we’ve got fewer active users but have an outsized post/comment count

my first response was directed at you. the second was not. I was answering the question you asked.

Genuine question, what’s the goal of such behavior?

to apply adequate pushback to erroneous understandings of the world. the goal isn’t to convince the interlocutor. it’s to encourage the people reading to investigate the topic. on many of the topics in question, the history and ideologies involved take entire books to deconstruct - doing so in an internet comment is extraordinarily difficult. the people we’re talking to don’t even agree with us on the meanings of basic words - there’s not even a basis for debate. because such debate is so unproductive, the aggressive tone encourages many people to stop and ask more serious questions. this undoubtedly works because so many of the posters on hexbear responded in exactly that way here or on reddit at some point in the past. and when they asked those questions, they got detailed answers, including links to sources so they could investigate for themselves. in actual fact, many of the people on hexbear received exactly the kind of aggressive pushback you’re decrying and ended up eventually convinced that our viewpoint had something to offer.

and as point of fact, when someone starts asking questions, we’ll tell each other to stop treating them so harshly cause they’re acting in good faith. that courtesy is not extended to people who continue down a path of antagonism. nor is it offered to someone who devolves into racism, transphobia, or other forms of bigotry. one of the benefits of the aggressive approach is that it encourages so many bigots to immediately out themselves.

lastly, civility is not an unmitigated good unto itself. civility is the false peace – it masks tensions, pretending they don’t exist. real peace is not civility – it’s a state in which tensions are brought to the fore so they can actually be resolved. civility is a white, middle class sensibility – our world is incredibly fucked up and the people affected by it do not owe anyone that masking of the horrors of our world. nor do we owe anyone an education they will neither ask for nor appreciate.

how they respond to detailed replies or lack thereof, snide, use of thought-terminating cliches, and hostility

it’s not directed at you. I’m explaining why we react strongly in general.

being critical without being interested in the response is bad faith.

obviously whether a take is bad or not depends on your politics. it’s so obvious I’m surprised you’d bother pointing it out.

Y’all respond to criticism like kim jong un is standing right behind you lol

this isn’t criticism. it’s just a snide aside.

Also we aren’t in hexbear right now

again, obviously.

think the overall Lemmy experience has gone downhill since hexbear federated.

if you asked questions in good faith, you’d know that the community is also aggressively welcoming to such people, even when we disagree. but you don’t so you won’t.

yes, it’s on purpose - we actively discourage lurking and encourage engaging with bad takes. the more you complain about it, the harder we go at it.

yeah, that’s the part that confuses me. whatever it is, it’s another stupid decision in a series of stupid decisions, and hopefully it just kills the instance.

In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don’t show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves.

I will take this to mean communists make up a soft majority on lemmy given the number of complaints about commie posting keep popping up on the major comms

“CSAM instances” <– Pretty sure any publicly facing instances with this problem would be tackled by law enforcement pretty quickly.

as far as I’ve heard, they’re still up and major instances are still federated with them.

“Nazi instances”< – These ones will likely de-federate themselves from the wider federated web, they can’t handle a broad range of perspectives well.

this is a deep misunderstanding of how far-right groups operate. they actively seek connection with the wider community because it presents them a chance to recruit and they’re numbers get decimated when they’re deplatformed. offering them a base of users to proselytize to only benefits them.

Social media has enabled these groups to both silo themselves and get promoted to users site-wide

yes precisely

This method of content promotion is responsible for the explosion of online hate content in the last decade

this has a deeper material reason underlying it. it’s got more to do with economic decay and the lack of prospects people face than the algorithms. we saw the same thing early last century. far-right ideology explodes in popularity when the left fails to make the case for a more equitable distribution of resources and because our oligarchs fund them to an obscene degree – minor fascists with a hundred followers on social media will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding (cf Ali Alexander). fascist ideology spreads because it poses scapegoats for the problems in society.

Nazis had plenty of websites in the 90 and early 2000’s but they didn’t get much traction with them because Facebook wasn’t forcing them into your home feed

yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won’t be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.

I really don’t have a problem with these sites existing, people should be free to have their own disgusting racist thoughts and share them with their own little chat rooms and forums and the like.

I do as me and mine belong to groups they target. if they’re allowed to rise to accumulate any power, it will spell death for us. there have already been multiple attempts in the US to organize pograms against trans people, as an example.

And they should be ruthlessly mocked and kicked out of every other space they could possibly go to.

however, I’d like to point out that 4chan originally started making memes to mock the fascists – their use of irony turned over time into unironic fascism and they became a hotbed for neo-fascists.

Again, using the e-mail example, I can get an email from whitepowerwebsite as a gmail user. That’s not google giving them a platform, it’s just a neutral protocol for online communication (e-mail) working in a federated state as it’s meant to

email is a bad example because it only provides point-to-point communication, unless you join a mailing list. social media is different – views get broadcast to the wider public on a given platform. federating with nazis allows them to broadcast their views and create a sense that their vision of the world is actually what everyone else believes. exploding-heads is federated with lemmy.world and the consequence is that many users have left lemmy.world specifically to get away from the fascists dumping their disgusting worldview onto the platform.

Gmail isn’t expected to police the entirety of e-mail, the legal liabilities lie with the sender and receiver.

they actually do have liability under laws like the DMCA, SESTA/FOSTA, and the new slate of laws recently passed to go after sex traffickers (and in reality a wide host of “undesirable” content more generally). but that aside, I’m not talking about legal liability. I’m talking about the responsibility the people running these instances have to not help build fascism. it’s an ethical/political responsibility, not a legal one.

it implies that it’s not democracy. people just make accounts based on which instance is currently the largest.

I think the media companies have been abusing the DMCA to go after people who link to pirated material. also, I’m starting to suspect world is trying to get funding because they’re trying to “clean” the site up in exactly the way banks/VCs require for loans. it’s a conservative interpretation of the law, especially the recent rounds that purported to go after human trafficking but actually forced major websites to take down anything remotely objectionable.

it’s the admin message on lemmy.world

defederation is good for nazi and CSAM instances. no one should touch either with a 10ft pole. there’s absolutely no reason to give them a larger platform.

when the capitalists expropriate the profits over creative works: cool, good

when some random person downloads it: how dare you

oh no, billionaire profits. anyway,

lmao of course the bootlicker clutches pearls over “trans ideology”.