Given the breadth and depth of evidence of him being a horrible person and holding favorable views towards fascism/nazism (see him flirting with every far-right movement), calling it misconstrued is misrepresenting reality. He knows what he did.

Unlike other commenters, I don’t think you’re necessarily a Nazi, but you are at least missing crucial information to make a proper judgment here. And, not to group you with them, but when you defend his Nazi salute, you’re not in good company.

I hope you’ll reconsider your stance.

Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.

I think voters started being counted a while back? I’ll see if I can find the release notes.

Edit: there we go, from the docs.

An active user is someone who has posted, commented, or voted on our instance or community within the last given time frame.

didn’t read, easy block, shoulda done this sooner

You streamed together a sequence of misunderstandings, fallacies and self-victimization into an incoherent pile of garbage that fails at actually responding to anything. Got it, got it, you’re god’s bravest warrior, resisting the authoritarianism of people who think others shouldn’t be forced to tolerate your immaturity whenever you act like a cunt. I’ll stop giving you attention now, so sorry.

Toxicity doesn’t “work fine,” it’s contagious and destructive. For projects, it slows progress. For communities in general, it reinforces bad behavior and pushes out newcomers, leading to more negative spaces, isolation, and stagnation, just off the top of my head. These were issues in older communities just as they are in modern ones.

I don’t see why we should abandon moderation for your benefit, at the expense of people who care.

Content moderation primarily serves advertisers

I’m lost, here. Do you not think fighting toxicity and hate speech is a valid and important function of moderation that’s just as much or more for the sake of the people as it might be for advertisers?

You are saying “the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech,” and not at all addressing the fact that the “bad” doesn’t appear to exist on modern Substack. If you have seen it, where have you seen it?

I literally linked an example.

tell me what ideas you are in favor of removing from Substack. Where are they on Substack, right now?

Follow the links.

So why are you still upset at them?

Link.

I actually do agree with Substack’s original moderation stance, precisely for reasons of free speech. We can talk about that if you want, although it’s a more complex conversation and we probably won’t come to agree on it.

I had a feeling, and maybe this reply isn’t outright confirmation, but it’s enough. I think you tunnel visioned so hard on defending poor Substack and free speech that you’re not even properly reading what you’re replying to. You’re going up and down this thread, finger on the trigger, and the moment you see the word Nazi you just fire.

You’re right, we probably wouldn’t agree, and if my read on you is any good, I’d rather not risk wasting time on that conversion.

If you think my problem with Substack is “Nazis are there right now,” then you didn’t get it. I must’ve not explained myself well, and that’s on me, but you’re missing the point regardless.

Nazis are part of my explanation because it ought to be clear to any reasonable reader how they should be dealt with, but one can still be horrible without being an outright Nazi. Those people should be dealt with similarly. Substack will see something horrible and first ask, “but how would our handling of this affect free speech?” which is a disgrace and a red flag.

I’m commenting on a larger issue related to the topic. At no point do I say people shouldn’t listen to good journalists because of their platform of choice. At no point do I claim there are Nazis there. To reiterate: bad is not specifically and exclusively Nazis.

Substack may not be Nazi-central, but it’s surely a product of broligarchy.

You’re answering something else, man.

I’ve seen people defend Substack saying it’s not so bad, or the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech.

I’m gonna say it: fuck free speech, I like myself some censorship. I sincerely believe some things are too harmful to be allowed to openly proliferate, that there’s often a feasible path to reaching that conclusion, and it’s not that difficult.

We mustn’t avoid this because “it harms free speech.” Nazis love that argument, and they’re a threat to much more than just free speech. They shouldn’t get to block attempts at censoring them, and they specially shouldn’t get support to do so, because they’re one of the reasons it’s necessary in the first place.

“But not every case is clear-cut like Nazis,” people will say, “you shouldn’t support censorship, since it can be used for evil. Innocent ideas always get censored, too.” To which I’ll reply, “tell me more about those innocent ideas.” When that happens, tell me. I’ll reach out to people in charge, spread the news, get mad, help you in any way I can to fix it. We’ll do it together. Fucking tell me more.

But lo and behold, many innocent ideas turn out to be dog-whistles or worse, it’s always the same shit.

I don’t care if it’s Substack, or Ghost, or Twitter, or Reddit, or whatever. It’s one thing to platform harmful views unaware. I get it, moderation is hard. Once aware, though, if your response is “but free speech,” fuck off. It is moral and correct to censor Nazis. Same for people saying immigrants will eat your pets, or that gays want to sexualize children, change their genders, and harm women. Fuck that.

Platforms defining themselves on free speech is a red flag. “We’re popular with both extremes” isn’t a defense, it’s a self-report that you’re just a mercenary and like it that way—both sides being users means double the revenue.

Substack may not be Nazi-central, but it’s surely a product of broligarchy.

Maybe this is part of why I keep bouncing off Mastodon. It feels tight-knit. It’s about individuals, about relationships.

I don’t fit in such a system. I’ve nothing to offer in a relationship, I cannot be a “comrade.” Still, I want news, media, and easily accessible knowledge being shared.

So, I’m a lurker, a consumer. I tend towards anonymous forums and spaces centered around topics rather than people. Or, I seek celebrities, and sellers, and content creators.

Either sort-of give me something I want, while Mastodon doesn’t. Too focused on the people, but without big names to follow.

And I’m saying you’re better off without. That sentence is ridiculous enough already, it doesn’t need the source to make it worse. But good on you for worrying about credit, do as you will.

— vintermann, Hacker News

I don’t know who this person is, but adding “Hacker News” doesn’t give their words more credibility. It gives them less, if anything.

Imagine I quoted someone and, underneath it, added:

— PM_ME_UR_FEET, Reddit

Both of these enjoy the same level of base, intrinsic trust to me: none.

Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I’ve looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it’s irrelevant here.

FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.

Put another way, it’s almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.

I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.

No, I’m trying to reduce the influence of a problematic individual. The lawsuit has, and will have, more coverage.

I’m sorry, banana, that was sarcasm. I saw nothing I’d call a quality.

I would suggest not trusting anything Lunduke says, the man went off the deep end and became a harmful conspiracy theorist.

For example, he believes there is a trans advocacy group going around and destroying open source projects from within. That’s right, only the Lunduke Journal has the truth, and the truth is that trans kids are killing open source.

The replies are a prime example of the fediverse microblogging sphere’s greatest qualities.

This entire event is unfortunate, but unsurprising.

In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That’s a very different cohost we’re envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.

At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.

No, thanks for suggesting. I saw a thread by other curious users and checked fediseer. Might be an admin issue, but I didn’t see clear evidence.

Don’t think it was spam as, unless I’m misunderstanding, that seems unlikely from fosstodon.