- Mod of [email protected] posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
- Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
- Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod
Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @[email protected]
I’m being extremely sarcastic.
I’m saying that proving that hierarchy is not necessary, and a group of people can manage themselves without one, by nominating one person to have ultimate authority over what actions can and can’t be taken within your anarchism group, so that person can make sure it stays anarchist, is a very silly thing to do.
But what I’m trying to point out is that this one person does not have authority over anyone due to the nature of the fediverse. If they did, your post right here would be gone.
If the users that are in the community of the moderator didn’t like how they managed things, they could make their own community. And if they didn’t like that the instance let the community exist for whatever reason, they can change for a better instance. Admittedly it’s hard to do so, but it’s a pretty good model.
They can’t stop users from making their own solar punk meme community.
The word your looking for is Free Association. And yes you are right, it is a key part of anarchism and you are mostly right. I do think moderation isnt being handled in a very anarchist manner, but the ideas of free association are still at play here.
Saying they don’t have authority because fediverse is a very disingenuous thing to say, they do indeed have some amount of authority because they run and control servers. Everyone who runs a server does and they have the capability to limit reach. Being able to start your own community doesn’t mean that others don’t have authority. The biggest servers have the most authority, if Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml wanted to both silence someone their post history would be wiped off the two largest servers entirely, and completely from all the communities they own, even in servers they don’t, as much as you insist it isn’t the case there absolutely is authority in the Fediverse.
If there wasn’t really, hijacking, comandeering, and then kicking people out of their own admin servers would be fair game. It isn’t though and is highly frowned upon, because they have authority over those servers and the slice of the pie, and that means they can silence you. Don’t try and delude people into thinking that isn’t possible, when it absolutely is and is kind of the reason why federation works the way it does. Since historically uncontrollable spaces were a bad idea that attract criminals and bad faith actors.
So I’m not saying it shouldn’t be the way it is, but I am saying it is disingenuous to frame the Fediverse like it is Nostr, because that’s not what it’s like and we don’t want to attract or welcome people who think it is.
What I don’t understand is how could a mod from a community have authority on someone on another community, let alone on an empty community? Like why would authority matter if no one is your subject?And I understand that making an instance is hard an not for everyone, but my hope is that it becomes easier and easier as time goes on.
If I remember, Lemmy is working on making sure comments and post history is exportable if you want to move instances. Having a backup of your account would definitely give even more power to the user IMO.
I never wanted to claim that the fediverse is like nostr. I just don’t consider it to be authoritarian because of the first paragraph.
More so a mod from an Instance. But a community mod can still have impact if they are close with their instance admin, which can have an impact on visibility and reach in the Fediverse depending on how big the servers are. Fediverse isn’t decentralized in the way most people think it is. In theory it is but in practical function it isn’t. Every server is like a slick of the pie in the Fediverse, and servers with more users are bigger slices. These bigger servers have more authority and if they decide to ban you or silence your communities (and you don’t retaliate by circumventing it with alt-accounts and/or lying on Registration to make them think you’re someone else) you’ll lose out on that chunk, and possibly 90% of the reach and interaction you’ll get. For these servers it’s a tradeoff because if they do it too much or too aggressively like Beehaw.org did they’ll lose their authority (I remember when Beehaw people had huge FOMO blowouts about the Beehaw defederation of Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, now people don’t even care, they killed the authority they had by killing their own reach), however when they haven’t gotten to that state their actions can be devastating to the reach of individuals here. Someone starting their own server or community on another server in these situations won’t really help because the pie slice of those instances is bigger.
Also even in the case of lowly moderators, if they moderate multiple large communities even without administrative abilities they can still squash your reach by banning you from the biggest communities. Similar to the issue of powermods on Reddit. Making your own communities doesn’t help here because your reach will be limited since the people are still over there. And despite what people say getting people to go elsewhere is no trivial task, you basically need admin/divine intervention to even put a dent in Network effect.
