I’m simply asking this question because of Lemmygrad.ml existing, and that there isn’t a far-right equivalent of it yet. If Lemmygrad has any standing for its right to exist under free speech, where is the line drawn for other extremist political ideologies? If Holodomor skepticism is allowed, then what stops Holocaust skepticism? (as it is generally accepted the Holodomor was man-made). I’m simply wondering what gives far-left politics a right to promote such extremist views in the Fediverse, when their far-right counterparts would be Defederated in minutes.
Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I’d rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.
Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they’re all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.
Eh… I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
I don’t think that level of intolerance should be tolerated, regardless of whether someone is on the right or left of the spectrum.
What does “far-left” mean to you, then? If someone with views entirely counter to progressive ideas just calls themselves “far-left” while spewing hateful garbage, do you just accept that they are part of the left?
Politics isn’t team sports. Your political association is defined by your views, not by what side you claim to be on.
Then it’s just a “no true Scotsman” argument.
There are plenty of examples of leftist governments who were openly hostile to minorities.
You can’t be a fascist and not be bigoted. You can be a marxist-leninist and not as a rule hate minorities. I encourage you to go to lemmygrad yourself, see if you find any hatred of minorities being tolerated there. You just won’t.
I can coexist in a space with them, they’re not going to start calling for the genocide of minority groups. They will deny that genocides have happened, which to be clear is bad but there’s a fundamental difference between “these events didnt happen” and a fascist saying “let’s mass murder all the minorities because they’re biologically impure”. I can coexist in a space with one, with the other my murder or the murder of any other marginalized group is as a rule being outright advocated for.
No matter how hard you try tankies even at their worst are not fascists. To try and equate the two is beyond ridiculous. You can point out that some historical regimes have done a lot of horrible things, fair enough. But ideologically marxist-leninists are not comparable on any level to fascists.
I can not, and will never under any circumstances tolerate the prescience of fascism to any degree.
OP mentioned Holodomor, so I’ll just point out that ML’s generally don’t deny that there was a famine, or even that it was exacerbated by bad policy. The specific point of contention is whether it was intentional.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
Even historians debate this, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to characterize it as “genocide denial”.
I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
Yeah, they’re banned from lemmygrad. Rule 5:
- No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome, this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.
- No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).
- No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, duginists, etc).
Denying the Uyghur genocide is an act of bigotry, no different from denying the Holocaust of German Jews, yet such content is openly tolerated there.
Can’t agree more. It’s amazing just how many posts I’ve seen since joining Lemmy equating the left and right, as if “workers should own the means of production” is just as bad as the literal genocide advocated by the hard right.
That said, given that lemmy.ml (and maybe latte.isnot.coffee?) is run by pro-CCP tankies, I think it’s worth taking a second to say that defending the genocide of the Uighurs is majorly fucked and the vast majority of hard leftists here on Lemmy vehimently oppose that.
But one can’t be hard-right and not be for genocide, basically. Not so on the left.
Unless you’re Jewish, the far left has had a huge blind spot for anti-Semitism over the last few years.
I’m not saying that all leftists aren’t bigots or that bigotry never happens in leftist spaces, but bigotry is the rule in fascist ones. Fascism is bigotry, it’s a core part of the ideology itself. For that reason they’re not comparable.
That sounds a little bit like the no true Scotsman argument
It isn’t at all a no true Scotsman argument, what are you talking about?
You can be a leftist and not be bigoted. Bigots also join the left, we can’t help that, but that’s because they personally are bigoted, not because the ideology is. In fact, most modern leftism argues that bigotry is fundamentally at odds with the core ideals, and in my experience a majority of the left, at least in English speaking countries, wants to distance these people.
You cannot be a fascist without being bigoted. Being bigoted is part of the ideology. It aims to spread and teach bigotry, that’s the purpose of it.
No true Scotsman would be “yeah but the anti Semitic leftists aren’t real leftists”, which isn’t what anyone said.
I disagree, but if we argue, it’ll go nowhere.
There’s not really anything to disagree with. What you’re calling a No True Scotsman isn’t a No True Scotsman argument in the slightest.
You might be mistaking denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestininians as somehow anti-Semitic.
Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.
My philosophy has been that If you hate people you’re never met, I hate you. Otherwise, let’s have a drink and talk out whatever the differences are.
The people who made abortion illegal in most of the United States have harmed millions of innocent people without meeting them.
You cannot stop someone from downloading a software to open their own instance. What you can do is to block bad actors/cut federation with them. Which is what most instances do with both alt-right/nazi and tankie instances.
I always laugh at the term “far left” or “left extremism.” Like oh no stop it with all the equality and rights. No no anything but those.
The victims of the Holodomor were not treated as equals by their killers.
Should political extremism, far-left or far-right, be an allowed part of Lemmy’s Fediverse?
by design it literally cannot be “allowed” or “disallowed”, it just Is and Can Be a part of the Fediverse. you as an individual have absolutely no control over who uses Lemmy or ActivityPub generally, in the same way Mastodon can’t stop a community like Gab from using their software as long as they abide by the guidelines. also, there is a “far-right equivalent of Lemmygrad” (exploding-heads) and you’re literally asking the body questions on an instance which defederates from lemmygrad (which many instances also do). this is such a perplexing set of questions in general.
Account is 3 days old. Maybe the whole idea of Lemmy and the Fediverse is still perplexing to them? This response feels needlessly passive-aggressive; seems like maybe there’s some room to afford grace?
