Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)
I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.
I have no real idea with Navalnvy, and only dim memories of news reports about Magnitsky which went into a little more detail, but I’ll tell you how I assume it operates: It’s basically mistreatment to the point that it’ll kill you, just slowly. Your cell’s cold all the time, in the arctic winter with no blankets. You get bad food and bad sleep and beatings and no medical care of any kind. Once your body starts to malfunction (Magnitsky started having kidney failure), they go on beating you severely enough to cause additional organ damage, but then just continue to put you in your cell day after day with no medicine. Basically, you’re going to die, but they’re drawing the process out enough that it’s indirectly, because of “medical issues” related to what they’re doing to you, instead of just from blunt force trauma or something. So it’s incredibly painful and long and drawn-out, a slow death of constant suffering from which you can’t escape or get any relief.
Not a map, but things I’ve seen on the roads in Boston:
I don’t even know about that, because instead of the article I got my App Store opened up demanding that I install Phantom Surfer Browser to protect me from viruses.
Headline’s a little misleading; the thrust of the story is that every search engine is getting worse under the absolutely crushing weight of SEO gaming the system, and they note:
Google’s targeting of SEO and affiliate spam appears to be the most effective, the team found.
Not since late last year they’re not. They spent early 2023 winning back the north of the country, then had a summer counteroffensive which captured essentially 0 of the East, then over winter they got nothing in terms of the ammunition and weapons aid they’d need to have to fight against an opponent which can outproduce them 20:1. They’re now desperately trying to hold the front line even though after 3 months of nothing they’re basically out of ammunition.
The big aid packages out of the US and EU are stalled apparently indefinitely. There’s that little package from the UK which hopefully will help a little, but unless the GOP stops being compromised by Russia sometime soon, it seems like they might be in real trouble.
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:121.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0.
I just did a bunch of testing. The issue is that final version number, “Firefox/121.0”. Google returns very different versions of the page based on what browser you claim to be, and if you’re on mobile Firefox, it gives you different mobile versions depending on your version:
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/41.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:29 URL:https://www.google.com/ [1985] -> "-" [1]
1985
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/62.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:36 URL:https://www.google.com/ [211455] -> "-" [1]
211455
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/80.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:24 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
15
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:04 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
15
If you’re an early version of Firefox, it gives you a simple page. If you’re a later version of Firefox, it gives you a lot more complete version of the page. If you’re claiming to be a specific version of mobile Firefox, but the version you’re claiming (edit: oopsie doesn’t exist or even really make sense didn’t exist when they set this logic up or something), it gets confused and gives you nothing. You could argue that it should default to some sensible mobile version in this case, and they should definitely fix it, but it seems to me like it’s clearly not malicious.
Edit: Wait, I am wrong. I didn’t realize Firefox’s version numbers went up so high. It looks like the cutoff for where the blank pages start coming is at version 65, which is like 2012 era, so not real old at all. I still maintain that it’s probably accidental but it looks like it affects basically all modern mobile Firefoxes, yes.
What’s the user-agent? I’m curious now.
Is this still true? I just tested and it works for me on LibreWolf, both for google.com and google.com.br.
Honestly, Google doing this as a deliberate anti-Firefox measure seems so wildly stupid and counterproductive on their part that I’d assume it was some failure (serving a slightly different version of the page to Chrome as for other browsers, and the non-Chrome side breaks for some reason) before thinking it was malicious.
If someone learns something bad about you, and your first reaction is not “this is why it’s not true” but “how did you find that out, we must punish the person who told you,” you might be a violent POS.
That’s just the UI that shows you other communities where the same link has been posted.
If you want to create a cross-post like that for an existing post that has a URL, just make a new one with the same URL. If you want to create one for a text-only post, I think that’s not possible though.
Yeah. To me it seems transparently obvious that at least some of the applications of AI will continue to change the world - maybe in a big way - after the bust that will inevitably happen to the AI-adjacent business side after the current boom. I agree with Doctorow on everything he’s saying about the business side, but that’s not the only side and it’s a little weird that he’s focusing exclusively on that aspect. But what the hell, he’s smart and I hadn’t seen this particular business-side perspective before.
