It is hard because unfortunately, lots of these federated websites seem to attract the sort of person who was banned from Reddit... and not being banned from Reddit is a pretty low bar.
Lemmy seems OK, though (and IIRC is actively trying to avoid that fate somehow).
Scott Alexander talked about this six years ago[1]:
> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong commitment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
>If that's the case then what makes rest if the internet as whole any different?
Because it doesn't have the adverse selection problem since it appeals to mainstream audiences. That could be bad as well if your prior userbase was above average, ie. "eternal September"
>Who gets to define what constitutes a scoundrel?
I don't think thats worth discussing. You don't need an exact definition of a "scoundrel" to see why free speech reddit clones tend to attract a certain kind of user base.
It took a quarter of a century from inception to commercialization for mainstream audiences to have to access to the Internet (at least in the United States). Until then it was used by the very same groups of free speechers you take issue with: the cypherpunks, Usenet groupees, technically-inclined social pariahs, waggish college students, anarchists, etc. In short, the contrarians. Of course there is adverse selection if one is looking for remnants of an Internet before or some several years after Eternal September. Mainstream usage does not imply that something is free from scoundrels. The only change is in the kind of scoundrels preferred. Social media (i.e Facebook et al), on both the corporate and consumer sides, is a testament to that.
And I certainly think it's worth discussing what constitues a scoundrel. After all Scott Alexander himself has infamously been regarded as one by mainstream institutions like the New York Times. For him to be quoted as an expert on the subject is painfully ironic.
>It took a quarter of a century from inception to commercialization for mainstream audiences to have to access to the Internet (at least in the United States). Until then it was used by the very same groups of free speechers you take issue with: the cypherpunks, Usenet groupees, technically-inclined social pariahs, waggish college students, anarchists, etc. In short, the contrarians.
I don't think "contrarians" in the early internet are the "scoundrels" that alexander scott was talking about. Specifically, it's possible to be a contrarian but not be that type of contrarian that you get on voat. Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"? Could you get away with spamming racist posts, or would you get shunned/blocked by the community?
>Of course there is adverse selection if one is looking for remnants of an Internet before or some several years after Eternal September. Mainstream usage does not imply that something is free from scoundrels.
It's not free of scoundrels, but they're diluted and moderated to the point that you don't notice them.
> Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"?
The most absolutely illegal stuff was posted. And often as not where one would expect ordinary porn. It was well beyond Wild West, and much more depraved Epstein rape island.
It took quite a few years for reliably legal porn newsgroups to become a thing, and even longer to weed out the criminal image and video groups… if they even did; the web took off before Usenet solved its criminal porn problems.
Anything you can imagine and worse was available on the early Usenet. Absolutely nothing was being done to regulate it.
>> Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"?
Yes. On Usenet you could and still can post anything you want. Even if is/was illegal. Warez, drugs, and other less-then-savory stuff have had whole boards devoted to them.
>>Could you get away with spamming racist posts, or would you get shunned/blocked by the community?
Once again yes. On Usenet, you could get kicked from a particular discussion depending whether an admin thought one was racist, not racist enough, or for any reason at all. However, there was nothing stopping one from making a different account and continuing to use the same board. After all, there wasn't a real name or email requirement a la Facebook back then or even today. Think 4chan or early Reddit but with more academics. That's what Usenet was and, to a more limited extent, so were BBSs.
>>It's not free of scoundrels, but they're diluted and moderated to the point that you don't notice them.
The dilution you speak of is a passive one and never permanent. It just happens to exist because most people are ignorant and uninterested enough to not give to certain types of scoundrels for the time being much serious attention. Their ignorance serves as a buffer against the spread of ideas. But up to a point. That same ignorance breeds naiveté towards seriously considering certain critical issues and leaves them susceptible to manipulation when faced with an issue one "feels" is important, but lacks an internalized explanation for. At a some critical juncture - a word said, a topic raised - the once blissful, sleeping giant of collective ignorance thrusts itself into the tumult armed with nothing by shoddy memes and crackpot ideas peddled by the scoundrels of their choosing. Except those scoundrels don't call themselves "scoundrels". These mainstream-appealing types call themselves "Joe Blow", " just a guy like you", a "clinical expert", a "thinker", a "hard-hitting journalist", etc. Maybe they believe their own drek or maybe they sell their horseshit with knowing impunity. Either way, mainstream audiences are generally less well-equipped (and likely less interested) to actively think through their chosen scoundrels positions, despite the wishful thinking behind the "wisdom of the crowds"-types suggesting otherwise.
On a free speech platform, a la Voat or Usenet, you know what you're getting itself into without any of the pretensions. The value in the content is in digesting the premises and principles behind one's thinking. How close one is to recreating society or its proclaimed values is not the goal or the measure by which one delineates, or should delineate, scoundrels from non-scoundrels. Doing so just breeds stagnation and scoundrels of a different strain: empty-headed, hypocritical pundits.
No, as decentralization merely complicates onboarding users while not really solving anything and creating new problems. The fediverse will still be nice for an alternative social media/blog sphere.
My guess is something will pop up with good UX and rules, that a critical mass moves to. Something akin to lemmy, but centralized.