This response feels needlessly passive-aggressive; seems like maybe there’s some room to afford grace?
we’ve collectively spent like 6 hours today just trying to get the site up and functioning because Lemmy is nightmarish to work with, you’re gonna have to forgive me a bit if i’m more blunt in fielding questions which have been litigated for as long as we’ve been here and get re-litigated on the time scale of every few days. this is a very played out discourse in general. i would encourage people to just lurk more to answer stuff like this
Lemmy is a federated platform run by instance owners. Owners have full power regarding moderating their servers including delegating that power to others. The owners can decide which other owners are censored through defederation. Lemmy, by design, is not free from political struggle. Lemmy handles power better than platforms like Reddit where server ownership is centralized.
Denying crimes against humanity is foul. Owners decide which ideas are promoted and which are denying history through federation with owners. Spaces for denying crimes against humanity will continue to exist. I would like to be in those spaces as a thorn to remind others of their awful ideas and possibly present better ideas.
Under present conditions someone must own the hardware to run the server. The owner cannot reasonably allow all content. Constituents of an instance place trust in the owner to censor in a transparent and responsible manner. Those same constituents can leave an instance for violating trust with regard to censorship. Freedom of association is an important component of Lemmy.
Far right and far left are a spectrum. I describe myself as an anarchist which is considered far left. As an anarchist, I see the fediverse as a possibility space for democratic control and power distribution over horizontally aligned hierarchies. I am excited for the possibilities to end domination heirarchies. My political alignment is tangent to the systems for power established by Lemmy.
Well said, all of it.
There’s nothing the Fediverse as a whole can do to prevent extremism, by design; what we can do is choose not to interact with it, or to interact antagonistically with it
I’m gonna be annoying and I know it, but I really hate that people equate the far left and the far right. What does the far left want? Destroy capitalism. What does the far right want? Kill all queer people and then some. For some people, the opposite of Nazism is Communism when these barely have anything to do with each other.
The far left can be annoying, sure. But in the end, the vast majority of them are not actively trying to justify mass murder. That’s a key difference. Also, one has dramatically more influence then the other. So the question should be:
Should the far right be an allowed part of Lemmy’s fediverse?
Which is a misunderstanding of the fediverse I think. We can’t forbid them to be anywhere on an open source and defedrated platform. We can however, ask if they should be tolerated? And that’s up to the various servers to decide.
Beehaw already has a stance on it, though: No. Hence the recent defederation. And I agree. Fuck Nazis.
This is my stance on it too. People like to treat today’s political environment as two sides of a coin diametrically opposed, but that’s not how political ideology works, it’s more nuance than that, like a sphere. I get why American’s do it with a two-party system, but that doesn’t mean you’re all in on one or another, people are more nuance than that too. People who run with this mentality that there are only two sides to politics often fall into the mistake of equating to two as equal sides as you said. It makes it hard to acknowledge the difference of the extremes and their intentions.
Though I think the biggest reason people are less tolerant the alt right is because there are more reasons outside of politics to be against the alt right. Outside of politics, alt lefties usually get into arguments with economist and capitalist because extreme leftist have intensions to change the economic landscape. Whether for better or worse is precisely what they’re arguing about. There’s also the more fringe alt left (tankies I believe) who will get in a tussle with historians and survivors alike, but their conversations chill out once they realize no one’s condoning anything (usually, idk all you tankies).
Meanwhile the alt right targets specific freedoms enshrined by the US constitution and the Human Bill of Rights. The alt right wants a say in who you marry, whether or not you should adopt, religious rule you should abide by, who should/shouldn’t get to vote, whether the vote should be decided by the people or legislator (you now Democracy and all), your identity, your medical decisions, your family planning, your education, and the very books you read. There’s a desire to snub out individuality if it doesn’t abide by the alt rights idea of “normal.” All of these stances directly invade individual rights of many people and their ability to pursue their respective happiness. While there’s political reasons to speak out against these stances, there’s also moral obligation and the simple instinct of survival pushing back on these perspectives. This creates a large group of people who not only disagree, but whose existence is literally threaten, there’s no room for tolerance when lives and freedom are on the line. The reason alt right has a tough time is because most Americans still hold age-old American values of liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yes, but no one is obligated to federate their shit, or host their shit.
I don’t understand what argument you’re making. I was about to say you’re welcome to make your own instance and federate or defederate with whoever you want, but then I noticed you’re on beehaw. They already have defederated with lemmygrad. So what’s the problem?
Btw, MLs suck but let’s not pretend they’re the same or as bad as Nazis. That’s a false equivalence.
Good to define terms for this. Does extreme left mean people who think that a living wage should be a thing? To fox news it does.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It’s quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That’s the whole point. There’s no centralized server where someone can decide “Oh, we’re just gonna prevent this person’s physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet”.
If there were, it’d be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don’t moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.
I keep seeing these posts about whether something should be “allowed”, and keep asking myself how people could so fundamentally misunderstand the fediverse when I’ve only been here a month and can see this is a silly question.
How are you going to stop an open source, federated community from having instances where far right or far left stuff happens? You can’t. All you can do is decide who you federate with on the instance you own. So join an instance who is careful about its membership and defererates instances that have far right or left activity. That’s all you can do.
There is no “king of the fediverse” making decrees about what is/is not allowed.
The premise is that it’s up to the admins of each instance to choose. Inherently in the design, nothing is globally allowed or not. And the less-preferable ideas will appear to fewer people because they will be defederated more often.
Fwiw, lemmygrad is defederated from many instances.
Politically speaking, the lemmy/fediverse would make a great PolySci thesus. There is no practical universal governance other than sharing the ActivityPub protocol. It is an interesting experiment in how humans behave. Each instance is like a country.
Exploding heads is a good example of a far right instance. A lot of folks have defederated from them. The biggest instance, Lemmy.world, just cut ties and they’re furious.
But lemmygrad is already defederated by most instances
