“Unremoval of Piracy Communities” https://lemmy.world/post/6018317
This post needs to be updated to reflect the current policy.
Six months later, a new Removal of piracy communities announcement confirmed that these communities had been removed. !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, which was the most popular piracy community, is still inaccessible to lemmy.world users. This is misleading: users see the old post, sign-up, and then find out they cannot access the community.
Please edit the original post to include the new removal announcement.
You say that as if it’s a gotcha, not a boon
If censorship is what’s being criticized, it’s no different. This is why I tell people not to use db0.
Used to be the first thing we’d suggest but it’s just become such a nanny instance that jumps on everyone’s shit.
Paradox of tolerance
I hate when censorship comes for people I do like.
I love when censorship comes for people I don’t like.
Admins are fighting a flood of instances and users more interested in getting attention than participating in the community. Consequently, you’ll have power users ballooning the front page with click-bait. You’ll have instances choke full of reactionary content specifically intended to bait a flame war. You’ll have spammers plugging their own brands or working on behalf of some third party. And you’ll have the odd bot-farm or other automated account that’s just probing the Fediverse for gaps.
“Ah, but the individual users can always block what they choose”
Sure. Technically. But nobody wants to wake up every morning to a front page that’s full of shit. The spammers can bloat your inbox faster than the individual can flush it out. So Admins who step in and do a little public house cleaning - the Nanny work you hate - makes the website cleaner and friendlier for lay users that pop in now and then.
I think the censorship arguments can definitely use some maturing… for example, what would you think of the cultural censorship that occurs with Nazi ideology? Probably want to keep that one, huh?
We don’t necessarily want to do away with censorship, I think. But, I think in the most mature world, it would be healthy to.
Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back? Why does the priest say the solution is faith, an inward focused quality to be solved at the individual-level?
There is so much fear, so much bias, so much identity tethered to ideology… sometimes I don’t know if humans can help it. Censorship is a … nuanced issue.
Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.
Crazy factoid I learned recently. Children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations within China. If you’re too young to consent, you’re too young to be indoctrinated into a religious tradition.
I mostly agree-ish. But the priest is really a metaphor for us all. See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology. The problem there is rather simple: ideology is unstable, and people compensate for that via censorship. The reason people compensate that way is more complex… it has to do with the relationship they’ve created between themselves and the ideology, codependency. If the ideology is attacked, it feels like a personal attack. If the ideology is destroyed, it can feel like philosophical death. People, like the priest, respond like an act of self-preservation.
We do this with all kinds of topics. Sexism, racism, nazism, … the Right would also do this for communism and socialism. If someone came to you with a thought experiment to explore the merits of racism from an objective perspective, how easy would it be to participate? Not so much, reasonably so, I’d imagine.
You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored. That sounds great and all… but it really isn’t any better. When humanities experience of the world revolved around their connection with god, it made sense to censor the heathens. Common sense to do so, dare I say. That idea doesn’t look so good in retrospect, but what’s changed now is just the context we live in. What hasn’t changed is the problem.
I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.
Every system has its gray areas and decision points.
That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.
Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.
How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.
That’s a good point, and it’s really what happens at a fundamental level when you decide your ideology is who you are. We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume, and we even joke sometimes like “you know if they’re vegan because they never stop talking about it.” It’s not rational to think the sanctity of an ideology should correspond with our own sanctity, but alas we fall into that trap so often as humans. How it happens can be like the frog in boiling water situation.
300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:
…all the while, they have no problem discussing the right way to punish your children versus a slave.
300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now. We’re doing the same stuff as before under the current cultural context. The only difference now is, we have more awareness of this dynamic while typically considering it just a thing of the past.
We should have conversations with people because that helps them understand. Sometimes when we try to convince them to instead just bury the thoughts because they make you a bad person, all we actually do is inspire more curiosity and secrecy. What we certainly don’t do is figure out where these crazy ideas came from in the first place, which means we aren’t exactly solving the problem with any sense of longevity via the approach of censorship.
My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes. We are always becoming something, never a static identity. If you were born Hitler, then you’d have grown up to be Hitler. The real question is, how do we use this knowledge for the betterment of mankind?
I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.
And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.
Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.
In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.
The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.
And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.
We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.
(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).
But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.
I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.
So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.
Don’t you know admins can have a default blocklist for all users (if a user want they can change that list)
feddit wasn’t a spam instance?
We vote on who we want to defederate from. Our vote threads even have cool pirate themed images and stuff.
They even make less content an event so you can celebrate your own loss?
Things are done there by consent. I see that’s something you don’t approve of.
By consent of others, whoever registered there will be forced to that outcome even if they disagree. I fail to see how that’s a good thing
You can always go to another instance that wishes to associate with them. The idea of the fediverse is you get to pick the experience you want.
It’s you get to see content from different instances if many instances defederate each other then what the reason of fediverse?
I think defederation speaks volumes of the quality of the content in the instances that are blocked, wouldn’t you agree? I wouldn’t want to listen to genocide apologists or astroturfed propaganda. Yes that means the echo chamber gets a little more closed off but it’s a prevention of exposure to some bad actors. I certainly wouldn’t want to put up with people who do Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson moves by “just asking questions” all the time.
Seems kinda hypcritical. Aw well, hivemind gonna hivemind.
Do you even know why the vote to defederate from Feddit came up? It’s because there are quite a few Palestinian genocide apologist accounts from there. It’s like the Nazi bar problem, you tolerate a few hanging out there and suddenly everyone else leaves while it gets full of them. I’d rather not hear that shit myself.
That would require understanding or research when they just want to use a gotcha
Imagine being so Reddit-/.world-brained that you think of instance democracy as “hivemind gotta hivemind”
So long as communities based on a common theme exist online, there WILL be a hivemind. Much like how we are not immune to propaganda, online communities are not immune to bandwagoning.
This is far from e.g. Mastodon-like mob behaviour. But I get what you mean
Go make your own “censor free” instance and stop whining, jfk