- Mod of !anarchism@slrpnk.net posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
- Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
- Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod
Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @mambabasa@slrpnk.net
Anarchy is not equal to “no rules”. That’s anti-anarchy propaganda.
Lemmy in itself is anarchist because each community is allowed to have its own set of rules, and each instances as well.
The point of anarchy is that if you and a group of other people disagree with how someone is handling things, you can exclude them from your group. Of course, this is all in the context of leftist and communist ideologies.
I must have missed that part being key, when I was reading about Kropotkin and the mutualists. I thought it was some other things were mainly “the point.”
It is key. Anarchist theory is supposed to prove that hierarchy is not necessary. Proving that a group of people can manage themselves without one is the point.
I also added in the last sentence in order to include this. Multual aid is a leftist theory. Maybe the misunderstanding stems from this, as I didn’t intend it to mean “that’s the only point of anarchy”, so my bad. I still think it is important though.
It’s so key that Kropotkin said you need to nominate a leader for each discussion, so that the leader can kick people out if they’re supporting the wrong ideologies. It’s one of the key tenets, and thank you for reinforcing it.
Also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
I’m not really talking about what Kropotkin said. I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic here.
Also literally the first line of your Wikipedia article:
I’m being extremely sarcastic.
I’m saying that proving that hierarchy is not necessary, and a group of people can manage themselves without one, by nominating one person to have ultimate authority over what actions can and can’t be taken within your anarchism group, so that person can make sure it stays anarchist, is a very silly thing to do.
But what I’m trying to point out is that this one person does not have authority over anyone due to the nature of the fediverse. If they did, your post right here would be gone.
If the users that are in the community of the moderator didn’t like how they managed things, they could make their own community. And if they didn’t like that the instance let the community exist for whatever reason, they can change for a better instance. Admittedly it’s hard to do so, but it’s a pretty good model.
They can’t stop users from making their own solar punk meme community.
The word your looking for is Free Association. And yes you are right, it is a key part of anarchism and you are mostly right. I do think moderation isnt being handled in a very anarchist manner, but the ideas of free association are still at play here.
Yeah, but I don’t think authority needs to be inescapable in order to be authority.
If I don’t like the laws of the state of Ohio, I can leave Ohio. That doesn’t mean the cops in Ohio have no authority.
In this case, it’s actually even a little bit sillier than that, because we’re just talking about words. There’s no way to even do any actions. All you can do is say stuff. If people come in and start talking about things, and that’s so destructive to your way of being that you have to wield your authority within that particular domain to eject them from it and stop them from saying those things, what’s that say about your ability to work things out without a hierarchy and get along? How are you going to deal with it in your anarchist community if someone’s playing music too late at night and keeping someone else awake, or saying things at meetings that you don’t think they should be allowed to say? Or even doing something even more destructive, letting their dog loose and it might hurt somebody, something like that? If someone has to default back to putting one person in charge and having them wield ultimate power to keep things in line this early in the process, it doesn’t sound to me like they’re very serious about anarchism.
I’m not trying to be negative or sarcastic about anarchism. I think, on the whole, it’s great. I talked more about it and learned some down in the deep forest of comments. I’m just saying that it sounds to me like !anarchism@slrpnk.net could use a lot more anarchism in its governance.
I think it should be inescapable. At least, the consequences from it should. The modlog is still available, and there is nothing that stops you from creating your own community. If we take the Ohio analogy tho, claiming yourself to be a sovereign citizen won’t stop the police from applying their authority on you. They use violence in order to apply it as well. In Lemmy, creating your community in an instance may not stop an admin, but will stop a moderator. A step further to that would be making your own instance, and I know it’s not perfect, but it’s already way more power to the users and less to the moderators.
I see it more as someone kicking you out of a group. You can ask the others if they disagree and want to form another group with you. If the others agree, they can leave the group, and if not, they’ll stay because they agree with the decision. It’s not a perfect model, but gives way more agency to the user than it does to the moderators/admins. For example, on reddit, if you were banned from a community, you could make your own, but if you were banned from the site, then not much could’ve been done. People also don’t agree with the moderation on ml, so they moved on to .world, db0 or lemm.ee. So far, it works.
I would advise against using the argument of it being “just words”, as it removes the intention behind your words, and can lead to some more right wing talking points (not that you are right wing).
Saying they don’t have authority because fediverse is a very disingenuous thing to say, they do indeed have some amount of authority because they run and control servers. Everyone who runs a server does and they have the capability to limit reach. Being able to start your own community doesn’t mean that others don’t have authority. The biggest servers have the most authority, if Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml wanted to both silence someone their post history would be wiped off the two largest servers entirely, and completely from all the communities they own, even in servers they don’t, as much as you insist it isn’t the case there absolutely is authority in the Fediverse.
If there wasn’t really, hijacking, comandeering, and then kicking people out of their own admin servers would be fair game. It isn’t though and is highly frowned upon, because they have authority over those servers and the slice of the pie, and that means they can silence you. Don’t try and delude people into thinking that isn’t possible, when it absolutely is and is kind of the reason why federation works the way it does. Since historically uncontrollable spaces were a bad idea that attract criminals and bad faith actors.
So I’m not saying it shouldn’t be the way it is, but I am saying it is disingenuous to frame the Fediverse like it is Nostr, because that’s not what it’s like and we don’t want to attract or welcome people who think it is.
What I don’t understand is how could a mod from a community have authority on someone on another community, let alone on an empty community? Like why would authority matter if no one is your subject?And I understand that making an instance is hard an not for everyone, but my hope is that it becomes easier and easier as time goes on.
If I remember, Lemmy is working on making sure comments and post history is exportable if you want to move instances. Having a backup of your account would definitely give even more power to the user IMO.
I never wanted to claim that the fediverse is like nostr. I just don’t consider it to be authoritarian because of the first paragraph.