Post · bonfire.cafe

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 5 months ago

"I think the answer isn't somehow, lets just ... silence the people we don't like, and only give voice to the people we do like ... I think that systems that suppress speech like that are not the answer.

I think at the same time, we have to realise that there are people who are using speech, especially inauthentic, coordinated behaviour ... where the goal is not to make counterarguments, the goal is to use speech to silence other people's speech."

@rabble, 2025

https://decentered.co.uk/building-participatory-media-with-evan-henshaw-plath-aka-rabble/

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Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 5 months ago

"But there's also this weird reality where 20-30 years ago everybody on the left were the free speech absolutists. We wanted to democratise speech, and we did. And we empowered everybody to participate in stuff.

Then a bunch of people who we didn't realise were also being silenced by mainstream corporate media, used the tools we were creating, and started saying stuff, and doing stuff. And that ... is super complicated."

@rabble, 2025

https://decentered.co.uk/building-participatory-media-with-evan-henshaw-plath-aka-rabble/

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#FreedomOfExpression

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 5 months ago

@rabble, 2025

https://decentered.co.uk/building-participatory-media-with-evan-henshaw-plath-aka-rabble/

(2/2)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 5 months ago

"A lot of people came off X and went onto BlueSky, and said 'oh this doesn't accord with our values', and I thought that was a huge mistake. Because you've given up the ground, and the good people need to be in the place where people are."

#RobWatson, 2025

https://decentered.co.uk/building-participatory-media-with-evan-henshaw-plath-aka-rabble/

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This comment folds in so many assumptions it would take a long form essay to properly unpack.

#podcasts #Decentered
@decenteredmedia

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 5 months ago

20 years ago similar arguments were being made for appealing to legacy corporate media for coverage, instead of publishing on the web. In both cases, corporate media platforms are being framed as neutral agora, which they are not. They gatekeep who gets to see what, in both explicit and covert ways.

Because of the power of network effects, the "ground" is the people, not the platform. Everyone who moves from a corporate platform to a community-centric network makes it easier to do.

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Sigismund Ninja

@sigismundninja@mastodon.nu replied · 5 months ago

@strypey I believe it's most productive to postulate that free speech has no intrinsic value. It's a mean toward a greater good. A society probably wants to maximize free speech to improve its rational decision-making. Free speech absolutism implies that you quickly get stuck in a degenerative and noisy local minimum. What you want is to maximize the signal to noise ratio, signal entropy and distributed coherent knowledge over time.

...

Sigismund Ninja

@sigismundninja@mastodon.nu replied · 5 months ago

@strypey this implies protocols, moderation and boosting of minority voices. Which is pretty much common sense and how we usually operate in daily life.

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