So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
Lol at creating a new open source platform with free speech and immediately asking how to eliminate it.
In the older, better days of the internet, “assholes” were just a part of it.
Learn to deal
In the older, better days, we used kill files, and our choice of platform was eventually overrun by spam.
What makes you think this platform has “free speech”? It has a bunch of tools for suppressing or excluding undesirable tools. Most obviously, moderation can be used to remove comments or users from an instance, and federation can be used to remove whole instances from the network.
I value free speech. But not every platform has to support it, and Lemmy explicitly doesn’t - unless people just don’t just those levers.
You can run your own instance or join an instance that tolerates that speech, and federate with other instances that tolerate it. So, the “platform” is not supressing you one bit. Go forth, and be an asshole if you wish.
However, administrators and users on other instances also have the freedom to participate without being forced to listen to assholes ad nauseum. “Free Speech” does not mean “Free (from the consequences of your) Speech” or that other people should be forced to listen to you.
No, assholes need to learn to behave within the context of the instance / community they are posting to or get downvoted / moderated. Ideally they go away to their own instance where they can be assholes to each other and be defederated.