I’ve participated in dozens of protests. Protests with political organization can lead to change. Protests without political organization are just yelling at a wall.

Protests !== organizing. Organizing achieves political change. Protest does not. Leftists know how to organize, liberals do not.

What’s the difference between a fascist and an “anarchist” who does everything they can to kneecap the only viable left leaning political party in the US?

Sorry which party is this? Dems are not even a remotely left-leaning party. Joe Biden literally criminalized the rail workers using their legal right to strike.

This is also like a children's picture book-level of understanding of fascism. As if the Dems' policy of 4 more years of the status quo could prevent fascism at all. That has literally never worked as a way to combat fascism.

Also note for folks reading: this user is not from midwest.social, they are from lemmy.ml.

This is really rude tbh, I haven't had any interactions with Hexbear users that would warrant this comparison.

one doesn’t have to go far to find posts of them comment-bombing in groups, trolling en-masse and generally being rude and abusive to other users. there’s a reason many other users are calling for defederation.

The way I heard them explain it is they don't have downvotes, so they're used to replying instead. There's also a higher number of them as they're one of the largest Lemmy instances:

You asked about us. We came out in force to answer you. Why is that surprising or evidence of anything? We don’t have a downvote feature, so we’re used to responding when we disagree. And of course we’re going to defend ourselves.

In that post yesterday I didn't see anybody trolling or really being rude, in fact the top comments were very nice in explaining what was going on and why they thought the way they did.

Do you have some examples of this behavior?

Since she was being sarcastic it means that she is trying to say that Obama wasn't bad (because that's how sarcasm works).

I mean… no? Sarcasm works in multiple ways lol. This is like a children’s picture book-level of understanding of sarcasm.

Yeah mine act like I get shot every time I walk out my front door

Obama’s biggest controversy was the mustard

That's not what she said lol. Sorry as a neurodivergent person I get that this tweet might be hard to read possibly, but she's being sarcastic here. Maybe in poor taste, but it's a joke. She's well-aware of the shit Obama's done and isn't a fan of him.

I didn’t post it because her joke was funny lol

In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away.

Is this a fucking joke

I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.

Mastodon has operated this way for years and it's worked out really well. They're currently at 12 million or 13 million users right now. Read my comment I wrote on it here. Basically all the Nazis flee to the Nazi servers because they can't follow or subscribe to their fellow Nazis or talk about Nazi stuff. So they leave. This makes it safer for users and easier for mods to keep their users safe.

And like... sure, there's drama. People defederate for dumb reasons. But Mastodon accounts are portable and you can hop around from server to server easily. And 99% of the time people don't defederate for no reason.

Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination.

This is often because they are. My old fundamentalist Christian cult I grew up in was incredibly homophobic. They 'looked' like they had beliefs that were discriminatory because they were. You do not get a 'be a bigot free' card because your religion says you are one. You can change your shitty religion (conservative fundamentalist religions have done so tons of times in the past). Minorities cannot change who they are. There are tons of other religious communities that do not discriminate against minorities so that standard is not unreasonable.

Blocking instances actually makes the lives of instance admins a lot easier. It not only reduces a whole chunk of problematic content for you to moderate, but it also encourages Nazis to go to the servers you block instead of yours. Nazis can't subscribe to the subs they want to on your server, and they get banned if they say Nazi shit, so they just leave and go to a Nazi server instead. It's like fly paper for Nazis lol.

As a Mastodon admin with a few thousand users, I rarely see Nazi content that I have to moderate. And that's because when I started I spent an enormous amount of time sifting through every server we federated with and blocking all of the Nazis and all the pedos and all the TERFs. And because I did that at the start, I only get maybe 10 reports a week, none of them are content that would traumatize me (almost always spam), and I also helped the servers that now use my list to do the same.

Blocking instances not only makes it easier for me to do my job, it encourages other admins to not tolerate these kinds of behaviors as well. Because if they don't moderate well, that attracts Nazis, and then we have to limit or ban them because we're volunteers. So everyone just ends up blocking the shittiest servers and moderates their user base well. It's a win/win for everyone.

Nazis are not entitled to access to minorities on my server. TERFs are not entitled to access to trans users on my server. Assholes are not entitled to have access to an audience on my server. There are tons of white supremacists or TERFs or other assholes hosting plenty of other servers where they can go and do that. But I don't want that on servers I host and my users don't want that on servers I host. If you truly believe free speech is such a big fucking deal, then you are welcome to leave and join one of those rotting servers as well. See how fun that is for you and how long it takes for you to come crawling back.