im trans so, the answer is yes. my first day here i saw a christofascist arguing for genocide. very Politely lmao.
ive seen some outbursts on mastodon as well. i was harassed once, and ive seen a bunch of trash on social. my own small mast instance tends to defed when that happens and mastodon has been mostly good for me since i, on an account level, blocked .social.
here i reported the christofascist and it didnt get moderated over the course of the day and tho i know numbers here have blown up, i have some serious concerns about kbin.social that run in line with the nightmare scenario ive seen on mastodon.social (prior to blocking the instance.) even if they bring up the mod count, i suspect we'll still see neolibs, fascists, and centrists dominate discourse while trans people get treated poorly with little recourse.
with that said, it cant possibly be worse than reddit or twitter so whatever i guess :/
im probably going to get harassed, see tankie shit, see fash shit, see centrists arguing that my right to access healthcare isnt important or shouldnt be prioritized ("its identity politics!!!") until i find spaces that defederate from "main instances" bc "main instances" tend to exclude minorities in favour of protecting violent or proveably false speech, regardless of the harm it causes. im not sure that will change here. or anywhere.
I have not seen something enough to get reported, but I did encounter a user that was very religious and not shy about how that informed their opinion on certain politically controversial subjects. They stopped short of advocating for violence, etc., but certainly that is not the kind of person I want to be included in any community I'm part of!
None so far. But I'm also for free speech and think mods should only block the worst of the worst like CP or extreme racism. Conspiracy theories and ordinary bigotry/extremism (not directed at a specific person) are fine.
Ironically I think "extreme racism" is fine for people to post, while "ordinary bigotry/extremism" aren't necessarily so. Often times, the super racist stuff isn't actually being hostile or antagonistic, they're just stating some super fucked up views (often in a polite way). Whereas run of the mill bigotry is often super heated, hateful, directed at someone, etc.
Conspiracy theories should always be allowed unless you're afraid of actual discussion and truth lol. like what you got to hide? conspiracy theorists just have some wacky beliefs, what's the problem?
Free speech is not a right to force people to listen to you. One of the good features reddit added was personal block lists. As a user, I should be able to completely ban and not see speech of people I don't want to engage with. If I could have my own personal AI filter assistant that would be even better, though I suppose that is best built client side.
I'm a fan of the self-censor model. If you don't want to see something, you should be able to remove it from your view. but you shouldn't be allowed to determine that someone else isn't allowed to speak.
There's plenty of it if you know where to look for. Just take any mainstream Mastodon instance for example and check the blocked instances. Yep, those ones are.
My first move is to just block-- individuals, and whole instances if need be. Hell, I'm quick to block instances anyway! The Internet is vast; I don't need access to every instance nor give every one a chance. I'll report if I feel like it'll do anything.
It also helps when you're on an instance that takes this sort of thing seriously-- you need Mods That Actually Do Something. Furthermore, there are tags you can follow to keep up on what to block, at your discretion.
💯. Background radiation is a great framing — @shengokai’ The Whiteness of Mastodon has sent great perspectives on this. And agreed that being on a well-moderated instance — and blocking/reporting whenever necessary — is key to having a good experience
I don't think I've seen it on kbin, but I sort of encountered it in a community hosted on beehaw, iirc.
There was a thread in the lgbt+ community where the OP was asking why the average person hated lgbtq+ folks and one dude clearly explained why he hated them.
His explanation was basically "as a muslim", so as someone with the muslim identity, he was alright with "gays" first because he didn't care what other people did in their bedrooms, but "it didn't stay there" and the gays with their ideology started to show up everywhere and started cramming their ideology to everyone else.
So yeah, the guy thought islam was an identity but being lgbtq+ was an ideology.
Ultimately this is what happens when you try to decide that people's beliefs are "hateful bigotry". each side thinks the other are doing some ultimate moral wrong, simply for having different beliefs.
When it comes to governing and politics, you end up with clear philosophical divides depending on how you see existence itself and peoples' role within it. To the muslim guy, opposing lgbt isn't hateful, it's trying to help people. to lgbt people, it's seen as hateful. In reality, it's a disagreement over facts and governing.
Someone having a polite disagreement isn't hateful. They might be wrong, and their incorrect view may lead to harm, but such things are often not malice.
Yes. It exists. But most servers that I'm on have zero tolerance for that nonsense. They either block the person responsible, or with repeated violations the entire server that the bigotry originated from. A perfect consensus doesn't exist, but basically everyone on the wider fediverse agrees that hate speech in general is bad. If an individual likes their hate speech, they are welcome to spin up their own server. And when they try to federate the rest of the fediverse is welcome to say, "naw, we're good."
This is easily the largest server that I'm on. I haven't seen it here yet.
I am on both kbin and Mastodon, it feels that all of the servers that I am on does have a active policy of non-tolerance of that type of thing. In other words don't be a piece of human trash. Even with Mastodon, I think that site wide in its Server Covenant, which is the very first thing, they do have a anti-racism, homophobia, ect, because of where they are located at and that the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, does not want Mastodon to become the next Facebook or Twitter, who tolerate that type of thing.
I will report it if I see it (hate speech, I don't care about being edgy as long as it's not hurting someone).
So block my account ahead of time if you can't be decent. A block it not an insult, and it is way less effort all around if you block me ahead of time so I never see it in the first place.
Sure there's instances dedicated to being human trash as you've put it, but in the general discourse it's not an issue I've noticed, and I think there's a few reasons for that:
There are no "Agendas" here yet: Make no mistake there are people spending a lot of money to define the discourse on major platforms. An example people are fairly comfortable acknowledging is the existence of Russian content farms, - a lot of what stirs up bigotry on platforms isn't genuine users sharing their experiences or hobbies or whatever, it's people with an agenda astroturfing discontent so their backer can point to it and say "see, the ordinary people are revolting, they would prefer our regime/product/way of life". I'm not saying every racist on Reddit is a paid actor, I'm sayinga lot of people who haven't given things much thought are being prodded and goaded into being insensitive through consuming the fake bullshit those people put out.
There are no advertisers here: Again, look at the major platforms, they sideline content and spaces about sexuality or race because they see these as unpalatable to advertisers. YouTube faced a lawsuit last year for “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.” On YouTube, content is separated not by target age, or [N]SFW status, but advertising palatability.
These spaces are not US centric. The US has some stupid laws, which Spez alluded to in relation to NSFW content, an example of which is FOSTA-SESTA. This is one of the reasons Tumblr and Only Fans attempted to go SFW. The laws claim to be anti sex trafficing but in reality they're just social conservatism for the internet age, you'll note in the link above regarding YouTube, the platforms defense of discrimination was that they were only abiding by the US Communications Decency Act, of which FOSTA-SESTA is an amendment.
The latter two points largely just hide or remove users from platforms, but that contributes to an overall atmosphere where bigotry goes unchallenged or bigot mods support bigot users. If people aren't seen as a valid part of the community things do go sour from there.
I haven’t personally, but other people have. I make sure to join instances that are proactive about blocking bad instances. Check out the blocked servers at Beehaw.org or hachyderm.io and you will get an idea of what’s out there.
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