edgerunneralexis

Sectarianism toward what ideology, out of curiosity? I couldn't wade through their endless text blobs enough to tell

It isn't high effort. It's a bunch of canned "gender critical" arguments that we've all seen a thousand times before combined with arbitrarily dismissing all of the evidence in favor of gender affirming care for kids using specious reasoning and then citing long debunked studies like the "80% desistance rate" one.

Their bias is even more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the first study they cite isn't hosted on any legitimate source of medical science, but on "transgendertrend." That demonstrates that they didn't find their data via PubMed or Google Scholar or anything, they found it by looking for cherry picked medical studies from people with an anti-trans agenda.

It's transphobia and perpetuation of misinformation disguised as a polite conversation. It's the same level of "discourse" as "blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the crime."

Edit: not only is it arbitrary and awfully convenient for cherry-picking purposes to leave out longitudinal studies of mental health, since mental health is what's at stake here, and "objective" measures are susceptible to many confounding variables and often not relevant, and standardized tests of mental health are regularly used to ascertain the efficacy of many procedures related to psychology, there are also studies that use "objective" measures such as the ones he wanted, where applicable. Here's one that's somewhat infamous due to one of the young adults getting a fatal complication from a surgery, but such surgeries are not performed on minors, and are not particularly dangerous, so it's largely irrelevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25201798/. Here's a list of 16 studies on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/political-minds/202201/the-evidence-trans-youth-gender-affirming-medical-care.

Thank you for writing this. I was almost roped into writing an at-length response to the "reasonable" comment, because it's all canned "Gender Critical" arguments I've seen and debunked a thousand times before, but it would've been an incredible amount of effort that would've been wasted because they'd just respond to me with an even longer and more specious comment, or ignore me.

Dude's unironically saying "you'll be back" lmao. Well, it sucks that the intimidation tactic of demonstrating our numbers and solidarity with a short strike didn't work as I originally feared. I said a couple times in the lead up to the strike that only striking for two days instead of indefinitely was ultimately going to be a performative move because it would give them assurance that it would be temporary and so ultimately the scene as a temporary inconvenience at most by Reddit management. That to really make them hurt and to make them scared a sizeable portion of subreddits would have to go dark indefinitely.

Someone pointed out to me that the performativity was kind of the point, because it was just a demonstration of concern and solidarity, and I had hoped that would work as a sort of forewarning of a more serious strike if they didn't listen, but that didn't pan out I guess.

I think the crucial thing that's missing from traditional social media is actual freedom of association, and I think thats the underlying thing that causes all these issues around "free speech." Freedom of association is the natural counterbalancing mechanism for "freedom of speech" in any form, and without the former the latter must either become incredibly toxic and damaging or be suppressed.

One of the interesting things we've lost (up till now) compared to physical, offline communities is that if someone was being a never-ending dick or a sealion, the rest of the community could just start naturally avoiding them and not inviting them of their own individual accord, and over time that would lead to the person being excised from the group — unless there was a reasonably sized contingent of the group that disagreed with that, at which point the two groups would just split, all without totally banishing anyone.

Or you could yourself choose to leave the group and find another one, if they consistently refused to deal with or helped bad actors, while still maintaining access and contact with some people from that group, and the common social setting and contacts you and the group exist in.

In other words, you'd have a natural, gradiated, and horizontal system of social self-policing that could take care of these kinds of things in a distributed manner. There's a natural outlet besides just trying to shut someone down entirely by removing their access to any community in the area at all or trying to shout over them.

These mechanisms are very hard to implement on centralized social media because it is essentially one gigantic social group that you are either fully a part of or fully separated from. Thus any decisions made about who is and isn't part of this social group are made unilaterally for everyone, and there is no room for diversity in norms and expected behavior, because everything is technically this one giant group, so there has to be this centralized compromise set of one size fits all rules. And because of the unilateral and centralized nature of everything, you need a unilateral and centralized decisionmaking procedure, which in practice and up just being faceless top-down moderation either descending to band someone or ignoring people's pleas.

So it ends up being very difficult for social media communities to self-police in a coherent way, because the platforms operate at two coarse-grained a resolution to see those communities, and it's difficult for people to disengage from toxic stuff they don't want to interact with.

This has created all of the problems we see with speech on social media now, where people who want to be dickheads perceive themselves as being oppressed, victims of authoritarian censorship, because community policing has to come centrally from above, instead of happening naturally and horizontally by a bunch of people either telling someone to leave or leaving themselves; meanwhile people who just want to live in peace and share their joy and interests online find themselves with a very little recourse to reliably avoid such dickheads and find places that feel right for them.

Reddit has this problem to less of a degree because it lets you create different smaller subunities of the social network that all have different moderators and different rules, but it's imperfect.

I think the solution to this is partly decentralization and federation, because they allow people to naturally associate and disassociate with one another on a very individual level that more naturally mirrors how communities and social groups work in real life. Communities can form their own rules, norms, and cultures, and push people out in a meanongful way without having to totally banish them from the entire social world, and people can also naturally move between them until they find one that aligns with what they need and their values, with the right degree of openness and closedness to the rest of the Fediverse, without losing contact with everything else and thus avoiding network effects and isolation effects. The fact that instances can de-federate or mute other instances creates this really interesting ability to partially fragment the network without fully fragmenting it so that you can get truly different experiences on different instances.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!

I'm going to miss all the weird niche subreddits I was a part of that will probably never show up here in force because there's just not enough people on Lemmy to begin the formation of such niche subreddits. The amount of users interested in those things on Lemmy will be proportionally smaller compared to the number on Reddit, and so it will make it just that much harder to have flourishing and active communities around those things.