(Eh, fuck it, I already spent this much time on it. Part 2:)
But the point is it wouldnt be better than a “substack without nazis”. Like not every board on 4 chan is overrun with nazis, not every section of twitter is controlled by chuds. There are "good’ parts to each website, just like substack. But if they removed nazis from their site entirely then all 3 would only get better.
Then can you name a single website or hell even a physical publication or space or anything of the sort that went from “Nazis arent tolerated” to “Nazis are tolerated” and actually got better? That helped people de-radicalise instead of just serving Nazi propaganda, giving them money and helping them recruit?
Pretty much any forum that includes Nazis will get worse as a result, yes. Absolutely 100%. That’s why I wouldn’t ever “force” a forum operator to include Nazis if they don’t want to. But:
Like your core argument is that its better to let them shout their propaganda as it will actually hinder them right?
Yes. Absolutely yes. With a caveat but mainly, yes.
Nazi ideology is abhorrent. Most people hate it. Most people, if they find out it’s going on in their community, are going to be fucking disgusted, and curious to know more about where the fuck is this even coming from. I absolutely think that Nazis feeling like they can be open about being Nazis is way better than keeping secretive and doing the same shit they would be doing, just without associating in the public sphere. I’d be happy to check with experts on extremism to make sure that they feel the same, if you’re open to hearing it.
Basically, if a forum is open to signing up to be the lightning-rod of bad faith they’re going to get from the Nazis, and abuse they’re going to get from the wider community, and degradation their forum is going to suffer as a result, in order to let the Nazis into the public sphere so that people can see for real what’s going on, and talk back to the Nazis directly instead of having all the Nazi-to-Nazi communication go on in some other place that the public isn’t privy to, I think that’s a good thing. 100%. I think that’s going to hurt the Nazis. Again, I’d be happy to check with experts on extremism to make sure that they feel the same, if you’re open to hearing it.
The caveat: That doesn’t mean I’m naive about the danger of letting these ideologies have a good foothold in society. You said “let them shout their propaganda”… I think combating Nazi propaganda is an important thing to do, yes. I think putting Nazis out of business or in prison because of their crime is fuckin’ fantastic.
I think it’s extremely important to combat Nazi propaganda when it comes in more subtle form, pipelines, engineered disinformation, or things without Swastikas (your TPUSAs and your Patriot Fronts). Those, to me, are much more dangerous than Substack blogs with swastikas. That’s a different thing from kicking the swastikas off Substack though.
Im non binary, and have many trans friends. People used to not give a shit until the right organised together to hate us. Now because of your glorious free speech they have been given a pass to be awful disgusting human being and spread their hate and ive lost 3 friends in 5 years to suicide because of it, because of things you think should be not only protected by law, but actively given a platform, advertised and monetised by companies like sub stack.
I am sorry for your loss. I’ve lost a friend to suicide. It sucked.
Is the lives of those people a good trade for you?
I want to talk to you about this, because I take it pretty seriously and obviously the rise of hatred on the internet is a huge problem.
I’m a little hesitant to say more because I don’t want to sound like I’m probing for information about something so personal or using it to “debate” with you. That’s honestly not my goal here. If you’re open to talk more I can tell you what I think would be a good ways to actually reduce hatred on the internet. I’m going to say this with all the kindness in the world: Kicking the Nazi blogs off Substack isn’t going to do shit. Not in the sense of “too small but any little bit is helpful.” In the sense of “counterproductive, putting you and your friends in more danger.”
Tell you what – if you’re comfortable, explain it to me. What type of hatred has directly impacted you, what needs to happen to fix things in your view. Any level of detail that you’re comfortable with, if at all. My goal is more just to explain myself and hear you out as opposed to “debate,” so let me hear you out.
