They probably aren’t. They just failed to really examine the effects hierarchy has on people.
They've written a bunch of their own theory and/or distillations of theory, so I find that difficult to believe. They've obviously spent a lot of time working with these ideas, which is consistent with either:
Being a bad-faith actor purposefully trying to undermine the growth of the space, or
Earnestly studying the materials a ton, and -- despite their personal study and voluminous discussion with like-minded people -- still arriving at bad, counterproductive conclusions.
In short, they're either a cop, or their actions are so harmful they might as well be one.
Federation is super interesting as an anarchist because it changes the relationship between moderators, users, and communities.
I read through your comments on this, and your comments on federation in some other thread, and it sounds super interesting but I'm still not quite grasping how it works. I'm particularly confused about the " users can easily switch to another instance and keep talking to all their friends largely uninterrupted, because the mods don’t have a monopoly on access to the community" part.
So if you get kicked off Gmail because Google doesn't like you drawing nipples in the O's in their logo, you can just sign up with Hotmail and you can continue doing all your email shit. You have to go through the tedious task of updating everything to use your new email address, but Gmail can't stop you from emailing your friends using another service.
For Lemmy, Mastodon, and the Fediverse at large, the same applies. If a moderator is an asshole, you can just literally go to another instance and continue accessing the larger Fediverse no problem, at least so long you're not such an insufferable asshole that other instances just ban you too or pre-emptively block your email address and IP.
This very heavily changes the relationship between moderators and users, especially compared to corporate social media walled gardens like Twitter. No admin or moderator actually has control over you, no one can actually prevent you from access the Fediverse at large by banning you, nobody "owns" the Fediverse so nobody can threaten to take away your access. They can boot you off their instance, and if you're a massive asshole you'll find yourself in the same sitaution Gab is in where everyone just has you blocked, but if it's just that one admin being a jerk or being abusive then you don't have to tolerate it. They aren't the admin of, say, Reddit or Twitter, where if you get banned you get cut off from everything and everyone. You have to be toxic enough that everyone whose opinions you care about all agree you're a liability before you find yourself isolated.
And because of this, moderators and admins actually do need to behave themselves, their power isn't absolute and they can't coerce users using that monopoly on the content of the community. On Matodon, for example, some moderators on an instance started doing some Nazi apologia under the guise of "free speech." It was a relatively well-populated instance, but their users fled to other instances (Mastodon lets you export your profile to easiliy import it into a new instance for just such an occassion) and the admins of other instances started blocking their instance. Now they only really federate with other "free speech" instances. They were unable to force their users to stay, nobody worried that htey couldn't talk to the same friend they always had if they went to a new instance, and they couldn't threaten to ban people who spoke out because they'd just pop up on another instance and no other instance thought what they were doing was cool (at least none that we in the lefty sphere give a fuck about, I'm sure Gab thought they were neat).
It makes being an admin less of a position of power and more what it really should be, curating the internet for other people to make it less toxic and abusive.
They aren’t the admin of, say, Reddit or Twitter, where if you get banned you get cut off from everything and everyone. You have to be toxic enough that everyone whose opinions you care about all agree you’re a liability before you find yourself isolated.
I think I get this. To make a rough analogy to reddit:
If reddit admins ban CTH and all its derivatives, you can't establish a CTH anywhere else on reddit, meaning you can't have your CTH content and reddit content still accessible from the same website.
In the Fediverse, there's no admin to ban your community, but other instances can stop associating with you/ban you/block you. So if your community sucks enough it'll be isolated from the broader Fediverse content, but it takes a lot more widespread agreement that your community sucks for that to happen; i.e., a small group of admins can't fuck you over. It's like if you removed the admins from reddit and let individual subs decide to associate with each other or not.
