this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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I have to preface with my comment with the fact that I’m not someone who would be targeted for harassment because of my identity, so I can’t fully appreciate the distress a lot of people who are part of minority groups have to go through on platforms like X, Reddit’s, or Meta’s.
But I hate the argument that we can’t/shouldn’t federate with them because they are nazis, transphobes, etc. 99.9% of people on those platforms are not that.
Like the author said there are people like that already on the fediverse. We have tools to block it at the user or moderator level. We have the ability to migrate to instances that have higher or more lax levels of moderation.
It's the nazi bar analogy. The moment you allow nazis, they invited that's friends and then you can't kick them out because they can cause big trouble. The solution is not to allow nazis in the first place.
And the issue with the "99% of people" argument is, it doesn't matter what percentage of the population are decent people. If they're too many, the network effect takes place and the platform becomes too big to fail.
Do you know how many people are dictators in dictatorships? One. The leader. The rest are subjects. But that single leader is enough to make everyone's lives shitty.
So it doesn't matter what percentage of Threads/Facebook users are nazis; by being there they support the nazis they can't kick out.
The decentralized fediverse model isn't perfect, but defederation has worked so far at keeping nazis at bay. They have their little corner where they can talk all the racist shit they want, but they can't harm users of instances that have blocked them.
The real question is how much money Zuck plans to invest in moderating hate speech. I can't be sure how much, but based on the precedents, I can say it's a pretty small figure. That IS a problem.
Indeed, there are lots of people like that already on the fediverse, and blocking entire instances is a blunt but powerful tool that well-moderated fediverse instances currently rely on for protection. Today, people on instances where admins and moderators don't block instances that have multiple badly-behaving people have to deal with a lot more harassment and hate speech than people on instances who do. So we'll certainly see a situation where some instances block Threads and others don't. The open question, though, is how many instances will decide to also block instances that federate with Threads -- just as many instances decided to block instances that federated with Gab.