Controversial - the place to discuss controversial topics

People don't always engage in good faith. Such people are not bringing ideas to the marketplace, they are trying to manipulate people.

In order to really engage with each other, we have to have some common ground on which we can work from. If that base ground is not established, there is no discussion to be had. If I'm trying to talk about how to make grocery stores more efficient, but you're talking about how to get to Jupiter, we can't have a conversation that has any point.

A similar thing can happen at the instance scale.

Defederating for the reasons you said are, by themselves, poor reasons I agree. But sometimes I think they are trying to say they aren't engaging in good faith, or that enough of the basic point of that instance is at odds with the basic point of this instance that defederating makes sense.

It might be cool to be able to individually ignore/block instances so it's on a more individual level

If the instances that want to be a safe space defederate from instances espousing an ideology they can't stand, I don't see the problem. If an LGBTQIA+ instance and a Salafi Muslim instance defederate each other, most of their members are going to be happier even though it might be hard on gay Salafis.

"This generalist instance I am on shouldn't tolerate Salafis and I demand we defederate the Salafi instance tomorrow" sounds the same in outline, but feels very different. It's closer to an attempt to push your enemies out of the public square than an attempt to prevent harassment of your private meeting.

Boycotts are a feature of an "open marketplace"

I think people who feel this is controversial are missing the entire point of federation and should consider going to a platform that doesn't use it.

Nobody is 'mandating [an echo chamber] for everyone else' by defederating from a different instance, as many other instances are open registration. The largest problem here is that, in my opinion, the design is not well suited for overlarge instances such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. We should all be on reasonably small instances that can smoothly choose who to federate/defederate and thus impact only a group of likeminded people. People with differing opinions can then just go to a different instance if they disagree. This is quite a democratic approach to problems like this, as it allows people who feel strongly about these things to 'shop around' for an instance that suits their needs and which will react favourably to further recommendations. If particular instances start hosting particularly disgusting opinions, they'll see a democratic process wherein a large plurality of instances all defederate from them.

In other words, you are seeing it as "defederation allows person X to determine what person Y can read" when in fact it should be "all people who feel the same as X are welcome on server lemmy.x". This problem is perpetuated not by people wanting instances that suit their needs, but by having a few specific very large instances that did not clearly lay out their philosophies (no fault of theirs I think, we're all learning this for the first time). They can no longer adapt with any agility due to a very heterogeneous and large user base.

On another note:

Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

You really should study the lead-up to world war 2 if you think platforming dangerous beliefs is a simple matter of "words will never hurt me". I don't intend this as a 'gotcha' or anything, it's both fascinating and disturbing, and something every human should understand. The argument of 'we should at least let these fringe weirdos say their piece, what harm could it have' is, without exaggeration, how we wound up with ww2.

I've been on the internet for a minute... if you think unmoderated free speech works in a primarily text based medium then I have a bridge in Queens that just popped on the market. Oh look that's a statement, i should defend that right with logically consistent arguments and citations and draw my conclusions from that and oh my God is anyone still reading this?

The most concise reason I have is that respect is a two-way street, and I haven't met a lot of folks online who actually understand what it means to respect an argument. The barrier to entry for me is the ability to think critically, and that involves regulating your own speach and not having to rely on others to do it for you.

So let's see... statement, some bullshit evidence, appeal to critical thinking, one more to go ...

This is a falsifiable and testable theory ... find me a site that promotes this and I'll look and see how long it takes for it to fail my one simple criteria.

Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated?

Yes, it is. We ran this experiment with 8chan already. I consider Frederick Brennans opinion on internet moderation pretty well-tested by reality, unlike the 'free speech absolutists' I meet. Musk is a classic poster boy for that mindset and the instant he was given power his convictions really amounted to 'hide the stuff I don't like, boost the stuff I do'. So I think we should all be suspicious of people who claim this at this point.

8chan exists, as do lots of deeper, darker unmoderated boards. If they are superior, why aren't the majority of people there? Why are they almost universally despised and shamed?

Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

No, humanity lives in reality where thoughts lead to actions and pretending like there's a firewall between the two is unrealistic. 8chan is routinely linked to mass shootings, and NOT JUST IN THE USA

1. Make lemmy stupidly easy to prop up an instance
2. Cap users of any instance to 100

This way, no one instance can bloat up to thousands of users and start making a big island.

Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

Here's the thing though: nobody's mandating it for everyone else. The admin has the final call. If you don't like it, find an instance with an admin that runs things the way you like. If you have the skills and/or money, make your own instance and run it the way you like.

This isn't Reddit/Facebook/Twitter where if you don't like the way things are run, your options are suck it up or cut yourself off from the network. Things are more nuanced here.

All of those arguments are not objective, they're subjective. This means that the idea of invalid/valid is irrelevant. To use an analogy, saying that "I like apples" is an invalid argument is pretty ridiculous, how is "I like/don't like this content" any different? To push that a bit farther, how is "I don't want to associate with these kinds of people, and I don't want to interact with people who find that ok"? This is all personal, subjective, messy stuff.

Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn't censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It's just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy's stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn't censorship either. It's only censorship if he isn't allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.

What it sounds like you want isn't a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B's access, and you don't allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you're actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.

In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that's where it becomes censorship to block person B's access, because then it's a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.

Exploding Heads guy here...

I'd like to say that the Exploding Heads admin, Kapow, is first & foremost anti-censorship. He's going to let anyone post things - there are lines in the sand not to be crossed, but the general belief of Kapow and many of the core contributors is that free speech doesn't hurt anyone.

Kapow is not far right. Many of the EH members are just Libertarians. Another large amount are Trump-type "populist right." Call them fascists, I don't care. It's fine. A rose by any other name... But there aren't any Nazis on Exploding Heads. We banned one just the other day.

The topic here is free speech & the marketplace of ideas and I can tell you that... man changes and grows throughout his life, and that people grow and change more through education, free exchange of ideas, exposure to the truth, than they do through isolation, shame, hatred...

In fact, the quickest way to make an asshole act like an asshole and become incapable of change is to treat him like an asshole.

I think if you are actually pro-peace, you must be pro-liberty, beause you would deny yourself the ability to coerce.

I think if you are actually pro-democracy, you are 100% supportive of free speech, because you would not use coercion and censorship to manufacture consensus and have a stranglehold on society.

I think anyone who believes in any value we can call "progressive" must first believe in the right of the individual to express themselves freely, and they should be secure enough in who they are to allow themselves to be challenged and to be ready to interact in good faith with others.