This seems to be becoming the hot topic, the elephant in the chatroom - the balance between censorship / freedom of speech on lemmy. There are solid arguments for both ways, and good compromises too.
IMO the FAQ makes it quite clear what the devs have built here, and why. But recent discussions, arguments, make it clear that a lot of the most vocal users object to it.
I’m very curious. Many active users feel this way? Please vote using the up arrows in the comments.
I’d like to add that many projects besides ours have codes of conduct, and anti-bigotry rules. For the bigots, its not just the enforcement of those rules, but the mere existence of them that turns them into whiny babies. They get kicked out of nearly every space and are begging to have a platform to spread their bigoted views.
We will never give them one, and will do everything in our power to keep them marginalized and isolated.
Well said!
IMO there’s no such thing as “on Lemmy” in general, unless you mean this specific instance of Lemmy. But anyway, this problem of balance seems to be an eternal philosophical question which may be never solved once for all. Each instance chooses its own combination of censorship and freedom.
At first I wasn’t sure about the slur filter, because I thought it could be a bit of clumsy implementation as it could catch a lot of false positives.
But in practice I haven’t noticed it once. I don’t need to punch down on disadvantaged minority groups and call people slurs, so it’s not a problem. If it did catch me, it could be for some slur I had been using without thinking, in which case I would think about it and stop using that word. If it did catch me for a regular word I’m sure I could easily work around it.
Now I think it’s actually a great piece of social hacking, and I fully support it. It seems to annoy and keep away the right kinds of people.
As @realcaseyrollins@lemmy.ml said in this thread: “I’m not active here, but I would be if there wasn’t hard-coded censorship on the software”. To me that shows that it’s working.
We don’t need another reddit full of “centrist” free speech warriors. And we certainly don’t need another 4chan, 8chan, gab, voat, or parler.
It’s nice to have at least one place where as a minority you don’t have to wade through a bunch of slurs and insults and be constantly gaslit by the same circular arguments of people trying to convince you they’re fighting for some noble cause.
If a community is to have autonomy it needs some consensus on rules and standards of behavior. If we don’t want to have an authority ruling over us, we need to have responsibility, hold each other accountable, and create an environment where the most vulnerable in our community feel protected and like people are actually going to fight for them.
You have ironically stated my reason for not by default holding all Lemmy users to the word blacklist in this comment:
If a community is to have autonomy it needs some consensus on rules and standards of behavior. If we don’t want to have an authority ruling over us, we need to have responsibility, hold each other accountable, and create an environment where the most vulnerable in our community feel protected and like people are actually going to fight for them.
I don’t think I’m saying what you think I’m saying.
What do you think I think you’re saying?
People who complain about “censorship” and “authoritarianism” while espouting the benefits of “freedom of speech” are exactly the type of people you don’t want around.
If there’s been discussion on lemmy.ml about this topic, I haven’t gotten around to seeing it. But from what I’ve noticed from witnessing this type of discussion all over the web is that these calls always come from either the most reactionary users or enablers i.e. those that would rather sit on the sidelines and either let it happen or put up a weak front because they have a right to “free speech.”
Unfortunately, this libertation-esque ethos runs deep in so many online spaces, where they’d rather have vague notions of freedom that obviously benefit them at the expense of others. Spaces like lemmy are not for them, and while there’s nothing lemmy can do about it, going against the grain and purging that type of vitriol is the best way to keep it from turning into the shitholes ranging from Reddit’s “enlightened centrism” to outright fascist spaces like *chans or gab.
I’m not sure the characterization is fair. Both extremes of the “free speech” vs “censorship” argument are toxic and illiberal.
It’s a classic paradox of tolerance. You can’t have open discussion (read: discussion without fear of retribution for what an authority or mob consider “dangerous” ideas), without balancing censorship and free speech. Anywhere outside of that balance is either authoritarian rule or mob rule and defeats the purpose of an open forum.
There is too much censorship
I worry that the phrase “censorship” gets used as a thought-stopping cliche, especially given it’s repetition here.
You could ask the same question but with different words, e.g. “harassment, racism, and incitement to violence should be welcomed here.” And then ask people to vote up if they agree.
And you could post the polling options as different variants of that question: “There’s a right amount of harassment.” “There’s too much harassment” “there’s too little harassment.”
I mean… you could do it that way. And it would be equally as neutral as the questions you did ask. If you find that framing objectionable because only uses language that focuses on one side of an issue, well… yeah.
I’m not sure they’re really the same question. Be careful of making a false equivalence.
Your questions are very loaded. Most people would answer “there shouldn’t be ANY racism at all!”
In that case, if the questions are really equivalent, everyone’s answer to the original question should be “there shouldn’t be any censorship at all” or maybe “there should be complete censorship for everyone”.
But I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. Therefore the questions are not equivalent. This is too simplistic.
Because you’re taking a very technical rhetorical stance, I’ll try to answer the same way.
Racism is a damaging thing. There’s no good side to it.
Censorship is also a damaging thing. But it can sometimes be a necessary evil to prevent worse evils. There is a sweet spot where it prevents more damage than it causes.
Racism is a natural feature that arises in groups of people, but censorship is a political measure. So if there is a damaging amount of racism in lemmy, censorship can be used to reduce it. While there is no underlying racism problem, then censorship causes its harm while producing no benefit.
These things are hard to measure, so censorship is normally a matter of very careful consideration.
