Comment on What would you want to see this site do differently from Reddit?
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 1 day agoI want Lemmy to do a better job than reddit at keeping fascists from being free to spread their poison.
What fascists? They’re rarely here.
Tankies, too? They’re already here.
HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Yeah, that was my point when I said it was already in a better situation than Reddit with defederation. They’re rarely here because they get quickly defederated. It’s part of why I’ve stayed.
Yeah and they’re also mostly defederated too
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 21 hours ago
I think it has more to do with their not wanting to be here & online communities voluntarily segregating themselves into their respective ideologies[^self-segregation].
Defederation is not an effective control against the individuals you want to contain. As we can see with tankies, their annoying conduct rarely rises to the level to result in bans from the unblocked instances they join.
As for spreading their poison, I don’t think people are mindless automatons who must become awful when exposed to offensive rhetoric all day. If mere exposure is all it takes, then they probably lacked decent principles. Sheltering a fragile position that disintegrates at the slightest challenge due to ignorance is a weak strategy that doesn’t build a firm, reliable foundation.
A better solution is to develop a sturdier position with principles everyone is keenly familiar with to effectively defend. They acquire that familiarity through observed & practiced success to defeat challenges. The best answer to speech we dislike is better speech that condemns & challenges it. People need robust principles to do that.
[^self-segregation]: a problem for civil engagement & deradicalization
HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
Its not good against individuals, but it keeps this from becoming a space where they can congregate and try to attract people in the pipeline already.
Of course people aren’t automatons, but people can and do often unconsciously mirror and internalize things they see as normal in a community. Defederation does do a good job of keeping the bulk of Lemmy from being a Nazi bar, so that will happen less here. Its not a perfect solution, but its better than reddit in that regard.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up tankies, you do realize they founded the site right? I don’t think that gives them any special right to be here, but its also hard to imagine Lemmy without tankies. Its a part of what makes the space unattractive to fascists, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy seeing Hexbears tear their posts into pieces. I think the numbers of tankies here is a lot lower than some users would have you believe, and the main instances are largely defederated or default blocks. I’m fairly content with how that is working out.
As for the rest, you won’t be able to debate fascism into the ground. Fascists have to be crushed through collective action. People differ on what that would look like, in my ideal we would band together march through the streets and dismantle the engines of war that fascists rely on. Burn the factories, abolish their institutions, and set about the work of preparing the world for climate disasters. They’re not going to fall over and stop being fascists because of perfect inescapable logic. They’re going to stop being fascists when the tools they would use to oppress us both physical and cultural are broken and they see they cannot win. Your debate tactics will have a place breaking their cultural tools, but it has to be accompanied by a large enough unified front to make fighting back infeasible, and the removal of avenues for them to retake control by physical destruction of weapons, weapons manufacturing, and vehicles of war including those used by the police.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Tankies are kinda deceptive and manipulative tho. They pretend to be leftists, then when Mamdani gets elected, they started slandering him, calling him a “zionist” or some bs, even tho he’s a Muslim.
Reason why their shit doesn’t work on me is because I was born in one of those “communist” countries they constantly praise about, which is very contradictory to my lived experiences. I know enough to recognize tankie bs and also the far-right bs.