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How the Liberal Left created the Conservative Right and extremism in the fediverse:
As someone who cares greatly about equality, and recognizes minorities and underprivileged groups deal with some unique and difficult struggles I realize the title to this post would seem a bit inflammatory. But that is not my intention, my intention is to address a very real problem.
As anyone on the fediverse knows there are generally two major groups of instances. Those that wont ban anything of any kind, no rules it's the wild west (red instances). Then there are those that ban anyone who shares any opinion that disagrees with their politics, even if you criticise both the left and the right in the same breath you will likely quickly find the instance or yourself banned.
However the unfortunate consequence of this pattern of behavior is to promote ever increasing support for red instances and to drive grey instances (instances that take a middle ground) into being red instances. Should be obvious why...
You basically have a spectrum of behavior with red on one side and blue on the other. With everyone crammed into the 0.1% of either end of this spectrum that means most new instances will start off, most likely, somewhere in the grey area, even if their just marginally shy of being red or blue in its full extreme.
The experience for an admin of such an instance is to quickly be overwhelmed with people from blue instances blocking and banning for things like criticising a democratic politician or something rather minor. By the end of the first few months a blue/left leaning instance will quickly find itself on dozens of suspend or ban instances as a result and find they only have a voice among the 99% red instances and the 1% grey instances out there.
Since this means they naturally wont have a voice among blue instances, and most people are on social media because they want to be social, this means their only incentive is to appeal to red instances (since that's where all their boosts and likes come from). Along with building animosity for how blue instances treat them and with the acceptance of red instances you will find all the incentive for the instances to move to be an extremist red instance with extremist no-rule policies quickly develop.
As such we see exactly what we are seeing now on the fediverse, an ever increasing number of red instances very quickly overwhelming and overtaking the blue instances.
Of course this is made worse by the fact that those ont he blue instances can only see other blue instances. so they will be under the mistaken impression that the red instances don't exist and that the blue instances are thriving and growing and dominating over the red instances. This ignorance just ensures the red instances grow unchecked and unchallenged.
As someone who's personal policy is anti-extremism, and with this pattern being one that generates extremism it is very VERY concerning to me.
@Alonealastalovedalongthe Well the best place to get those numbers (the place I get them from) is looking at the user statistics and growth rate across the red instances.
When i look across the user growth rate charts for various red instances I notice a very marked increase in users. You also notice during periods of campaign to block red instances the user count rate on those increases in the time that follows.
I agree that is hardly scientific, but there are no scientific papers obviously to argue either side on this. As such its the best I have to draw my conclusions from.
If these are things that you observe then I encourage you to collect the statistics and indicators you see into a form that can show others the pattern you see.
The narrative that the left is full of reactionary people that won't listen to different opinions is a classic case of people that have that exact problem trying to relabel the left with it to avoid criticism of themselves.
I'm not saying this is why you are saying these things but it is a misleading narrative.
@Alonealastalovedalongthe As for making a case, I agree, it might be useful. But I have limited time. I am a Research scientist with more than enough papers in my quota already.
Moreover I would suspect it will fall on deaf ears. The blue instances guilty of the behavior arent likely to be receptive to such evidence. In fact they would likely twist it into evidence of me being right leaning (which i am not) and even go so far as to use it against me as is their MO.