(Edit: Reframing it so we’re talking about “hatred against trans people on 4chan” and what to do about it instead of “Nazi philosophy on Substack” and what to do about it makes a lot of what you’re saying and how you’re reacting make more sense. Nazis are going to be pretty rare, although they’re out there. Anti-trans people are in the modern climate everywhere. That’s why I’m asking more directly for the root of what you’re talking about.)
are you just going to ignore this question like ignored all the other questions that would have uncomfortable answers for you?
Which questions didn’t I answer? I’ll address anything you want to ask me if I missed any questions before or anything.
I don’t feel the same way about murder.
Why though?
I feel like you may be wanting to “debate” this, like until one of us “wins,” which isn’t my goal here. But if what I wrote before wasn’t a good enough explanation to understand my point of view, here goes:
I don’t feel the same way about murder because humans don’t naturally tend to murder each other. It does happen in certain circumstances, but there’s actually a massive resistance to it internally. Militaries have to do careful psychological training to make sure people are ready to kill because there’s so much resistance. Most people tell each other what they think at least once a day, and communication networks for formally sharing each other’s opinions get a lot of use. Most people go their whole lives without murdering one another other. Even in societies with permitted circumstances where people can kill each other and it’s fine, it’s a pretty rare thing.
In conclusion, using a communication network to share your ideas is a fairly natural thing. More so than murder.
Does that answer the question? Again, you don’t have to agree with me on this point of view, but it’s honestly a little hard for me to believe that my explanation wasn’t a coherent explanation of what I think. If you’re using “why” as code for “I want to argue, say something to ‘prove’ your side and convince me, let’s keep going back and forth about it,” I would prefer not to.
The Nazis were allowed to hold rallies and publish newspapers in Germany too. Thats how they became so powerful, and how they became powerful in the US too, that is until the bombing of pearl harbour and the government raiding the headquarters of The German American Bund and arresting their leaders. After which American Nazi’s lost all their influence. funny that. And then they’ve never been able to gain power in any country that has taken a strong stance against them. And you can use communism as an example too, communists were never able to gain influence in the west and especially America, despite how popular the idea was because of the active effort that went into stopping them.
I think we may just not be able to see eye to eye on this.
(Side note, if that Wikipedia article is to be believed, the Black Panthers got treated way worse than the Bund. No one assassinated any Bund leaders like they did Fred Hampton, at least according to the article.)
Do you agree with what I just wrote so far? Agree that those three bullet points are factually accurate, at least? I feel like there’s so much gulf between how we see these events that it’s gonna be tough to find any type of common ground here.
Well I wouldnt know any off the top of my head, but a quick google shows plenty of results
https://news.sky.com/story/warwick-students-expelled-and-fined-after-racist-messages-11402539#:~:text=The Midlands university expels three,declaring love for Adolf Hitler.
(Edit: Ken Parker wasn’t expelled. He was still allowed to attend online classes, and presumably to speak in those classes and all. They just kicked him off campus because of physical safety concerns, which sounds pretty fucking justified)
Those people are being expelled because of a wide variety of stuff, including Naziism, but also posting favorably about rape, holding assault rifles and saying he’ll “shut down” other students, a lot more than just “being Nazis.” It sounds like they were expelled for things I’m fully in favor of expelling people for. I’m talking about someone like Richard Spenser – who says Nazi things but only rarely commits actual physical crimes (although often enough to put himself in trouble).
It looks from a quick search like there are multiple universities that have invited him to speak, so it’d be surprising if any student who emulated him was instantly expelled right after they invited him to speak. Do you have an example of something like that?
and again to use communism as a counter example, universities are where many people become socialist/communist because the organise there and can get the word out. If Nazis were allowed to do the same you would have much higher rates of kids becoming nazis.
I think we are simply too far apart in how we see the world to have this conversation. I’m getting sort of echoes of religious people who say “But if God isn’t there to punish you what’s to stop you doing rape and murder?”
