I think this, especially the second issue, is something the Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) will have to work through at some point.
If Reddit bans a subreddit on a controversial subject, it’s banned, it’s gone. But if a Lemmy instance defederates with another instance for hosting controversial content, you just find another instance that doesn’t.
I think the real issue is with federation in general and the creation of bubbles: there is a certain subset of users who just want full federation and full visibility, including sites that host lolicon, fascism, and other problematic content. Even if they aren’t, say, fascists themselves, but just free-speech absolutists. The issue is that any instance that doesn’t defederate with, say, Fascist instances, is tainted, either by association (“this instance refused to defederate from fascist instances, so we’re defederating from them too”) or because problem users are attracted to it (“people in our comment sections from this instance have been defending fascism, so we’re defederating to keep them out”).
And there really isn’t a good solution to the issue, aside from hosting your own tiny client-only server.
This has been the dynamic on Mastodon for years now, and I don’t think it is really a problem. Framing the problem itself as “free speech” vs. “censorship” itself is often used as a fascist canard when it is really a matter of the freedom of association. Communities choose who to associate with and who not to associate with. Moderation, to prevent harassment and abuse, to keep the discussion on topic, to remove illegal content, is a very NORMAL thing. It starts with small tools like temp-bans from communities, and increases in scale to permanent bans from instances, or de-federation if an instance proves to be a continuous torrent of abuse.
There are a lot of cases of genuine censorship which take place on commercial platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, but these “free speech extremists” are always more concerned about whether or not they can use slurs and spew blood libel than they are about what happened to r/BlueLeaks.
I think this, especially the second issue, is something the Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) will have to work through at some point.
If Reddit bans a subreddit on a controversial subject, it’s banned, it’s gone. But if a Lemmy instance defederates with another instance for hosting controversial content, you just find another instance that doesn’t.
I think the real issue is with federation in general and the creation of bubbles: there is a certain subset of users who just want full federation and full visibility, including sites that host lolicon, fascism, and other problematic content. Even if they aren’t, say, fascists themselves, but just free-speech absolutists. The issue is that any instance that doesn’t defederate with, say, Fascist instances, is tainted, either by association (“this instance refused to defederate from fascist instances, so we’re defederating from them too”) or because problem users are attracted to it (“people in our comment sections from this instance have been defending fascism, so we’re defederating to keep them out”).
And there really isn’t a good solution to the issue, aside from hosting your own tiny client-only server.
This has been the dynamic on Mastodon for years now, and I don’t think it is really a problem. Framing the problem itself as “free speech” vs. “censorship” itself is often used as a fascist canard when it is really a matter of the freedom of association. Communities choose who to associate with and who not to associate with. Moderation, to prevent harassment and abuse, to keep the discussion on topic, to remove illegal content, is a very NORMAL thing. It starts with small tools like temp-bans from communities, and increases in scale to permanent bans from instances, or de-federation if an instance proves to be a continuous torrent of abuse.
There are a lot of cases of genuine censorship which take place on commercial platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, but these “free speech extremists” are always more concerned about whether or not they can use slurs and spew blood libel than they are about what happened to r/BlueLeaks.