Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I'd rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.

Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they're all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.

Should political extremism, far-left or far-right, be an allowed part of Lemmy’s Fediverse?

by design it literally cannot be "allowed" or "disallowed", it just Is and Can Be a part of the Fediverse. you as an individual have absolutely no control over who uses Lemmy or ActivityPub generally, in the same way Mastodon can't stop a community like Gab from using their software as long as they abide by the guidelines. also, there is a "far-right equivalent of Lemmygrad" (exploding-heads) and you're literally asking the body questions on an instance which defederates from lemmygrad (which many instances also do). this is such a perplexing set of questions in general.

I mean, how scary is the far left? They want to feed too many hungry kids? Make healthcare affordable? Respect basic human rights? It seems disingenuous to compare the left to the right, I mean one side is too nice and the other wants to tear down democracy.

I always laugh at the term "far left" or "left extremism." Like oh no stop it with all the equality and rights. No no anything but those.

You cannot stop someone from downloading a software to open their own instance. What you can do is to block bad actors/cut federation with them. Which is what most instances do with both alt-right/nazi and tankie instances.

I don't understand what argument you're making. I was about to say you're welcome to make your own instance and federate or defederate with whoever you want, but then I noticed you're on beehaw. They already have defederated with lemmygrad. So what's the problem?

Btw, MLs suck but let's not pretend they're the same or as bad as Nazis. That's a false equivalence.

Lemmy is a federated platform run by instance owners. Owners have full power regarding moderating their servers including delegating that power to others. The owners can decide which other owners are censored through defederation. Lemmy, by design, is not free from political struggle. Lemmy handles power better than platforms like Reddit where server ownership is centralized.

Denying crimes against humanity is foul. Owners decide which ideas are promoted and which are denying history through federation with owners. Spaces for denying crimes against humanity will continue to exist. I would like to be in those spaces as a thorn to remind others of their awful ideas and possibly present better ideas.

Under present conditions someone must own the hardware to run the server. The owner cannot reasonably allow all content. Constituents of an instance place trust in the owner to censor in a transparent and responsible manner. Those same constituents can leave an instance for violating trust with regard to censorship. Freedom of association is an important component of Lemmy.

Far right and far left are a spectrum. I describe myself as an anarchist which is considered far left. As an anarchist, I see the fediverse as a possibility space for democratic control and power distribution over horizontally aligned hierarchies. I am excited for the possibilities to end domination heirarchies. My political alignment is tangent to the systems for power established by Lemmy.

Good to define terms for this. Does extreme left mean people who think that a living wage should be a thing? To fox news it does.

Exploding heads is a good example of a far right instance. A lot of folks have defederated from them. The biggest instance, Lemmy.world, just cut ties and they’re furious.

I keep seeing these posts about whether something should be "allowed", and keep asking myself how people could so fundamentally misunderstand the fediverse when I've only been here a month and can see this is a silly question.

How are you going to stop an open source, federated community from having instances where far right or far left stuff happens? You can't. All you can do is decide who you federate with on the instance you own. So join an instance who is careful about its membership and defererates instances that have far right or left activity. That's all you can do.

There is no "king of the fediverse" making decrees about what is/is not allowed.

I'm gonna be annoying and I know it, but I really hate that people equate the far left and the far right. What does the far left want? Destroy capitalism. What does the far right want? Kill all queer people and then some. For some people, the opposite of Nazism is Communism when these barely have anything to do with each other.

The far left can be annoying, sure. But in the end, the vast majority of them are not actively trying to justify mass murder. That's a key difference. Also, one has dramatically more influence then the other. So the question should be:

Should the far right be an allowed part of Lemmy's fediverse?

Which is a misunderstanding of the fediverse I think. We can't forbid them to be anywhere on an open source and defedrated platform. We can however, ask if they should be tolerated? And that's up to the various servers to decide.

Beehaw already has a stance on it, though: No. Hence the recent defederation. And I agree. Fuck Nazis.

Yes, but no one is obligated to federate their shit, or host their shit.

The premise is that it’s up to the admins of each instance to choose. Inherently in the design, nothing is globally allowed or not. And the less-preferable ideas will appear to fewer people because they will be defederated more often.

Fwiw, lemmygrad is defederated from many instances.

Do not tolerate the intolerant!

We should tolerate every ideology and political flavour as long as its supporters are not actively attacking or suppressing other views and especially targeting vulnerable people. The goal should be to create a welcoming place of free speech for all and this requires to eliminate those who do not support this goal or actively work against it - namely fascists (and that includes more than just the old and alt right).

Anti-fascism ist necessary action against those that claim freedom of speech but abuse it for ideological warfare with the ultimate goal of abolition of free speech.

Fuck the far right in all venues and platforms.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It's quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That's the whole point. There's no centralized server where someone can decide "Oh, we're just gonna prevent this person's physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet".

If there were, it'd be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don't moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.

The problem isn't political extremism in either of those cases, the problem is authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is just bad, no matter who does it. As others have stated, there is indeed no king of the fediverse.

The wonder of a federated system. Is you or anyone else can set up an instance that is dedicated to open political debate.

But no one can force you to do so.

The issue is to encourage the current right wing to join, you will need to allow prejudice and hate. Because tha is what the far right has turned into. At that point no one else can or should be forced to allow your instance to be federated to them.

Most instances have no objection to fiscal right wing politics. They just ban the hate. If right wing supporters are unable or unwilling to debate in that environment. I have no desire or ability to force instance owners to accept them.

If you explicitly define what far-left and far-right means, you could probably have a straightforward answer. You mention holodomor skepticism and holocaust skepticism as some kind of far-left and far-right examples (unless I am misreading your comment), but I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR, but I am not at all sure. Maybe my internet experience is in some kind of enclave composed of SF literature discussions, 8-bit computers and King of the Hill clips, but I really don't run across holodomor skepticism at all.

Of course, I know what holocaust skepticism is (the denial that millions of Jews [and a whole bunch of gays and Christians and Roma peoples) were systematically killed by the German regime during WW2, as directed by Hitler), but that's only because the types of people who would embrace (or worse) holocaust skepticism are feeling more emboldened by the current political climate.

Personally, I define far-left and far-right as being 'armed militants' and/or 'large groups of people calling for the eradication of one or more types of people.' 'Types of people', in this case, means 'people who are born with a certain characteristic that is not changeable, such as race or sexuality' Currently, we have armed militants protesting libraries (libraries, of all places!) but I have yet to see an armed militant demanding government-funded healthcare or seizing the means of production. Therefore, you will have to forgive me if I don't buy into the 'both sides' equivalence that your post requires the reader to hold.

When the far-left becomes as bad as the far-right, we can (and should!) talk. Until then, miss me with that shit.

But lemmygrad is already defederated by most instances

Isn't Truth Social (Trump's thing) technically part of the fediverse, since it runs on Mastodon? I don't know if they're a far-right equivalent of lemmygrad since I haven't spent time on either but it seems like a fair parallel.

Personally I'm not a fan of eager defederation. I'm skeptical of the benefits of deplatforming and I think that casual use of the banhammer, even if the subjects deserve it, is corrosive to our own ability to think clearly.