Most people in my circle of people I know consider themselves “allowed” to start to follow Nazi ideology, if they want to. 0% of them do it because they’re not fucking psychopaths (or even if they are, not to that level). In college, it was the same. Communism as an ideology (the Karl Marx version at least) doesn’t involve exterminating any inferior races, so people are more into it. You really believe that if people were “allowed” to be Nazis, a lot of them would? The only reason communism gets more followers is communists are “allowed” and Nazis are not?
Let me ask you a 100% sincere question. Who is it that should decide what is “allowed” and not? The university administration? State or federal government? Student organization threatening boycotts if people start to “allow” the wrong types of ideologies? Who?
(Spent too much time on this, I’ll write up a part 2 that includes replies to the rest of your message later on.)
This sub-thread is very long and I’m starting to lose focus. I don’t think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that you’ve been civil.
Haha yeah, all good. I enjoyed it, thank you as well. I’ll wrap up my thoughts if you don’t want to go back and forth indefinitely.
Why do you find people using their limited economic power coercive? You say you like boycotts. Telling Tide that you saw their advertisement on a nazi blog so you’re not going to buy Tide until that’s remedied is a boycott.
It comes down to the goal of the boycott. A boycott to stop someone polluting or abusing human rights, I’m down for. A boycott because some comedian said something someone doesn’t like and they want to “deplatform” him, I’m against. A boycott because Substack allows Nazis, and you’re trying to get third parties to punish Substack to make them stop, I also don’t like.
Somewhat related, I think it’s great to attack Nazis directly. Something like this where you’re crippling them because they broke the law and hurt people, I’m very in favor of. I don’t like Nazis any more than anyone else does. I just think it has to be based on behavior rather than speech. Letting them speak, but not letting them hurt people, I think is going to hinder their cause a lot more than it helps it.
their “Holocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]” post up is a hazard
Okay, here’s the crux:
I don’t think that post is a hazard.
I think having an exchange of ideas which includes dangerous ones, even very dangerous ones, alongside the truth, is a good thing. I think trying to get rid of “dangerous” ideas by banning people from talking about them does more harm than good. I think declaring that no one is allowed to say the holocaust is a lie is a hazard. I think it helps the Nazis to make that rule. I think the people who want to ban Nazis are, unintentionally, helping the Nazis quite a lot. People are talking to me in this subthread like I’m being soft on the Nazis and Nazis are terrible, but I think letting them say what they think, having everyone see it, and having other people free to illustrate why they’re wrong, is way harder on the Nazis than forcing them off somewhere where they can congregate in peace and no one can see them.
You might not agree, but that’s how I see it.
There are some points of view that are so hashed out, it is unlikely to be worth our time to debate them again. Nazi ideology, for example, was pretty firmly settled as bad. The forum I mentioned before had a clear “We are not going to debate if gay people have rights” rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they don’t, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale it’s not worth entertaining the “debate”.
So we disagree on this point. I don’t see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If I’m running a bar, I don’t need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth.
I’ve also never run a forum. I expect there’s a big “for me it was tuesday” experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, it’s the first time he’s ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, it’s tuesday, and the fourth time this has come up this week. I expect dealing with the worst sorts of people would take the shine off anyone’s idealism.
Yeah, I get this. I wouldn’t try to tell anyone running a forum that they have to entertain this type of debate, because it’s incredibly draining and may not fit the goal of the forum and may obscure the actual goal of the forum. I get all that and I wouldn’t try to tell you to run your forum any other way.
The thing is though, that “for me it was Tuesday” thing cuts both ways. You may have had this discussion a thousand times already, but for the guy that came in, it may be his very first time being exposed to certain things. I think a lot of religious people have this type of experience when they start talking with athiest people on the internet, and they may be coming from a pretty ignorant place when they start out. I had this type of experience as far as geopolitics and who the “good guys” are. And, I’ve heard a former white supremacist talking about having his awakening moment and leaving the KKK because of it.
