The admin team* that I'm talking about is lemmy.ml's. It would be within its* moral rights as instance owners to say "we don't want criticism against the Russian Federation or the PRC here", but that is not what it's doing - instead it removes any sort of criticism against either, under allegations that it violates rule 1 (no bigotry), leading others to believe that the content was xenophobic, and that's what makes it witch hunting.

*note: I'm treating "the admin team" as a single entity to avoid naming the ones doing it.

The definition of witch hunting that I use is a bit more inclusive - it's "publicly accusing one or more people of belonging to a morally reprehensible group, without having grounds to do so". It doesn't require an organised campaign. That's relevant when it comes to the CP talk.

i.e. it seemed to me to be less of a “witch hunt” than a “self-policing” so that external authorities did not need to step in and pass regulations (or enforce existing ones) to shut down Fediverse servers, treating them like pirate seeding bays or such.

It's self-policing when it's targetting actual CP and their spreaders, like the guys in LW did. That's the right thing to do.

It starts being what I call witch hunt when pointing fingers at distasteful but not CP content, saying that "this is pedo shit". I've seen the later happening here a few times, not just from lemmy.ml admins but from other users.

(Now thinking, most of those users were from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. Perhaps it's a fair point that most witch hunting comes from LG/HB? I'm a bit biased towards both as a communist, perhaps I'm being unfairly lenient towards them.)

So it's closer to what you said about people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. Being nervous is IMO understandable; accusing people is not.

That said, being a fairly centrist person myself, I tend to get reactions FAR more often from far-right-wingers accusing me of not being far-right-wing enough than from left-wingers doing similarly.

Ah, the alt right bloody loves some witch hunt, too. For them everyone is a degenerate woke bluepilled whatever, unless you're actively spamming slurs. And it's kind of funny, because they talk all the time about how the left is "virtue signalling", but they do something similar all the time, to avoid being witch hunted by their peers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Oh no, I must have misremembered the details about lemmy.ml and conflated the original developers of Lemmy as being in charge of lemmygrad, not lemmy.ml? (or perhaps it was... both? or something like that?) Thank you for setting me straight. Yes I am with you there... now:-).

Something that sets LG and HB apart from other places is not merely what was said, but the manner in which things are handled. e.g. I say one thing that merely doesn't support their world-view hard enough and even WEEKS later they barage my account endlessly with continued mockery. More importantly, not just once but as a firmly established pattern of behavior. That is just not how I want to spend my time, on the internet or irl. It is LEAGUES apart from this civil discussion format that you and I are having - each willing to bend, not so much to each other but to whatever the Truth happens to be. If I am correct (hey, even a stopped watch...), or if you are, or neither, or both - it is that chasing after TRUTH that concerns us, and unites us in our shared mission.

Neither admiration nor equality are mandatory there (e.g. a hypothetical discussion between an adult moderator and a child first-time lemmy-er), but respect is, being foundational to the communication process. B/c otherwise what good is "tRuTh" when it cannot be conveyed, due to corruption introduced by the message delivery method? i.e. a truthful message is no longer truthful when it becomes corrupted, either by the delivery method or by the deliver-er (the latter goes off on a tangent that could get quite a bit deeper but the short version being that the message thus proferred for deliver is no longer the real message - e.g. if the truth were 1+1=2 but the sender caused the addition of +1 to each element, then 2+2=3 is no longer an accurate representation of the TRUE original statement; nor even would 1+1+1=2+1, b/c while that one preserves the mathematical integrity, it still differs in other ways e.g. it would take more resources to store, or brush strokes and paint supplies to write down if it were intended to be represented in such a manner, etc.).

Getting back to how this relates to LG and HB: their lack of respectful forms of communication makes them "wrong", regardless of whether the message they were originally aiming to convey was correct or not. I do not care if you are a communist, anarchist, freedumb-loving bald-eagle slaying Americunt or whatever, you are respectful to people, and I love that about you. In case you are interested, imho they do NOT seem like "your people". That said, I acknowledge that I am VERY biased myself here, b/c I have judged them by the worst set of interactions that I have had with them... and yet, is that not mostly a fair way to do things? (someone who kills is usually called a "murderer", someone who steals is usually a "thief", and so on) I am aware ofc that not every single person on them is "that" way, nor do I particularly care b/c I had a problem with some large-ish fraction of their userbase, which I solved by blocking them, and now I am happily enjoying the Fediverse, whereas before I was not happy anytime I forgot and accidentally responded even to what may seem like an innocuous meme post on it. If that one simple action (well, that pair of blocks) can dramatically improve my Fediverse experience, then I am happy to think of LG and HB as "a place where people tend to be disrespectful" (surely not all, but enough of them that they warrant that description?). And unless someone convinces me otherwise, I am also happy to share that opinion, in case it may help others to similarly improve their own Fediverse experiences.

Likewise, it seems that you are suggesting that even if in a far more limited scope, lemmy.ml has a lot of similarities. To confirm your suspicion: yes I was thinking about the LW handling of the actual CP. And I guess I do not know about the lemmy.ml handling of it - though I would draw a distinction between some commenter filing a report saying "this is pedo shit" vs. an actual admin implementing a policy, whether written and agreed to in advance aka above-board or unwritten and enacted on the sly. Still, if enough of them do that then... yes, I see that you are correct, that's "witch-hunting".

Though I was pointing out how Reddit at-large was LEGENDARY for doing that, though typically more in the most popular (and therefore largest) centralized subs, while the smaller & more niche subs were able to get away from all of that and at least have a chance at a better mod team. At least, if they did not rock the boat too awfully hard during the protests that went on.

About right-wingers: every accusation is a confession, yeah. Though left-wingers do have a different set of issues, e.g. the ivory tower / walled-garden approach that aims to be "correct" even while not actually being thus, i.e. this witch-hunting that we are discussing now. Between the two though, the Left vs. Right, they do not love witch-hunging "equally": I would say that the Right uses that tactic far more often, at least in the sense that there are some few Leftists who do not use it, where I have yet to see a Rightist that does not.

So I think my point might be phrased as saying that it might not be fully fair to say that the Fediverse has a witch-hunt problem that is in excess of what was observed on Reddit. Though you have convinced me that it is significantly larger than I thought here, while I hope that in turn I have convinced you that it is also possibly less extensive that you thought here (being more concentrated in a few areas rather than baked in throughout the entire Fediverse) but more to the point that Reddit was far more so. Especially nowadays, where the mods are extremely often the literal scabs at best and at worst the very people who were banned from those subs previously for refusing to play nice, and who now enjoy lording their power over others in the same way that they choose to view how others previously treated them, i.e. unfairly, capriciously, etc.