Comment on Call to defederate from feddit.org over zionism
Panamalt@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The link appears broken, so I don’t know the specifics here, but defederation really needs to be a last resort as it kinda halts any chance of the conversation going the other way too. It helps create and support the extremified echo chambers that actively cause so many of our societal problems.
If the instance is particularly problematic or exclusively causes harm, then it might be appropriate to nuke em. But it also effectively tells the entirety of Lemmy that this is not a conversation worth having, and that it is wrong (at least socially) to ever interact with these people. And, it tells the folks being defederated that whatever they are saying must be valid because it gets an extreme reaction. People are exceedingly unlikely to admit wrongdoing and change their behavior when action is taken against their community of like-minded buddies (echo chamber), they double down and become even more polarized.
I know you mentioned speaking against defederation before, and I obviously don’t fully understand the details here, but I feel like it bears repeating that defederation has to go beyond the moral opinions of any individual if we want to stave off circling the drain of overreactive garbage that places like Reddit or Twitter became.