The “talk.origins” newgroup on Usenet was this. It was a place to debate evolution versus creationism. Is that a pretty firmly settled question? Yes. Absolutely it is. Honestly, more so than gay rights (although gay rights is also settled, to me.) And yet, somehow, there are people in the world who don’t agree. A lot of them argue in bad faith, a lot of them are tedious or ignorant, there’s a ton of ground that gets covered over and over and over again. But is that a useful thing to have exist? Ab so fuckin lutely.
Does that mean that every 4chan troll arguing about the holocaust in bad faith, who’s never going to change his mind, deserves your time and attention? On a forum that’s not for that? Fuck no. I actually think that deliberate engineered misinformation, and the toxic and mind-change-resistant culture of debate on the modern internet, argues for a radical rethinking of what’s a sensible way to approach “an open exchange of communication” so that it doesn’t wind up as just the Nazis being able to spew hatred in places it doesn’t belong, and public forums being soft fertile ground for disinformation pipelines. I’ve also debated with enough closed minded people on the internet that I’m not naive about what the result of engaging with Nazis in an earnest debate is likely to be. But, a lot of the creationists on talk.origins were just as bad-faith about their conduct as modern 4chan trolls.
Hopefully that makes sense. I just don’t think that the answer is that as soon as someone says one ignorant thing about, for example, gay rights, they’re stripped of their ability to continue the conversation. Because if no one is ever willing to talk with them about it except other gay-bashers, how would you expect they would ever change their mind about it?
I had a long day, so I don’t have time to do much more than some quick responses:
That is incredibly flawed reasoning you can use to justify literally anything. People have a tendency to murder each other, should we just acknowledge thats the reality and not bother trying to stop it?
Humans naturally tend to talk to one another and communicate. Any amount of obstacles you try to put between them, they’ll find ways around unless you put way more effort in than is reasonable or safe into stopping them. With some rare exceptions, you should just let them communicate. It’s better. I don’t feel the same way about murder.
This is not a good faith argument. Nazis weren’t outlawed in Germany until after the holocaust and you know that. They were able to come to power BECAUSE they enjoyed protections at the time.
The US has strong protections for abhorrent-to-the-majority political speech. It’s one of its notably unique features, and was virtually un-heard-of in other governments as of the early 20th century. Once the Nazis were in the majority in Germany, of course their speech was going to be protected, but I’m saying that their rights as a minority party, before they came into power, weren’t formally protected by law in Germany in the same way they were in the US. There was no German ACLU making sure that they couldn’t get in trouble for having rallies. And yet, somehow, they made it work and took control in Germany. And yet, somehow, in the US where they were allowed to have rallies and publish newspapers and etc before during and after the German Nazis lost the war, they were never able to take over. That leads me to think that them having a platform or not isn’t as critical a factor in their spread as it sounds like you’re saying it is.
Jews in the US were subject to much the same treatment as they were in pre-war Europe.
My family was Jewish, earlier than pre-war, in Europe. It depended on your specific part of Europe, but as a general rule, this isn’t even close to accurate. That’s why we came to the US. This is a pretty good high level summary.
This is exactly the problem I have with Liberals. Its almost as if you only care about your own plausible deniability. “I didnt know he was planning on murdering Jews, all he did was say Hitler was right and shouldnt have been stopped (which is perfectly acceptable) I couldnt have known he would kill all those Jews, so my conscience is clean for putting in no effort to stop them”
I hate Nazis. I’m not saying all this because I want Naziism to grow in the US. I’m saying it because I consider Nazi speech so abhorrent that giving it a good airing will turn people against it more than it will attract people to it. I don’t think people are as simple-minded as “I saw Nazi stuff” -> “am Nazi now”. I have a hard time believing your summary of how it works on college campuses if you don’t kick out the Nazis. Who are some examples of students who’ve been kicked out of their colleges because they were Nazis? Thus protecting the rest of them? I just have trouble believing that it happens the way you’re describing.
I’ll say this – the one person I know who comes to mind offhand who’s interacted with a real IRL neo-Nazi, it was in Germany, not in the US.
