That’s not an accurate way to view Hexbear. Hexbear is very explicitly for Marxists and Anarchists, but the vast majority of users live in areas where those are fringe viewpoints. Hexbear allows people to talk to other like-minded leftists without having to constsntly deal with people hostile to Anarchism and/or Marxism, which is the default in their lives.

A more accurate “bubble” would be instances that uphold ideologies aligned with the status quo in my opinion, as it minimizes exposure to other viewpoints.

I don’t generally say hateful things, so no risk of being censored for that, and I like that my instance doesn’t censor anything that could possibly be considered a slur the way .ml does.

I was originally on .ml and I remember seeing a comment that had a legitimate use of a word that could be considered a slur in another context. I don’t remember the exact scenario, but it was something equivalent to saying “response time retardation” in relation to drunk driving. And “retardation” was censored, which created unnecessary confusion. I’d been thinking of switching instances anyway, and that silly little example is what pushed me over the edge. I guess I’d rather not be cushioned from every word that might be hurtful, especially when doing so can cause confusion.

No hate or disrespect to .ml, by the way - I’m very grateful to Dessalines and crew for creating lemmy and Jerboa, and I respect their right to administer their instance the way they see fit. To me that’s the neat thing about the fediverse - it allows for a “different strokes for different folks” approach. :)

I honestly feel like parasocial friends with DB0 at this point, and he is a really standup person in my opinion. Definitely the kind of intelligent nerd I admire.

Lemmy largely has 3 camps, the Anarchists, the Marxists, and the Liberals, and each instance leans overwhelmingly in one or 2 of those directions. Looking at the number of active users on each instance, at this point it’s fair to say that the liberal camp is probably the largest, as much as I wish that wasn’t true.

That does make for ample radicalization territory, however.

Can’t really speak to specifics. I’ll just say that there are definitely posts on .ml news and commentary communities that go against the typical views of many .ml members, and they are left up by the mods and allowed to be discussed and debated.

Every community has censorship, it’s a spectrum. But that’s what I love about the federation model and FOSS in general. There are always different communities with different focuses and standards, something for everybody. And still we all have the freedom to block content we don’t want to see or support.

I haven’t checked the log, but I get my news from several different sources, Lemmy is only one of them.

Agreed. I appreciate the well-thought and out level headed approach lemm.ee has taken.

Actually, for a moment I was annoyed they wouldn’t defederate with a certain offensive instance. But, now, looking back on it, I think they made the right decision. I appreciate that defederation is an extreme tool that shouldn’t be used lightly.

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That’s a bit of an interesting dillema. Anyone that supports something consistently is doing propaganda, so it’s generally better if people reveal their biases. As for brigading, it’s difficult to tell if there’s just a large group of an ideologically different instance coming across a post in their all feed or of its a concerted effort.

Its the same thing. People are just primed into thinking that censorship is universally bad in every instance.

It’s meaning in abstract is simple, but it’s actual manifestations are usually quite complex. Self-censorship for example: If you self-censor out of fear of a negative social reaction, to what degree is that actually someone else stopping you from talking? Everyone else, or the idea of everyone else? I would say that any view that’s held by a group of people that’s pervasive enough to cause others to calibrate their words towards them, any cultural context strong enough that visitors feel a need to adjust for it, automatically and unconsciously practices censorship.