I was just informed by one of the admins that I have 14 days to leave functional.cafe after I called a troll doing genocide apologia in my comments a zionist ape, where should I go? What servers don't bow to the complaints of #Zionism?
Functional.cafe are claiming I'm simply a multiple offender of their rules, which i will admit is true ever since they changed their rules, but I would like for it to be clear. They changed their rules in October specifically to accommodate Zionists complaining about my posts, the very day a #BDS tagged post of mine blew up and became among the most shared BDS posts on the activity pub network. I initially agreed to CW political posts, but as #Israel's #genocide in #Palestine has accelerated, killing all but one of my students in Gaza along with most of their families, I've concluded that hiding this behind content warnings is itself bowing to mild repression for the sake of satisfying the demands of the most extreme oppression: genocide.
I've seen plenty of pro-genocide posts in the local server feed. I dont think they are being asked to leave or even getting their posts censored, as mine increasingly have been (even removing posts with many likes from months ago, apparently on demand).
I'm sad I'll be losing all my past posts, especially those about #lisp and #scheme that I occasionally rediscover. Where can I go that won't turn similarly sour? My time with the #fediverse may be up tbh. After being blocked and soft-blocked by nearly everyone I was buddies with in the #guix community (for years!) for being an anti-genocide Jew, and now this, its quite clear that even spaces that act like they stand for universal liberties above all are actually willing supporters of the most oppressive regimes and ideologies on the planet. At least insofar as they are #European in origin and character.
@rml You can join starnix. This has been pretty cool.
In the meantime. do you have a blog or something? Like in neocities.com or anywhere similar?
That would be better.
@shakil_tcs yeah I need to do that, the problem with me and blogging is that I have this humanities academic ocd wrt to publishing, where everything has to be expressed correctly when I feel like I'm leaving the zone of simple discourse for my writing proper, and have never been able to overcome it and treat a blog more like I do Mastodon. Maybe its time to get back on it.
@rml I hope you can at least backup your posts from functional.cafe and view them offline, even if you can't move them to a new server.
In a debate over issues in which one side of the debate says "I want to kill you and everyone in the world like you" and the other side of the debate says, "I don't want to be killed," I really hate privileged centrists who try to politely accommodate Both Sides™ of such issues, and who feel a need create an environment that encourages such debates. Centrists with privilege invariably turn on the people who say, "I don't want to be killed," they will always hear the passionate entreaties of the underprivileged to live in peace and confuse it with extremism.
@rml I am a bit disappointed to see apes tarred with the smear of Zionism. Surely most apes possess enough common care to not stoop to the genocidal mania undergirding Israeli hegemony in Palestine.
@rml
I don't think we have to resort to shaming apes or any other species in general, but it's a real shame functional.cafe succumbs to zionism... Hope you find a new home. Have your tried asking types.pl? Genocide denial is prohibited according to their rules. Or maybe a more political instance, like kolektiva.social?
@g1smo@rml we are not bowing to zionists, functional.cafe is just not the right place for this kind of discussion. Nothing prevents @rml from opening a political account in a dedicated instance.
@mdallastella@g1smo@rml How is it not bowing to zionists though? You are removing rml specifically because you are receiving too much attention through reports by zionists. The zionists "win" here because you effectively cave to their desire for censorship. It's hard to not see that as plain as day.
this is how they work, and they are effective at that
and while I agree that this is not the most graceful way of dealing with this issue, I'm also not surprised that the moderators here want to stay away from that
the only problem is that "staying out of politics" is only an option when this "politics" does not concern you personally, or your friends, which I think isn't rml's case
I personally find it saddening that, instead of standing up for rml, the mods choose to wash their hands, but still I'm grateful for all the voluntary work they are doing to keep this instance running (and I'm not sure that I wouldn't want to do the same if I was in their shoes)
@mdallastella@g1smo@rml Ah, this is the thing again where you'll claim you're not censoring anyone but also ban people from expressing opinions you find unpleasant/inconvenient. Shameful.
@rml I'd be curious to know of good servers for your kind of posting. Even my current server wouldn't be a fit because its policy is geared towards depoliticization and liberalism (for good and bad). And most servers which embrace politics, even radical politics, seem to be for anarchists first and foremost, and treat all communists as suspect. I have yet to see any server on the Fediverse which isn't hostile to communists.
@zyd@rml I'm following this thread with interest, because Emacs.ch was in a very similar situation one year ago (some might remember) - which resulted in us landing on the Olifant block list.
The people responsible for putting us there never cared to resolve the issue and hide behind anonymous profiles while regularly tagging fake screenshots of me (as the one who made the mod decision) with personal information with a Fediblock. It peaked in me receiving death threats even addressing my children.