Literally completely the opposite of reality. and you can clearly see that with places that allow these shitheads to congregate. Do you think twitter has become a place of enlightenment and de-radicalisation since Musk took over and went on his freedom of speech circle jerk? or do you think its gotten worse? Or how about 4Chan?
On 4chan, you kind of have a point. 4chan has specific features (primarily anonymity) that are attractive to Nazis and encourage their spread. Twitter has full-throated support for Nazis built into it from the founder. I think those factors are important too, not just the failure to kick out Nazis. I do think there’s a good case to be made there to contrast different ways of designing networks so that they won’t form breeding grounds for Nazis. My personal belief is that something like “Substack with Nazis” would be very, very different from 4chan and modern Twitter. My evidence? Substack today is Substack with Nazis, and it’s very very different from 4chan and modern Twitter.
My brother in Christ you need to relax. This is not a combat. I poked you a little to get clarification because you’d been personally attacking me, not to continue the argument. My goal was just to find out what you believe and bring some clarity to your accusations, because to me they are unfair, and bringing clarity to the issue will show that.
I know you said that Substack should demonetize Nazis. I had the impression that, in addition to supporting the idea of Substack demonetizing Nazis, you would also support the idea of them taking it a step further and banning Nazis outright. Maybe that impression of mine is wrong. You seem to think that I was “lying” and trying to say that your one statement about demonetization was instead one statement about banning. I was, instead of that, just making a more general statement about what I thought you believed. Maybe wrongly. To be honest, I still don’t know for sure whether you support Substack banning Nazis (in addition to supporting them demonetizing them, which you said twice, yes), because now you’re fully refusing to clarify what you believe, just giving me full on information-free hostility.
I think the productive business of this conversation has concluded. Have a good one. You can repeat your attacks on me if you like; for my side I think the conversation so far pretty much speaks for itself.
Are you planning to answer my question? I’m fine to just drop it if you’re not planning to, but you accused me of deliberately lying because I represented your views a certain way. It seems fair for me to ask directly, okay, what are your views then? So I can understand in what way they don’t match the way I described them?
I’m not trying to hound you about it if you just want to drop it. But I am not a liar. If you’re going to make that accusation, I’m going to ask you to back it up, and assume that it was unwarranted if you just suddenly go silent when asked clarifying questions.
Substack can host nazis given the legal framework in the US. But why shouldn’t I speak up about their platforming of evil?
Oh, yeah, you can say whatever you like.
I think you’re right that I was a little fuzzy when I talked about things that were illegal versus things I personally don’t like, yeah. You should obviously be able (legally and what-I-think-is-right wise) to say anything you like about Substack. And, they are legally able to do whatever they want with their servers, whether that involves allowing or banning or demonetizing Nazis or whatever. Most of my conversation was about what I think they should do with their servers, but it’s just my opinion. And yes I think you should be able to state your opinion and I should be able to disagree with it and all that.
You asked before what I meant about the “spirit” of the first amendment. What I meant was, there’s a specific purpose why it was enshrined into law, and the same principles that led to that legal framework also produce some implications for how the operator of a communication network “should” treat that network, in my opinion, especially as it grows to the size of something like Facebook and starts to wield power similar to a government in terms of deciding how people should be able to communicate with each other. But yes, this is all just what I feel about it, and you’re free to disagree or say fuck Substack or organize a boycott or whatever you like.
Once it gets into, we need to pressure their advertisers and try to force them to run their servers in a more Nazi-hostile way, I really don’t like that. It is legal, yes. But it’s coercive. It’s like a high-pressure salesman or a slimy romantic partner. All perfectly legal things. But I think that’s crossing a whole new line into something bad, much worse than Substack just doing something with their moderation I personally think they shouldn’t be doing.
A web forum I used to frequent banned pro-trump and pro-ice posts. The world didn’t end. They didn’t ban BLM. It helps that it was a forum run by people, and not an inscrutable god-machine or malicious genie running the place.
