and HTML to somehow stop NAZIs using it because as they are now they can be used by NAZIs to spread their message? How about e-mail? How about pen and paper?
You can’t just throw the baby with the bathwater “because NAZIs”.
If you really want to stop NAZI messaging altogether you can’t do it by Technical means, you have to do it by Social and Political means - Laws Censoring NAZI messaging - and even there, look at Germany that does it and all they seem to have achieved is that the NAZI symbology is hidden whilst a large part of the NAZI way of things is widespread in society (hence the AfD success) and some elements of it are even shared by the majority (hence Germany’s very overtly race-justified unconditional support of a nation commiting a Genocide). De facto Germany’s banning of NAZIsm hasn’t stopped the kind of Fascism like in the US right now or the AfD there, were they use the NAZI propaganda techniques and share many ideological elements with the NAZIs but just don’t use NAZI symbols.
Barring them from everywhere would be ideal, but if not that, barring them from as many places as possible would be good too. Billionnaires have too much power and they are the powderkeg, in my view, that enabled fascism. So imho, we need to reduce their numbers and wealth, redistributing it to everyone.
I defend barring fascists everywhere, and not compromising the resilence of the fediverse to censorship from fascists.
And as for social and political means… in Germany, the AfD has had fewer votes as a % of turnout, than what the Republicans got in the US. I think the real cure is to combat algorithms by the root, and to seize the power over them back to the left and anyone non-fascist (or not as insane).
I understand the feeling.
I also look at it Logically and that yields a more subtle take.
My point is that thinking that ANYTHING is acceptable to contain the NAZIs (even when it hurts the rest) is forgetting that the whole point of stopping the NAZIs is to protected everybody else and their freedoms.
I’ll give you a parallel example: start by “Everybody should be thrown in Jail to make sure all criminals are in Jail”. Whilst it would work, this is obviously senseless. Once that’s accepted the discussion becomes “how far should we go to make sure criminals go to Jail” and onwards to “how many innocents wrongly in Jail is acceptable” and “how many criminals who evade Jail is acceptable”.
All that is what lead to things like a Justice System with Presumption of Innocence, different sentences for different Crimes and an Appeals System.
When it comes to stopping NAZIs the same reasoning applies - “ANYTHING is acceptable” is obviously senseless (killing all human beings would certainly stop the NAZIs, but I expect we both agree that it’s a bit too much) so the discussion is then moved to “how far are we willing to sacrifice the rest in order to stop the NAZIs”, which is the area of thinking anchoring my original point - if the NAZIs are contained (by their own choice, even), then maybe it’s not worth it to sacrifice the freedom of the rest by mangling the Fediverse if all that would deliver as a result is the near-zero impact outcome of barring the NAZIs from their own separate space in the Fediverse whilst they can still gather elsewhere.
In my view by wanting that you asked originally, a far greater number of people than the number of NAZIs would sacrifice a lot for something that will make the NAZIs lose very little - or in other words your idea amounts to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
I don’t think that “lets’ fuck up what’s important for almost everybody in order to barelly inconvenience the NAZIs” is a wise position, even if I understand the impulse to “just fuck those sons of a bitch no matter what”.
But, how would you inconvenience the Nazis then? How would you deter them from the fediverse?
Deterring them from the Fediverse (as in not letting the use the protocol) is a near zero impact for them outcome, possibly technically impossible (it’s an open protocol and the software is open source) and possibly with a lot of negative impact for everybody else (it risks undermining the main point of the Fediverse - Freedom).
Much more important is deterring them from spreading their hate to other people (in general) and as it so happens, when it comes to the people in the Fediverse, them segregating themselves in their own server actually helps with that: other servers can simple defederate, taking away their audience, hence they’re not actually spreading their hate to others in the Fediverse.
With them not being self-segregated it’s a lot harder because it they’ll do what they are doing right now: join servers all over the place, post comments all over the place, so in response they get banned if they go too far (and then just open a new account) and others tend to try and nullify their poison by downvoting them or pointing out the with logic the stupidity and/or inconsistence of their position, all of which is a lot more fallible than just defederating the NAZI instance.
More generally, there is no perfect way to “deter them from the fediverse” (just try to actually analyse the problem space and you will soon find that there’s no foolproof method), and hence the discussion has to be about how far should we go and what the delivers the best results, which brings us around to the point I was making: having the NAZIs in their own instance does more to stop them spreading their poison the Fediverse audience than somehow blocking that and keeping on trying to stamp them down individually when they’re mixed with the general fediverse population.
True, freedom is important, but I feel like the paradox of tolerance also could apply.
Wouldn’t it then be a better idea for one of us to secretly install a ‘mole’ instance for the far-right? Once a critical mass is reached, all users from there can be banned, and someone loyal to us can make a new mole instance, claiming it’s free from their censorship. And then again, rinse and repeat.
The Paradox Of Tolerance is about how we should not tolerate the intolerant, not about what sacrificing ourselves to inconvenience the intolerant, must less sacrifice others to inconvenience the intolerant.
It’s really only about the Tolerant tolerating the Intolerance leads to an increase of Intolerance, and doesn’t really cover how far and justified is to make onself or others lose something to inconvenience the Intolerant, or in other word, the devil in the details part of any solution.
That said, your idea has merit and it has parallels to what some of the right does - for example, how the right creates spaces which they pass as leftwing to attract leftwing people and then when enough of a critical mass arises they use it to spread rightwing-distortions of leftwing ideas or even just outright rightwing ideas: look at Twitter or, even better, Reddit or even what the DNC has done to the Democrat Party in the US.
The discussion there is not anymore “how much is right to sacrifice the rest to inconvenience the NAZIs”, but instead is “how moral and ethical it is to create fake NAZI spaces to fuck with the NAZIS” - so it doesn’t involve sacrificing the rest at all - and personally I think it’s pretty damn ethical and moral to fuck with the NAZIs like that (after all, they want to do far worse to other people than merelly honeypot them into an online space that just gets closed after a while, so it’s not even close to how harshly they deserve to be treated)
How easy or hard it is to pull that off, especially repeatedly, is a different matter, as the Technical bit of setting up such instances is easy, the hard part is to attract the NAZIs to the honeypots, which is a Marketing problem.