Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)
I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.
What the HECK man?
There’s an underlying problem IMO with all Fediverse software and instances, in that because it’s made available for free, people get entitled, moderators and admins are obligated to sort of do volunteer work on behalf of people who haven’t earned it in order for any of the thing to work, which naturally leads to a inexhaustible wellspring of negative energy because the whole thing isn’t right.
I saw the posts of Ruud asking for people to basically interview for a part time admin position and do a job which for skills and time investment is worth from $50k/yr-$200k/yr (calibrating for the fact that it’s “only” 5-10 hours per week), and all I could think was whoa no no no this isn’t the way. Not saying there’s anything wrong with people volunteering their time to make available this great thing, but I think undervaluing them when they decide to do that is almost inevitable, which has follow-on effects that manifest in all kinds of ways and lead to things not being the way they should be. With this comment as a prime example.
What on earth is hostile about this post in any way?
Yep.
There are two big end-user security decisions that are totally mystifying to me about Lemmy. One is automatically embedding images in comments without rehosting the images, and the other is failing to warn people that their upvotes and downvotes are not actually private.
I’m not trying to sit in judgement of someone who’s writing free software but to me those are both negligent software design from an end-user privacy perspective.
Of note about this is that image links in comments aren’t rehosted by Lemmy. That means it would be possible to flood a community with images hosted by a friendly or compromised server, and gather a lot of information about who was reading that community (how many people, and all their IP address and browser fingerprint information, to start with) by what image requests were coming in kicked off by people seeing your spam.
I didn’t look at the image spam in detail, but if I’m remembering right the little bit of it I looked at, it had images hosted by lemmygrad.ml (which makes sense) and czchan.org (which makes less sense). It could be that after uploading the first two images to Lemmygrad they realized they could just type the Markdown for the original hosting source for the remaining three, of course.
It would also be possible to use this type of flood posting as a smokescreen for a more targeted plan of sending malware-infected images, or more specifically targeted let’s-track-who-requests-this-image-file images, to a more limited set of recipients.
Just my paranoid thoughts on the situation.
Not a map, but things I’ve seen on the roads in Boston:
Hopefully this time they’ll stay there.
Are you arguing against private entities having editorial freedom? Should private entities not be in charge of their own publications and platforms?
Yes, absolutely. Lemmy.world should be able to ban Nazis if they want to, as should Substack. Personally, I think it would be better in some cases if people didn’t. Although, there’s so much overlap between Nazis and general-toxic-behavior users that I wouldn’t really fault them for banning Nazis outright even if they theoretically supported the Nazis’ right to free speech.
Notably though, I think Substack should also be free to not ban Nazis, and no one should give them shit for it. In particular, they definitely shouldn’t be talking about trying to get their Stripe account cancelled, or pressuring their advertisers, as I’ve seen other posters here advocate for (although I think the thing about advertisers is just a result of pure confusion on the poster’s part about how Substack even makes income).
In this particular case, I think allowing the Nazis to speak is the “right answer,” so I definitely don’t advocate for interfering in anything Substack wants to do with their private servers. But no, I also don’t think anyone who doesn’t want to host Nazis should have to, and it’s a pretty good and reasonable question.
As I said to someone else, there is presumably a line that’s too much to cross. Is it “live stream of grinding up live babies and puppies and snorting them”? If there is no line, I don’t even know where to begin.
Let me say it this way: If what you’re doing or saying would be illegal, even if you weren’t a Nazi, it should be illegal. It shouldn’t suddenly become illegal to say if you’re wearing a Nazi uniform. Threatening violence? Illegal. Threatening violence as part of your Nazi political platform? Illegal. Wearing a Nazi uniform, saying that white people are superior and the holocaust didn’t happen? Legal as long as you’re not doing some other illegal thing, even though historically that’s adjacent to clearly-illegal behavior.
I realize there can be a good faith difference of opinion on that, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. If it’s illegal to wear a Nazi uniform, or platforms kick you off for wearing one, then it can be illegal to wear a BLM shirt, and platforms can kick you off for saying #blacklivesmatter. Neither is acceptable. To me.
Probably the closest I can come to agreeing with you is on something like Patriot Front. Technically, is it legal to gather up and march around cities in threatening fashion, with the implication that you’ll attack anyone who tries to stop you? Sure. Is it dangerous? Fuck yes. Should it be legal? Um… maybe. I don’t know. Am I happy that people attacked them and chased them out of Philadelphia, even though attacking them was interfering with their free speech? Yes. I put that in a much more dangerous category than someone hosting a web site that says the holocaust didn’t happen.
Platforms taking some responsibility for what they allow would go a long way without requiring a heavy handed government solution. Substack could just say “nah, we’re not letting nazis post stuff.”
Would it go a long way, though?
Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have been trying to take responsibility for antivax stuff and election denialism for years now, and banned it in some cases and tried to limit its reach with simple blacklisting. Has that approach worked?
Nazi stuff is unpopular because it’s abhorrent and people can see that when they read it. I genuinely don’t think that allowing Nazi speech on Substack is a step towards wider acceptance of Naziism. I don’t think there are all these people who might have been Nazis but they’re prevented by not being able to read it on Substack. I do think allowing Nazi stuff on Substack would be a step towards exposing the wider community to the actual reality of Naziism, and exposing the Nazis to a community which can openly disagree with them instead of quarantining them in a place where they can only talk to each other.
I do think responsibility by the platforms is an important thing. I talked about that in terms of combatting organized disinformation, which is usually a lot more sophisticated and a lot more subtle than Nazi newsletters. I just don’t think banning the content is a good answer. Also, I suspect that the same people who want the Nazis off Substack also want lots of other non-Nazi content to be “forbidden” in the same way that, e.g. Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan should be “forbidden” from their chosen platforms. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s part of why I make a big deal about the Nazi content.
I’m aware of how the first amendment applies, yes. I agree with the spirit of it in addition to the letter, though. You’re free to delete the one sentence where I talked about founding fathers, and respond to the whole rest of my message which doesn’t reference them or government censorship in any way.
(Edit: Actually, I wasn’t super explicit about it, but in the whole final paragraph I was thinking partly of government regulation to combat misinformation. That is, in part, what I meant by “organized opposition.” So, I spent time in my message referring to what the government should do to limit harmful internet content, and no time at all talking about what it shouldn’t do. I did throw in a passing reference to founding fathers, in reference to the spirit that I think should inform private companies who are non-governmental gatekeepers of content.)
That you broadly agree with everything you see on a website funded by Nazis, that doesn’t speak highly of you.
This thing I’m broadly agreeing with, in addition to being a viewpoint of this one article which you’ve managed to construct a connection back to some Nazis from, is also a viewpoint of the list of cosigners on this essay, which includes Edward Snowden and Richard Dawkins. Does that all of a sudden change your viewpoint on whether this is a valid thing for me to agree with? If, all of a sudden, some “good people” are saying it instead of some “bad people”?
I also agree with Winston Churchill on some things, even though he was a colonizing racist. I agree with some things Thomas Jefferson said, even though he was a literal slaveowner, which is arguably a much worse thing to be than an internet Nazi. Yes. I evaluate things on the merits, not on who agrees or disagrees with me. I’m not sold on the connection between “this essay” -> “the editors of Reason” -> “the Koch brothers giving it funding” -> “Nazis” meaning I’m directly agreeing with Nazis if I agree with this essay. But the big point is, I mostly just don’t care who said it when evaluating whether it’s true.
To me, it sounds like you’re so attached to saying viewpoints are good or bad depending on the people who said them that I’m not going to talk you out of it. Best of luck with it then, I guess.
Also, I said nothing about banning speech. I have been talking about not monetizing Nazis this entire time. Do not lie and put words in my mouth.
If you’re only advocating for “demonetizing,” allowing the Nazis to remain on Substack but not get subscription revenue, my feeling on that is pretty much the same. The platform shouldn’t be in the business of rewarding or punishing people depending on whether they agree with the viewpoint. That should be up to the person reading.
It wasn’t a deliberate lie; I just assumed you wanted to ban them, but I’m happy to talk about it in terms of demonetizing instead. I apologize if I was misconstruing anything. I gave a quick stalk to your profile just now and you did say “If you do not support removing Nazis from the public sphere, you aren’t necessarily a Nazi. But you do support Nazis,” which some people could construe as advocating for banning them.
Honestly? I didn’t read the Reason.com article. Someone else linked to it, I skimmed it and agreed with parts of the take that I saw, and threw a link in there as sort of an expansion of what I was saying so I wouldn’t have to keep typing the same types of arguments over and over. I just skimmed it again, from the beginning, and I have to say that broadly I agree with almost everything I see.
Quick work with wc indicates that I’ve typed about 4500 words on this topic within this post. I typed one sentence where I linked to Reason.com, and somehow out of all the thousands of words, it seems like that one sentence is all you want to talk about. I don’t know how many times to say this before it sinks in, but it’s a lot more valid way to discuss with me, if you want to address directly what I’m saying as opposed to pointing to a certain source and saying I’m invalid because I used that source. I can assure you that the Reason.com article had 0% to do with forming these opinions in my mind.
Additionally, I’ll say that this whole model you seem to have in mind, where I read an article on Reason.com and inhaled it like a AI language model and now I’m just parroting whatever I was exposed to, and blame for anything I’m saying attaches to the article because I was powerless to resist anything wrong in it, is kind of telling as to why you want to ban Nazi speech. The thing is, people can use judgement. I do. I read stuff and I consider it critically. I might see something with a swastika and read it, and come away somehow without having become a Nazi. I might agree with something even if I find the source reprehensible personally (as I do the Koch brothers, to whatever extent they were personally involved in this article), or I might just not care what the source is, and evaluate it on its own merits. That’s a good way to do it. Right? That’s why I genuinely just don’t care about the Reason.com article as a thing to argue about, and want to get back to discussing the facts of this actual discussion.
