I wish there was some more detail in the article. My two initial impressions are ‘how does the power get to Earth?’ and ‘Mr. Burns blocks out the sun’. (Obviously it won’t be that big)

My point is that it’s very different from moving from WhatsApp to Signal, or from reddit to Lemmy.

Let’s imagine on an instance, a community mod started flooding their /c/technology with ads and deleting any posts criticising them. And suppose the admins decide not to step in, saying it’s their community and their right to do that.

How painful would it be for users to go from /c/technology over to /c/tech or /c/[email protected] ? There is a far smaller barrier - it’s basically two clicks on their side to change their comm subscriptions, they don’t risk losing communication with friends or miss out on a larger site’s content feeds, or have to deal with ‘one more app’, they don’t have to learn a new tool, they just use a different community.

absolutely nothing in the Lemmy model protects communities from the admin of the instance where it was created to go full Elon

I’d say the low cost of migration does, especially if user awareness remains high (and since most users are here over complaints of the APIs being restricted, I’d say there’s an above-average awareness). It’s pretty easy to clone a community onto another instance, and it would be trivial for users to migrate too.

No need to imagine. Slavery is conditionally legal in the US, as written in the Thirteenth Amendment.

Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

‘ex-4chan users’ isn’t really an important criteria, especially if you’re including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. “Ex-” usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.

But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.

America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that’s not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.

The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it’s important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond “Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.”, especially if you’re on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.

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How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.

I am quickly fragged by space-aged weaponry, provided I don’t explode from the strange atmosphere. Best case scenario isn’t good, food seemingly doesn’t exist.