this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I can see where you're coming from but there is a basic level of conduct that must be upheld for a place to not turn toxic. I don't think that's debatable. You cannot have a positive effect overall if people are just hurling slurs at each other. The same goes for less toxic behaviour to lesser degrees but I think it still applies.
Opinions are a different matter but even those must be kept in check to a degree. You can write a deeply xenophobic comment in a manner that does not go against basic etiquette but that doesn't mean it's something everyone should be exposed to. I do not believe that Xenophobia and other unethical opinions help build a healthy (online) culture.
You make some good points and I think that there should always be an "unfiltered" view available somehow but I also think you're not seeing the biases consuming unfiltered views introduces. There are already more than enough biases out there without the extremes but even just being exposed to extreme content will alter your opinion and the extremes tend to use this effect to their advantage; intentionally creating an image that is massively skewed towards their extreme.
This effect works even if you're fully aware of it which makes it so incredibly dangerous.
I can appreciate and agree that instances with very little blocking are a thing but that should never be the "default" experience IMHO.
The admins of a social media platform the size of lemmy intentionally creating filter bubbles is not something I've seen often. You can fault them for many things but i.e. Reddit (the company, not the community) has for the most part done a really good job at not creating filter bubbles perhaps too good of a job, judging by how long they allowed i.e. the_donald to stay.
I've yet to see an example of this on Lemmy (on the instance level that is) and I don't see how that would ever work given how diverse any given instance in its own is (biased yes but not homogenous).
Plus, all defederation is public. If you wanted to know whether your instance is creating a filter bubble around you, all you need to take a look is /instances and browse the defederated ones.
I agree that a certain level of civility should be maintained through moderation, but in my opinion it is bad for the user agency and individual control to have other people pre select for you before you even had the opportunity to decide for yourself if you want to engage with that type of content, even if they have nothing but good intentions.
Your suggestion of introducing a third, "true" all feed that users could browse sounds like a good compromise. Maybe restrict it to all instances that have application based or closed registrations to protect from the most obvious avenue of harassment.
Though I would like to emphasize again that I have had only very few negative interactions on Lemmy and haven’t observed xenophobia or bigotry as you suggest would immediately take hold.
Granted, occasionally there is someone trying to spam a transphobic meme or something to a couple communities, but that happens even with more strict moderation. A quick report later and the account and post are gone.