A response to Evan Prodromou’s “Big Fedi, Small Fedi”

  • Dame @lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Yes, but your response is misleading it insinuates that we have ways to keep those people off of the Fediverse and we don’t. It’s not possible, all of the kinds of people you’re saying he wants on the Fediverse are already on the Fediverse. Also, small doesn’t equal safer, the Fediverse has been small until last year and for years minorities have dealt with racism and harassment. What he said is ultimately right, we need to make the tools. With better tools people can largely have their preferred experiences, it doesn’t have to be an either or situation.

    • thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.worldOP
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      11 months ago

      I agree that small doesn’t equal safer, in other articles I’ve quoted Mekka as saying that for many Black Twitter users there’s more racism and Nazis on the fediverse than Twitter. And I agre that better tools will be good. The question is whether, with current tools, growth with the principles of Big Fedi leads to more or less safety. Evan assumes that safety can be maintained: “There may be some bad people too, but we’ll manage them.” Given that the tools aren’t sufficient to manage the bad people today, that seems like an unrealistic assumption to me.

      And yes, there are ways to keep these people off the fediverse (although they’re not perfect). Gab isn’t on the fediverse today because everybody defederated it. OANN isn’t on the fediverse today because everybody threatened to defederate the instance that (briefly) hosted them, and as a result the instance decided to enforce their terms of service. There’s a difference between Evan’s position that he wants them to have accounts on the fediverse, and the alternate view that we don’t want them to have accounts on the fediverse (although may not always be able to prevent it).

      • Dame @lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        OANN and Gab are one example of a back down. What about the child porn instances? They are still on the Fediverse, they’re just blocked by lots of instances. Using Gab provides a false sense of safety to people.