You missed what I’m saying. I’m not funded by Nazis. You took my message and ignored what I was saying in favor of criticizing Reason.com. Fair enough. I was inviting you to continue the conversation, if you have an argument against the content, now that I’ve removed anything that could be construed as “because Reason.com says so” and simply said what I think about it.
Agreed. I actually had come back to this topic specifically to make this exact point, which for all the time I’d spent on this at this point I feel like I hadn’t said.
People are adults, generally speaking. It’s weird to say that you can’t have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it’s saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone “in charge” of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won’t be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint. It’s one the founding fathers were not at all in agreement with.
Personally, I do think that there’s a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that’s a huge problem right now. I don’t actually know what that opposition looks like, and I can definitely see a place for banning certain behaviors (bot accounts, funded troll operations, disguising the source of a message) that people might class as “free speech,” or adding counterbalancing “free speech” in kind to misleading messages (Twitter’s “community notes” are actually a pretty good way of combating it for example). But simply knee-jerking that we have to find the people who are wrong, and ban them, because if we let people say wrong stuff then other people will read it and become wrong, is a very childish way to look at people who consume media on the internet.
“Ad hominem” refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking. It doesn’t mean that your statement about the speaker isn’t factual, or that understanding more about who is speaking might not be relevant – it simply refers to the idea that you should at some point address the content of the message if you’re going to debate it.
In this case, I said something, you ignored the content and instead focused on the fact that I’d linked to something, and criticized the source of the thing I’d linked to. Okay, fair enough, the Koch brothers are Nazis. I don’t like them either. If you want to respond to the content of my message, I’ve now reframed it so the stuff I’m saying is coming directly from me, so that “but Reason.com!” isn’t any longer a way to dismiss it because of who is speaking.
… which is very different from “not allowing sex workers to use their service,” and undermines the whole argument that “well they do do moderation, they just think Nazis are on the ‘ok’ list.” I would have had a totally different response if the person I was responding to had tried to argue that since they don’t allow actual porn, they should also be obligated to ban extreme viewpoints.
Ad hominem. Nice. That said, I get it if you think Reason.com is a sketchy source to try to point to as an argument for anything. I restructured my message, so I’m simply stating my facts and opinions directly, so you can disagree directly if you like, instead of just jeering at the “Reason.com” part of it.
If the fact that I cited “Reason.com” as an aside is a problem, but it’s not a problem the person I was replying to was calmly stating something that was highly relevant to the argument that wasn’t actually true… you might be only concerned with whether something agrees with your biases, not whether it’s accurate. Does that not seem like a problem to you?
Hm. Fair enough. The core complaint I have with banning Nazis from being able to speak, has nothing to do with which way the money is flowing. And I fixed “your” to be “the”; I just hadn’t noticed you weren’t the person I was talking with before.
This might blow your mind a little bit: depilatform them. Hatespeech is hatescppech, a call to violence is a call to violence. Neither is protected by your first amendment, and both should be completely and utterly illegal.
A lot of the thinking on things like free speech by the founding fathers was that it wasn’t like a “grant” of something the government is letting you do. It’s an acknowledgement of some simple physical realities of what thinking beings are going to do whether you “let them” or not. Nazis are going to talk to other Nazis. If you come into their Nazi place saying “whoa whoa whoa you can’t say that!”, they’re not going to just suddenly go, oh, my bad, you’re right, we won’t say that anymore. You might hate that the KKK is “allowed to exist” when their whole thing is violence, torture, basically organized evil. But, the government isn’t “allowing them to exist” in the same way it might let someone have a driver’s license. It’s more just that people good or bad are going to do certain things, and the government is acknowledging the reality.
I would actually put some other things in this list, sex work and drugs among them. For pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think as a matter of the fundamentals of law, they should be sort of in a “can’t be illegal” list, because it’s so weird and invasive to people’s liberty to even try.
Germany has had restriction on Nazis for a long time now. And hasn’t had issues with censoring non-nazi speech. So why can’t your country?
The US had robust protections on speech by the KKK and the American Nazi party, before during and after World War 2. In Germany, before and after the war, it’s legal for the government to allow and forbid particular political parties, as they currently do with the Nazis. Fair enough. Which country was it that actually had a holocaust again? Why didn’t the Nazis do it in the US, where they had such robust protections on their ability to speak and organize?
And also, if you allow for Nazi speech, how far do you take it? do you let them draw up plans and organise gangs to hunt down undesirables? Only intervening when the physical violence actually starts?
