Hey all, I recently left reddit like many of you. I have a question regarding lemmy and the fediverse on the history of banning and defederation. I have noticed several posts calling for varying communities to be disconnected. were these removal requests as prevalent before the mass migration? Usually I am all for communities existsting in their own spaces, barring illegal content. I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.
Eeh let me go against the grain here a bit: Personally I’d rather have my account on somewhere that doesn’t police my access. IMO one of the major boons to the Internet that it being decentralized and not particularly easy to police by any one authority. I’ve lived a big part of my life in an authoritarian country, and censorship gradually builds up. I have no interest in granting this kind of power even governments rarely get to exercise, to some random people.
I firmly believe that the best kind of content moderation is to use the small “X” button right next to the browser tab. I would understand and completely support not wanting to see certain content, communities or users yourself, but unless illegal [1] I don’t see any reason why you should be able to prevent others.
[1] even then, question of in what jurisdiction comes to kind
Anyway, I know that nowadays vouching for information freedom doesn’t win much favours. Cool thing about ActivityPub is that barring future potential scaling issues, I can run my own instance and enjoy the Internet as it once was.
edit: I have to say that there’s a level of irony in asking for bans and central controls on content on a platform that in its very nature decentralized and supposed to be empowering.
There isn’t any irony. That’s the whole point of the decentralization - it empowers everybody to be part of the communities they wish to be in, and not participate in those they disagree with. We have the power to leave any instance where we disagree with the admins and move to a new one.