General Discussion

How's that Nazi bar story go again?

I was at a shitty crust punk bar once getting an afterwork beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "No. Get out."

And the dude next to me says, "Hey, I'm not doing anything. I'm a paying customer," and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "Out. Now," and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed.

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "You didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And I was like, "Oh okay," and he continues.

"You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends, and the friends bring friends, and they stop being cool and then you realize, 'Oh shit. This is a nazi bar now.' And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down."

And I was like, "Oh damn," and he said, "Yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

-iamragesparkle

That’s something I noticed when I joined Mastodon as well. When people are in control for the sake of community and not profit, things tend to be better in this regard. Let crazies federate with crazies.

Loved the comment from user @[email protected] :

*"If you want your own unfiltered feed. Create your own instance and don’t de-federated any other instance. All the content in the feed will be available because like email, it is federated, so you only need to subscribe to the feeds. The admins do not control the content. But they do control the instances which they maintain, and rightly so.

This is NOT A PLATFORM, it is a protocol and you have the choice to engage with it how you want. Don’t like an instance, stop using it. Use another or create your own. You will still get all the content."*

This is just so well stated, imho. Of course the person TheLurker was speaking to isn't interested in the content, they're interested in the users so that they can troll them endlessly.

I was so fucking relieved to see that lemmy.world doesn't fuck around with the fascist "absolute free-speech" game. Fucking FINALLY! If I didn't already have a reason not to return to reddit/Twitter/whatever, this would've been enough on its own. Thank you, admins!

I love how taking out the Trump trash happens so much faster here!

Over in the old place, getting the admins to do something about right-wing toxicity was like pulling teeth. Flagrant TOS-violating bigotry, hate & disinfo would fester for weeks, months, years while the admins yawned

At the same time, if people started talking about punching Nazis, the bans and post deletions would start flying instantly, with admins threatening mods & threatening to ban entire subs if they didn't delete Nazi-punching posts fast enough.

Gee, you think those admins were biased?

While I certainly understand the appeal of "free speech no compromises" the evidence is real clear that any online forum that adopts that mentality invariably becomes a bigoted shitpile, I'm not going to make a choice on philosophical grounds when the reality of the situation makes itself so obvious

The lack of corporate influence is really felt here. Corpos love right-wing fanatics because they make people mad, which encourages engagement with a platform.

This is the LITERAL first post I saw after signing up. I'm ecstatic and so fucking relieved

LOL, the OOP's username in that linked thread is certainly a username.

Really appreciate all the human eyes keeping a lookout for this nonsense instead of letting the ragebait spiral in on itself with the algorithms.

exploding heads

I don’t know what that is and to be honest at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

I signed up for Voat years ago when it was online, but the rampant anti-semitism rendered the site unusable.

We aren't quite out of the woods yet. ~~/c/ConservativesOnly /c/Maga~~ /c/conservative and ~~/c/prolife~~ are still around here on lemmyworld and spreading bullshit.

Edit: some were removed after all

The biggest difference I've experienced between the fediverse and Reddit is how infrequently I come across outright bigotry in the comments. I didn't expect that, and I certainly didn't expect that to feel as refreshing as it did. I had gotten to the point where I was just numb to the racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, etc. Not having to put up with it to nearly the same degree in my first few weeks over here was amazing.

Now that I've (a) seen that a community can exist with a minimum of people calling me slurs, and (b) realized how much those comments were actually affecting me (I'm not so tough after all), I am very aggressive about protecting this space while it's still possible to stem the tide.

I suspect a lot of other Reddit migrants feel something similar. We've been forced to put up with these chuds for years, to the point where we've just started treating them as an inevitable, natural forces, like shitty weather or beach seagulls. Over the last four years, particularly, we've very clearly seen the result of allowing these fuckfaces to take root and grow their communities. Now that we have a chance to make something different, a place where that doesn't happen, we're (pretty collectively) jumping at the chance to actually fight against them. Trying to fight them on Reddit was like trying to fight a snowstorm, or fire ants, or the just the fucking tide. Here? There's a chance.

While it's good to believe in Free Speech generally, a blanket approach is how Reddit alternatives end up like Voat. Even normal people were suggesting it as a popular Reddit alternative, but then it became clear that their slavish devotion to the idea of "free speech" included not kicking out fascists and bigots.