Well, there are always people who want a more safe space and in turn leave (or threaten to leave) a certain environment. Whether the environment then choses to make itself more safe or to stay the same is a careful consideration. Making it more safe might make other users leave, but also attract others to the instance.
In the same way, there will be people calling for more openess/“free speech”, prompting the same consideration.
For me, the basis of this is given by law; everything else needs to be negotiated dynamically, how open/save an instance is might change over time depending on its users.
Now, in this debate, identity politics tends to favour more safety by default, which might make sense at first, but if you follow it through consistent, you end up in something like garden eden. Because there, everything is safe, you don’t need to fear any threat whatsoever, but you are also not really doing anything. If you default to “safe is always better” you end up in a totalitarian system.
So safety/openness is in general a worth consideration and it should be dynamically debated. Maybe in a few years, consent-based federation proves itself to be a best-practice to make a place safer for trans people and becomes a standard; then we all adapt it happily - that would be fine with me; but if so, I see it at the end of a process.
thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Yep, I agree that instances and social networks that focus more on safety will attract some people but others will leave. Today, there are a whole bunch of social networks that don’t focus on safety, and very few that do. So there are a lot of options for people who prefer “openness” and very few for people who prefer safety. Strategically, that’s an opportunity for the free fediverses today.
blue_berry@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, probably. Question is how big it will become. Let’s see.
thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
In the short term, they’ll be much smaller than Meta’s fediverse (because mastodon.social and most of the big instances are federating with Threads) and of course much smaller than Threads. Longer term, we’ll see, but I wouldn’t expect them to be as big as Threads for a long time if ever.
blue_berry@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ok, I may have blown the discussion a bit out of proposition earlier. It’s just that I thought you meant basically the whole Fediverse. The name “Free Fediverse” is a bit misleading imo.