I do hope they do that, it wouldn’t solve the issue of servers being big enough to have a noticeable impact on your reach but it would solve the issue of servers being able to axe your account and history from existence entirely. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like they really care that much about doing that, at least not moving post history. Currently it only supports moving subscriptions, description, Display name, and a few other traits which… I don’t really see much benefit in. I didn’t do it when I created an account here, since I knew that if lemmy.world banned me or was angry at me for making an account here (there was a short feude with dbzer0 at the time and they were banning people talking about moving here) it wouldn’t really matter if I could take my subscriptions since 99% of them would be useless. Thankfully that didn’t happen though.
That’s good, though unfortunately I know that there are some… Okay a lot, a worrying amount in fact who do. I don’t think that Lemmy itself is authoritarian. I do think it is considerably better than mainstream social media sites like Reddit or Facebook, but I feel that telling people that admins and mods don’t have any authority on lemmy and the fediverse as a whole is at best naive and at worse reckless and irresponsible, because they ultimately do have power and authority based on popularity and size. And it can have severe negative impacts that simply self-hosting or making your own community can’t solve.
Of course this is also a feature of the Fediverse compared to Nostr because it means that shitty people are kept outside the fence (when they aren’t lying or cheating their way inside) so it’s a double edged sword. It’s important people are aware of that, because actually one of the biggest things we do have against bad actors who are big + powerful and do this is awareness. Because if a big server is silencing people aggressively, action can be taken by other servers to limit their reach, and their authority is greatly diminished. Beehaw did it to themselves but I could see a situation in which another server might have it done to them because they are silencing criticism for objectionable views while promoting and endorsing those objectionable views themselves.
So in that sense, communities like [email protected] or [email protected] are really good since they help develop that awareness and can lead to action being taken to stop abuse, like removing of remote communities from instances, or defederation of hostile instances.
Missing an e in the link
Fixed the typo.
Well put
Yeah, but I don’t think authority needs to be inescapable in order to be authority.
If I don’t like the laws of the state of Ohio, I can leave Ohio. That doesn’t mean the cops in Ohio have no authority.
In this case, it’s actually even a little bit sillier than that, because we’re just talking about words. There’s no way to even do any actions. All you can do is say stuff. If people come in and start talking about things, and that’s so destructive to your way of being that you have to wield your authority within that particular domain to eject them from it and stop them from saying those things, what’s that say about your ability to work things out without a hierarchy and get along? How are you going to deal with it in your anarchist community if someone’s playing music too late at night and keeping someone else awake, or saying things at meetings that you don’t think they should be allowed to say? Or even doing something even more destructive, letting their dog loose and it might hurt somebody, something like that? If someone has to default back to putting one person in charge and having them wield ultimate power to keep things in line this early in the process, it doesn’t sound to me like they’re very serious about anarchism.
I’m not trying to be negative or sarcastic about anarchism. I think, on the whole, it’s great. I talked more about it and learned some down in the deep forest of comments. I’m just saying that it sounds to me like [email protected] could use a lot more anarchism in its governance.
I think it should be inescapable. At least, the consequences from it should. The modlog is still available, and there is nothing that stops you from creating your own community. If we take the Ohio analogy tho, claiming yourself to be a sovereign citizen won’t stop the police from applying their authority on you. They use violence in order to apply it as well. In Lemmy, creating your community in an instance may not stop an admin, but will stop a moderator. A step further to that would be making your own instance, and I know it’s not perfect, but it’s already way more power to the users and less to the moderators.
I see it more as someone kicking you out of a group. You can ask the others if they disagree and want to form another group with you. If the others agree, they can leave the group, and if not, they’ll stay because they agree with the decision. It’s not a perfect model, but gives way more agency to the user than it does to the moderators/admins. For example, on reddit, if you were banned from a community, you could make your own, but if you were banned from the site, then not much could’ve been done. People also don’t agree with the moderation on ml, so they moved on to .world, db0 or lemm.ee. So far, it works.
I would advise against using the argument of it being “just words”, as it removes the intention behind your words, and can lead to some more right wing talking points (not that you are right wing).
you’re not an anarchist, so I don’t see why they should consider your critique as anything but liberalism