Defederating was the right call. The_Donald is being hosted on sh.itjust.works.
i.imgur.com
The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.
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This is really a microcosm of the problem of "free speech communities." They wind up being infested with trolls and Nazis.
The only plausible reasoning for the admin not banning this community is they don't mind it. Glad Beehaw is not federated with a place like that.
That was Voat. Voat, feature-wise, was like a better reddit. But then they (I think it was like one guy administering the whole site) stuck to "freeze peach" and it quite quickly turned into a cesspool. Like on Day 1. And of course reddit tried that, too from time to time when it was convenient. But as soon as it was inconvenient, like when the media found out about the JB, FPH, etc subreddits, free speech was off the table.
Free speech - as it's understood in the US - concerns one thing: Governments. People literally have no free speech in any other regard; certainly not on privately owned/operated websites. Unless it's their own; and it's never their own, because no one would visit it.
I always wonder if these free-speech-people have ever tried yelling profanities or slurs at their boss or customers at work. The answer is of course they haven't for the vast majority, because they know that yelling back "FREE SPEECH!" wouldn't stop them from getting fired on the spot. But it's the same principle. So it's weird to me that people think they have some fantastical "right" online to get away with saying anything.
Yep... people usually interpret "free speech" as "freedom from the consequences of my speech," but it's never meant that.
It's not even that complicated. To these people, "free speech" only means that they believe they should be allowed to scream literal slurs when they want to make someone feel afraid or worthless. That's literally the only thing they really want to use "free speech" for.
People need to realize that free speech only protects you from the government. We don’t have to listen to speech we don’t agree with.
I'm not sure what's more painful, American Free Speech'ers who don't know it has no relevance outside being free of government censorship, or non-Americans thinking it's some universal truth.
Yep, and we have literal decades of evidence to show that Every. Single. Internet. Community. - whether it's forums, blog comments, newsgroups, etc. - will always descend into a Nazi-filled hellhole without moderation or content guidelines.
And you really nailed it. It's always a bad faith front. The people pushing for this "free speech" shit want that kind of community
Sometimes I wonder if the early version of the internet (the one that millenials grew up with) were too accepting of the "online edgelord" mentality. You know, the people who don't believe their own words, just spouting stuff because it makes them look edgy and cool. Like, I know a younger me thought being edgy was cool, and I took that version of myself to online spaces - it wasn't shut down like it should've been. However, I did end up growing out of it, only to realize my old friends never did. Even in their 30's they still act like "top kek memelords" and are some of the saddest and loneliest people I know.
It kinda made me realize that "grown up people" online need to NOT put up with that crap. Like, zero tolerance, "Oh, your being an edge lord today? Temp ban - come back when you grow up".
These same people, that were my friends back in high-school days often feel "persecuted" when they can't be an edgelord anymore. After all, it was just SO NORMAL before. "It's just a joke bro!". And now every time they interact with society it's through a lens of persecution because they can't be as edgy as they want anymore.
THEN it get's to bad faith bullshit as external bad actors feed the narrative that they "get" to be an edgelord and that's what freedom of speech means - which then becomes a slide into alt-right and incel territory.
It's exhausting, and honestly, I have a bit of myself to blame here - when I was more accepting of that type of behavior rather than pushing back on it. I even think that extends to the larger millenial cohort as well. We just kind of "accepted" 4-chan and the trash that came out of it for so long that many just feel entitled to be an edgelord these days.
It's always a joke until it's not anymore. It's why places like 4chan led to the creation of QAnon and real-world white supremacist terrorism. Even on sh.itjust.works, the mod of the Trump community insists it's all just "ironic". But I've heard that before and it never stays that way.
I had always heard that supposedly the original r/t_d started as a joke, and we all know how that ended up.
Poe's Law ruins everything
"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
Yes, I think this is true. There was a lot of "irony" that, as it turns out, was not really very ironic.
Absolutely. The edgelord mentality got completely normalized and persisted for so long that people just seem to accept that's how people on the Internet are.
I used to spend a lot of time in Linux and F/OSS forums and there were so many people who, when posting in screenshot threads, had their browsers open to 4chan. It was just a totally normal and everyday thing for these people. And back when I was a bit more naive and having never heard of it, I remember hopping on and looking around 4chan, like just to see what the hype was all about, and wondering wtf was wrong with all these people who spent so much time there.
I don't think those sort of folk are specific to F/OSS communities, but moreso as an overall tech culture thing. There's this myth of "meritocracy" where people think that if your a 100X coder, then that's all that matters, and being a disgusting shitstain of a person shouldn't be relevant at all. And when they get chucked off of a project for being a bigoted asshat, they get pissed and spew their bile and entitlement all over the place.
And this is absolutely where it led and where it leads. It feels like it takes its roots in tech enthusiast circles, then bleeds out into other enthusiast cultures, e.g. gaming, comics, etc., and then just poisons everything. And then after something like GG, you get people like Steve Bannon who see how that entitlement and disaffection can be weaponized, and can be used to drive the alt-right pipeline even faster.
Another thing I think contributed to this is that, as millennials, especially early on in Internet adoption, we had this idea of a separation of identities. Our online personas were completely different from our IRL personas because we were conditioned to believe that this was the safe way to go about things. But I think it just gave people a mask to hide behind, and just assume "well, it's not real life. So I can just do whatever" without ever thinking about there being an actual human on the other side of the screen. And for so many millennials, it seems impossible to change this perspective.
As PA put it so succinctly:
I genuinely think a lot of it was ironic back in the day -- at the very least people seemed to know not to "take it too far" -- before a generation grew up online who perceived the edgier posters as Cool and took it seriously, leading to the miasma we have today.
#UPDATE it's been removed :)
Well, some of us are actually trying to convert it into a Donald Duck sub. Which I find kind of fun and couldn't have happened if it was immediately banned.
Unfortunately my account over there was already banned from that community(I asked if they were being ironic when they first popped up) so I can't help.
Edit: and someone else pointed out that the mod there keeps changing his display name so the community looks more active than it actually.