Nice chatting with you.
I'll close by thanking you for providing this instance.
It's great that there's a place that a) allows unfettered access to the entire Fediverse; b) hasn't descended into complete chaos because of it; and c) most surprisingly of all, hasn't been widely blocked due to it.
It seems to me that by far the most important thing about Mastodon is now sadly overlooked in this age of censorship and general intolerance of open discussion; and that ironically even includes the network's creator.
Thanks for providing a safe haven for the open exchange of ideas. Only in such an environment can ideas flourish and the human race truly progress.
For that reason, I feel very strongly about free speech, and I consider the worst excesses of free speech a very small price to pay for its benefits. The alternative is unthinkable. This seems to be an unpopular opinion nowadays.
Have a good day and thanks for the crossposting tip.
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@ianmacd We put a lot of effort into being respectful well behaved members of the wider community. So I'm glad that can be seen.
We actually had a rather unique history with our stance as free speech. Early on when GAB came ont he scene is when instances started to push other instances to defederate with anyone they didnt like. As such you get a few instances with massive block lists of pretty much any instance that federates with any instance they block, and then any instance that federates with them, ad nauseum. At the time we were stuck to make a decision, get cut off from short sighted but well intentioned instances, or start censoring our users view of the fediverse. So it entered a debate here in our very early days as an instance.
It turned out that the LGBT community were actually the ones that convinced me of a free speech stance, which is ironic as many of the LGBT instances are the ones that ultimately took a block-first mentality. What had happened is LGBT servers were very heavily blocking instances that exhibited anything remotely resembling intolerance. This left very few LGBT friendly instances that were free speech and as a result we had a sort of exodus of LGBT scholars joining QOTO (and boosting our early numbers).
It turns out the LGBT community had a strong voice when we opened the discussion up to the community. Many of them explained to use that they came here because they monitored hate-speech accounts on GAB and other places to identify doxing within their community and other threats and warn the members of their community. So they felt their safety was at risk on other servers, they also didnt feel safe on other free speech instances since hate was common on those servers and didnt want to be on a hate speech instance. So they urged us to not block other instances, and ultimately the community agreed and we remain free-speech.
It is also why we implemented features like subscriptions, specifically for the LGBT communities safety and others in a similar position as them. This way they can get alerts of the public posts from threatening accounts they monitor without actually needing to follow the account and alerting the account that they are following them.
Its just really sad how some in the LGBT community have ultimately used that against us, that we went out of our way to take the heat for the LGBT community at the time only to see a small number of people use our decision as a weapon against us. Thankfully its a small minority of servers today, but still it was sad to see.
For what its worth QOTO is one of the most heavily connected servers in the fediverse. Last I checked we were in the top 10 of english speaking servers.
@freemo That's great. You've managed to strike a very delicate balance in a philosophical minefield that is constantly contracting.
And how ironic that the safety of the LGBT community was threatened not by maintaining a link with the perceived threat, but by breaking that very link and becoming unable to keep a spotlight shone on it.
'Know thy enemy' didn't become an adage for nothing.
This is the myopia of censorship, and it's as applicable to the digital world as it's ever been to the corporeal.
You can ban speech, but speech is merely the verbal expression of thought; and you simply cannot eradicate thought, no matter how repugnant you might find the doctrines it sometimes espouses. All you achieve is driving it from scrutiny into the shadows, where it festers and grows with ever greater resentment.
More importantly, you drive a stake through the heart of constructive discourse, too; which is why it's tragic to witness the succumbing of so many academic institutions in the West to the practice of creating safe spaces, where ideas can and must go unchallenged, and anyone foolhardy enough to issue such a challenge is punished by being summarily deplatformed.
This is how the USSR used to operate, and for reasons I will never understand and would not even believe possible, had I not witnessed the emergence of the phenomenon first-hand, this is what many people in the West now also aspire to: a culture in which free thought is suppressed, either semi-voluntarily via peer pressure, or under direct duress.
The town square has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, a process catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Public discussion no longer takes place in open spaces, be they physical or virtual, but has slowly moved, one brick at a time, behind the walled gardens of big tech.
And people have foolishly done it to themselves over the last 15 to 20 years, shifting all of their content away from the public digital space onto platforms that require an account to read it, and/or editorial control over it before they will print it.
A few powerful companies in Silicon Valley are now very much the arbiters of free speech, with no government or even industry oversight to prevent the abuse of that power. And these are not neutral entities, but corporations with a very well-defined agenda run by demagogues with delusions of grandeur.
Most people have yet to even wake up and realise just how much freedom they have surrendered.
I always imagined that people would go screaming into the night when Big Brother finally came to assert total control over their lives. Never did I consider the possibility that they would surrender without a fight in exchange for the illusion of a free lunch. A Faustian bargain if ever there was one.
Anyway, I'll rant all night if I build up a head of steam, so I'd better quit here and save the rest for an endless diatribe of toots some other day.
@ianmacd I have no problem with safe spaces, so long as they are what they should be, an isolated space. When you try to make the world a safe place all you wind up doing is causing the hate to exist only in echo chambers where it thrives unchallenged.
I agree with most of what you said and its a scary and sad pattern.