Clearly there's a lot of back-and-forth between essentially two different philosophies towards the purpose of this site.
The first one says: we are loud-and-proud communists who disdain to conceal our views and aims, therefore we should federate with as many instances as possible to educate and agitate. That means engaging with libs/chuds/reactionaries of all stripes and allowing them to flood in to be dunked on (and allow us to flood out). There's greater potential for us than just being a uniquely left-unity enclave in the broader internet. You can call this the "Blacklist philosophy".
The second one says: it's taken 3 years and a lot of struggles and purges to cultivate this space into such a positive, welcoming one, and the main reason people keep coming back here is because of that. Opening the floodgates to the majority of Lemmy instances would do potentially huge damage to the vibes of HB and alienate many of our comrades. Sure, people are free to block any comms or users they want, but that's already demanding effort from our users who simply don't want to be exposed to reactionary garbage in the first place. We worked hard to purge the bigotry, why allow any of it back in? This is the "Whitelist philosophy".
I'm inclined more towards the WL philosophy myself, especially after seeing so many people say that this is essentially the only social media they use because everywhere else sucks.
Clearly there's a lot of back-and-forth between essentially two different philosophies towards the purpose of this site.
The first one says: we are loud-and-proud communists who disdain to conceal our views and aims, therefore we should federate with as many instances as possible to educate and agitate. That means engaging with libs/chuds/reactionaries of all stripes and allowing them to flood in to be dunked on (and allow us to flood out). There's greater potential for us than just being a uniquely left-unity enclave in the broader internet. You can call this the "Blacklist philosophy".
The second one says: it's taken 3 years and a lot of struggles and purges to cultivate this space into such a positive, welcoming one, and the main reason people keep coming back here is because of that. Opening the floodgates to the majority of Lemmy instances would do potentially huge damage to the vibes of HB and alienate many of our comrades. Sure, people are free to block any comms or users they want, but that's already demanding effort from our users who simply don't want to be exposed to reactionary garbage in the first place. We worked hard to purge the bigotry, why allow any of it back in? This is the "Whitelist philosophy".
I'm inclined more towards the WL philosophy myself, especially after seeing so many people say that this is essentially the only social media they use because everywhere else sucks.
e: mixed up BL and WL
deleted by creator
Yep I mixed those up, thanks
I'm curious how closely this maps on to people's opinions about internationalism vs socialism in one country
"we should federate! permanent revolution!"
"hexbear in one instance, nothin personnel"
I think we should federate and that Trotsky should have been killed a decade sooner than he was.
We can criticize Stalin for many things, but "socialism in one state" as isolationism was always, always a bullshit accusation.