Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

‘ex-4chan users’ isn’t really an important criteria, especially if you’re including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. “Ex-” usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.

But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.

America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that’s not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.

The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it’s important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond “Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.”, especially if you’re on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.

Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.

https://inv.us.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=MCTlcJMCSpM

How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.

Reminder to be aware of darknet mirrors like I2P sites and Tor .onion services - domains aren’t controlled by a company so they can’t just be taken down by a legal request.

For z-lib, the Wikipedia article lists their .onion and I2P addresses (I haven’t verified them so check before bookmarking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

Communities defend communities.

Swearing to protect is vapid symbolism that anyone can feign with ease, and the laws are rarely decided by the people subject to them. The fact that so many people trust state police is amazing once we take a step back and analyse it.

Interesting case studies include real places that evicted police and politicians.

Claim ignorance? How? “I didn’t learn in school that neo-nazism and abusing children is frowned upon in society” ?

“Power corrupts”, sure, but it doesn’t turn people into nazi and child abuse fanatics. Power provides the means.

Unrelated partial list.

It could be possible for a third-party site to aggregate the posts from each instance’s AMA communities. I wouldn’t be too hard to code, just checking the API of each site and adding links to the new posts.

The devs have far bigger priorities but this can (and should) be made by someone else.

The lack of forced monetization is why I joined Lemmy. It’s a feature.

If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.

I just want to say the maintainer who wrote that appears to have handled this gracefully. It gives me hope.

They’ve made a transparent public announcement, making it clear what we should and shouldn’t expect from them, and how we should handle it. They understand the FOSS paradigm (no, I correct myself, the digital paradigm) and have given their blessings for the community to do what they do best. I’d guess the smart thing to do is play along with the cease notice to avoid consequences, go underground and make YouTube play whack-a-mole with sock-puppets and hostile jurisdictions.

Cut off one head and three shall take its place. Wind in your back lads, wherever you go.