Just to be clear, here on emacs.ch there is no "hostility towards communists" (I would even say quite the opposite). Our general "keep politics at a minimum please" rule is there to protect all our users from retaliatory actions, and even legal threats, that are inevitable when it comes to moderating issues like this. And I assume functional.cafe had to introduce such a rule for exactly the same reason. It is to their credit that they made every effort to let rml continue for so long.
What makes rml's situation particularily hard is that I can symphazise with either side. Smaller instances like functional.cafe or emacs.ch - operated by a few volunteers - not lawyers, don't have enough "network weight" to endure the pressure that arises from bad actors in the Fediverse. And there are a lot of them.
In a perfect world the Fediverse should be resilient towards this, I think it was even created for exactly that purpose. To overcome censorship and oppression and create a space where things that need to be said, can be said. I soon had to come to the conclusion that we are very far from this perfect world and the Olifant block list, that is advertised every day here on the Fediverse, is part of that imperfection.
My personal recommendation to you @rml is to spin up your own instance, which is very easy (i.e. using the lightweight snac2 server). No one will be able to kick you out, with or without good reason and there will be no admin that has to suffer for what you have to say, and I mean that not in an insulting way. The mods from functional.cafe are fine people and they stood by us when emacs.ch was publicly shamed for being "anti-semitic" because we did not allow one of our users to be deleted for political reasons. Running your personal instance is the way to go and this is exactly how ActivityPub was designed for.
Just in case I'm not being clear myself: I don't think emacs.ch is hostile to communists. I am one myself and find myself relatively comfortable here, but I know things would be slightly different if I were to talk more explicitly about politics. My comment about hostility towards communists is purely focused on anarchist-operated servers, it's just something amusing I've noticed. For what emacs.ch is, it's great. I 100% get the reason for de-emphasizing political discussion here, hence why I said "good and bad" regarding the liberalism.
That said, where does one go if they want to express communist politics (or hell, politics in support of peoples liberation, a la Palestine) in an online space? Somewhere without all the negatives of typical mainstream social media. The fediverse is a great outlet but very few choices. Like you said, running an instance of one's own might be the only way.
Call me crazy but if you join a tech server, post only about tech until the most brutal violence since WWII emerges, which your posts turn towards as people you have known for a long time are killed alongside their families, one after the other, the server kicking you out is the enforcer of repression, even if they do so all while paying customary lip service to condemning the oppressor. That its a libertarian free speecg fundamentalist who is doing the repression is so incredibly typical. Absolutely vapid ideology, we communists are infinitely more committed to liberty than those who merely brand their personal interests with it. #BDS#Palestine
Zionists dont have to troll me in my comments believe it or not. I did not go and find that guy myself, he found me. He came and started posting about how oppressed Jews are in Brooklyn — which is grotesquely absurd, equivalent to white genocide narratives — in order to defend the genocide of Palestinians. That is beyond the pale in my books... especially as a brooklynite Jew who is sure beyond any reasonable doubt that we aren't one of the oppressed minorities of NYC. If you seriously care about the oppression Jews have suffered throughout history, you should be well aware that the violence that black people, east and west Asians, latinos and Muslims as a whole suffer in the city is comparable to what our grandparents experienced before WWI in Europe, which you should also know is incomparable to anything we or our parents experienced growing up (my father's shul was bombed in one of the worst antisemitic terror attacks in US history growing up, so I dont want to hear about how its so much worse than I acknowledge)
Not sorry I called him an ape. If you stoop to such ridiculous lows and expect strangers to buy it, to acknowledge that your intelligence is comparable to that of a primate is to give you the benefit of the doubt tbh.
It does seem that some quality pro-Palestinian folks get censored by Mastodon Dot Social. I left them when they clamped down on a pro-Palestinian guy I followed, who happened to be Jewish! They remind me of those Germans in WWII dancing a polka on the other side of a concentration camp fence: see no genocide, hear no genocide, speak no genocide. Ignoring a looming genocide in Gaza, & punishing those who point out Israel's mass murder of 15,000 children, is wrong. #Palestine
@rml Hi, I'm the mod of Functional Café who delivered the "kicking you out" message.
The team of our instance was and is not prepared for the content that you're posting and we're being strained too hard by it by the efforts required to moderate it, even if it means only the basics, i.e. reading the content of the reports and the reported posts. These contain too much aggression and the news are too hard for us.
We had a discussion between keeping the straining content out and closing the instance altogether, and we're choose the former. We're sorry, but there's no energy we're able to spend to perform this sort of duties for a free instance. We're too weak for that.
And, since we haven't made this explicit enough in my previous post that I sent in private, we're fine with keeping your posts and a link to the new account, we just want you to move elsewhere where the mod team is better capable of handling the matters you post about.
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