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.
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.