Public service message; 'my way or the highway' is not how horizontal community-building works. It's how authoritarianism works.
You can exclude anyone who doesn't immediately agree with you about everything, instead of maintaining open dialogue and seeking consensus. That's one way of using freedom of association. But sooner or later, you'll find yourself in an ideologically pure community of one.
Everyone wants to have some control over their own experience, whether in-person or online. But some people seem to implicitly believe they have to control *everyone's* experience to control their own experience, and therefore have a right to. I don't agree.
The whole point of the #fediverse, as I understand it, is that it allows us to exercise control over our own experience, *without* having to suppress or curate for the whole network. So many overlapping platform experiences can co-exist.
One of the most corrosive things about social media culture is the way it actively discourages relationship building. This is primarily a social problem, not a technical problem, and I observe it in the fediverse too.
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Because anyone we interact with could be a Bad Actor, out to waste our time at best, we are incentivised to shoot first and ask questions later. Muting and Blocking over even the smallest disagreements, in case they're the tip of an iceberg of trolling, sealioning, and dogpiling.
So we learn that we may be Muted or Blocked at any time, no matter how polite we are, even by people we've had friendly interactions with before. What reason do we have to put effort into building relationships?
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Any healthy system is going to be a set of constraints and freedoms layered over each other. The limits which define a given community are often seen as overbearing to people who disagree with those standards.
I'd only use the word "authoritarian" when a group of people set limits on others that are meant to disenfranchise them. This is distinct from "normal" constraint and standard setting.
Exactly. Platforms are effectively a single community and must have a unified set of standards. Which is absurd when that community includes millions of people from different real world communities, each with their own culture and norms.
The fediverse allows each community to maintain their own norms, and filter out stuff that clashes, without policing the whole.
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