Yep. And the fundamental change that brings is that admins and mods stop being hte "bosses" of communities and act more as curators for the Fediverse at large, maintaining a custom blocklist to suit hte tastes of their users, while simultaneously using their own reputation as a good judge of character to vouch for their users to other admins doing the same thing. No one has to put up with Spez because you just have to if you want to talk on Reddit, you just have to be good to people in the ways that they feel matter in order to reach them. We can just choose to not care about the instances in the Fediverse that take offense to us glorifying John Brown, but can still be held accountable by those whose opinions we actually value. We can glorify John Brown all we want and not care who blocks us for it, but we do care if someone blocks us because we start becoming too tolerant of, say, ableist slurs.
They've written a bunch of their own theory and/or distillations of theory, so I find that difficult to believe. They've obviously spent a lot of time working with these ideas, which is consistent with either:
In short, they're either a cop, or their actions are so harmful they might as well be one.
I read through your comments on this, and your comments on federation in some other thread, and it sounds super interesting but I'm still not quite grasping how it works. I'm particularly confused about the " users can easily switch to another instance and keep talking to all their friends largely uninterrupted, because the mods don’t have a monopoly on access to the community" part.
So if you get kicked off Gmail because Google doesn't like you drawing nipples in the O's in their logo, you can just sign up with Hotmail and you can continue doing all your email shit. You have to go through the tedious task of updating everything to use your new email address, but Gmail can't stop you from emailing your friends using another service.
For Lemmy, Mastodon, and the Fediverse at large, the same applies. If a moderator is an asshole, you can just literally go to another instance and continue accessing the larger Fediverse no problem, at least so long you're not such an insufferable asshole that other instances just ban you too or pre-emptively block your email address and IP.
This very heavily changes the relationship between moderators and users, especially compared to corporate social media walled gardens like Twitter. No admin or moderator actually has control over you, no one can actually prevent you from access the Fediverse at large by banning you, nobody "owns" the Fediverse so nobody can threaten to take away your access. They can boot you off their instance, and if you're a massive asshole you'll find yourself in the same sitaution Gab is in where everyone just has you blocked, but if it's just that one admin being a jerk or being abusive then you don't have to tolerate it. They aren't the admin of, say, Reddit or Twitter, where if you get banned you get cut off from everything and everyone. You have to be toxic enough that everyone whose opinions you care about all agree you're a liability before you find yourself isolated.
And because of this, moderators and admins actually do need to behave themselves, their power isn't absolute and they can't coerce users using that monopoly on the content of the community. On Matodon, for example, some moderators on an instance started doing some Nazi apologia under the guise of "free speech." It was a relatively well-populated instance, but their users fled to other instances (Mastodon lets you export your profile to easiliy import it into a new instance for just such an occassion) and the admins of other instances started blocking their instance. Now they only really federate with other "free speech" instances. They were unable to force their users to stay, nobody worried that htey couldn't talk to the same friend they always had if they went to a new instance, and they couldn't threaten to ban people who spoke out because they'd just pop up on another instance and no other instance thought what they were doing was cool (at least none that we in the lefty sphere give a fuck about, I'm sure Gab thought they were neat).
It makes being an admin less of a position of power and more what it really should be, curating the internet for other people to make it less toxic and abusive.
I think I get this. To make a rough analogy to reddit:
Is that at least kind of right?
Yep. And the fundamental change that brings is that admins and mods stop being hte "bosses" of communities and act more as curators for the Fediverse at large, maintaining a custom blocklist to suit hte tastes of their users, while simultaneously using their own reputation as a good judge of character to vouch for their users to other admins doing the same thing. No one has to put up with Spez because you just have to if you want to talk on Reddit, you just have to be good to people in the ways that they feel matter in order to reach them. We can just choose to not care about the instances in the Fediverse that take offense to us glorifying John Brown, but can still be held accountable by those whose opinions we actually value. We can glorify John Brown all we want and not care who blocks us for it, but we do care if someone blocks us because we start becoming too tolerant of, say, ableist slurs.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. Sounds like it has a ton of potential.