Sure. So, I actually don’t like that type of thing (although it is, of course, legal, and I’d defend the rights of those forum operators to do it if they chose). I got banned from a few different subreddits, both left and right wing which was funny to me, because people didn’t like what I said. That’s, honestly, pretty infuriating. I’ve also talked with conservative people who got suspended temporarily from Facebook, or had their posts taken down because they were antivax or whatever. Did I agree with those posts? Absolutely not, and I argued with them about it. Do I agree they should have had their posts removed? No. I started out thinking that yes, removing the posts is fine, and told them that more or less Facebook could do whatever they wanted because it was their network, but after having the argument a certain number of times I started to sympathize a lot more with the point of view of “dude fuck you, I’m a human being, just let me say what I want to say.” I don’t think that simple removal of the post, or chasing people off the “main” shared network completely, and onto a Nazis-only network like Truth Social, is the answer. I’ll say this, it definitely didn’t make them less antivax when that happened, or make it at all difficult for them to find antivax propaganda.
That’s different from actual Nazi posts, of course. Just saying some of my experience with this. I actually don’t like a lot of lemmy.world culture that’s developing now because it is starting to become this sort of monoculture, where only a particular variety of views are allowed. Like it really irks me that pro-police or conservative viewpoints get shit on so relentlessly that it basically chases those people away. I liked that reddit had both /r/protectandserve and /r/badcopnodonut. It’s fine. Let people talk, and don’t start yelling at them that they have the “wrong” view (although of course you can always tell them why you think they’re wrong). I have plenty of “wrong” views from the POV of the Lemmy hivemind, so maybe I’m more invested in it as an issue because of that.
I’m also not sure I understood your answer to my question. Is there a line other than “technically legal” that you don’t want crossed? Is the law actually a good arbiter?
Fair question. I mean, at the end of the day each server operator can do what they like. Some people will say that Nazis or MAGA people are so frequently trolls that they just don’t want to deal with them. Some people don’t want porn. Some people want to run a forum that’s explicitly pro-conservative and just get tired of left-wing people coming in and jeering at them. All those things sound fine to me (what-I-like wise as well as legally). I don’t think it’s my business to tell people where to draw that type of line.
To me, though, that principle “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” is super important. If you start saying only certain viewpoints are welcome, and dismiss the others not with open debate but with loud jeering or technical restrictions, it hurts the discourse on your server. Of course you’re legally allowed to restrict people’s access however you like. But to me, I would draw the line by disallowing illegal things or things that hurt the discourse (because of trolling or brigading or deceptive bot posts or whatever). But if someone’s just coming in and saying something you think is absolutely dead wrong (e.g. that the holocaust didn’t happen), I don’t think it’s your place to remove or ban them. I think you should allow that.
Does that better answer the question? That’s just my take on it. I’ve never been a modern Lemmy-instance operator, so maybe seeing it first hand and dealing with child porn from angry MAGA people or bomb threats from Nazis and things like that would make me less sympathetic.
I don’t think they’ve actually been trying very hard. They make a lot of money by not doing much. Google’s also internally incompetent (see: their many, many, canceled projects), Facebook is evil (see: that time they tried to make people sad to see if they could), and twitter has always had a child’s understanding of free speech.
I can only say what I’ve observed in terms of restrictions on Facebook posts from people I know, or Youtube creators I know who got demonetized or otherwise chased off Youtube. All of that, I think sucks. I agree, it’s kind of heavy-handed and brainless the way they’re doing it. I think that’s an additional issue in addition to the fact of censoring the ability of people to post being the wrong approach in the first place.
I think one of the core issues is that a huge for-profit company running a huge content network, where they don’t have bandwidth to put much attention into moderation and where most of the architecture of the network is designed to extract revenue from it, is just wrong from start to finish. That’s why I’m here right now as opposed to Facebook or wherever. When I talk about free speech issues I’m mostly talking about it in terms of things like Lemmy or Substack. But yeah, maybe you’re right that issues of profit motive and moderation bandwidth mean that we can’t draw much of any conclusion by looking at how things played out on the big networks.
Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)