If you do not work to prevent atrocities, and turn a blind eye to those trying to commit them then you are in fact tacitly complicit in those atrocities.
So you can punish speech advocating for violence. It’s a tricky thing, because people will just speak in code, which is now happening all over the place. (I see that on Facebook – people will say, I can’t really say what I want to have happen, but we all know what the answer is. Things like that.) But yes, if someone says we have to kill the Jews, I think that should be illegal, whether or not they’re a Nazi. Talking to an associate to plan a robbery is illegal, publishing a newsletter planning a new holocaust is illegal. Saying the holocaust is a lie, I think should be legal. Saying Hitler was right, I think should be legal. That’s where I would draw the line.
It sounds – tell me if I’m wrong – like you think that I just don’t care about hate speech, or I don’t see why it might be a problem, or it’s not worth worrying about. Absolutely it’s a problem. On all this urgency you’re expressing, I 100% agree with you. I am saying that banning it makes that problem worse. Basically, my opposition to banning hate speech is because I don’t want it to “win.” The original internet (like Usenet era), the one I talked about way up there in my original comment, didn’t have anywhere near the level of embittered extremism that we see now. I think that’s because everyone was on the same network. Someone could go on and say “Hitler was right” and people pile on to tell that person why they were wrong. But you could say whatever you wanted. It’s like people who go to college and get less racist because they’re thrown into this big multicultural situation. There will still be racist people, yes. But things will be much worse, and people will be a lot less honest with you about their racist views, if the instant some person says something racist the college administation tells them they’re not welcome on campus anymore and they have to find a new society to be a part of that isn’t so multicultural. They get isolated and fester and find like-minded people to fester with. Which is what’s happening now on the internet.
I am sorry for talking so long; this is just important to me. The one last thing I’ll say – one main reason I’m so concerned about this is that I have a feeling that it won’t stop at Nazis; that as soon as Nazis are deplatformed they’ll start coming for the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles on Substack, someone who is far from calling from a holocaust, but just has said something that someone decided isn’t allowed. Literal Nazis tend to call for genuine crimes, and tend to not attract as many followers as the kill-the-Democrats-oho-I-didn’t-mean-it-literally-wink crowd, so they’re easier to deal with. My main concerns are, please don’t try to censor the non-Nazis, and please what the fuck do we do about the new brand of extremists. I can’t literally agree with you that we should deplatform all my Facebook friends who call for violence in coded ways. I won’t claim to know what’s the right thing to do about this new type of propaganda but that doesn’t seem like the answer.
Still 100% possible. Wordpress hosting is cheap and easy. It’s getting harder and harder for that type of site to find a good audience, as the web becomes more and more siloed and the stuff within the silos becomes more tightly interconnected, but some notable people are still doing it. Cory Doctorow comes to mind.
Where out of my message did you get that I was talking like it was harmless opinions? I get it that my tone was casual and I can apologize about that. Let me take it a little more seriously, then:
Let me guess, you’re not the kind of person that the Nazis are extremely keen on putting in a gas chamber?
Because you’re talking like this is just harmless, but unpopular opinions people have. Not a group of people who by definition think they are the master race and people who are “impure” need to be genocides.
I have a decent amount of Jewish ancestry and a Jewish name. I’m not practicing or anything. My parents had a friend who had the numbers tattooed on her arm.
Part of the reason I’m so casual about literal modern Nazis is that the modern threat of extremism isn’t specific to Jewish people. Hispanic people are probably more at risk; under Trump, ICE detention centers became temporarily something that any informed person would describe as for-real concentration camps. I think if it does start to happen in a big way in the US, it will probably start with trans and Hispanic people and continue from there.
But every single one of us, Jewish or LGBT or Hispanic or just Democrat-supporting, is at risk under a second Trump presidency or whatever the next iteration after Trump is. That’s not some abstract “I know your struggle” type of statement; I literally believe that Nazi-type violence and mass incarceration of “the enemy” are on the table according to a much wider swathe of the US populace than official-Nazi supporters.
And honestly I can’t fucking stand spineless cunts like you that think we can’t draw a reasonable line between Nazis calling for the end of entire races and for one of the worst atrocities in thr history of mankind to happen again, and Naom Chomsky. Putting “wrong” in quotation marks as if thinking genocidal racists being wrong is just a matter of opinion. And you have such little regard for the people that suffer at the hand of these scumbags that you think you can play devil’s advocate as a fun little excessive for yourself.
Okay, let me ask you, then. I have Facebook friends who make posts about getting themselves amped up for civil war if “the Democrats” keep it up. I would describe that as an atrocity. Dead is dead. A Jew in a concentration camp is just as dead as a Democrat who got shot by his neighbor because they got radicalized and decided today was the day (which has already happened, it’s just on a tiny scale at this stage).
Most of the way I talk about this issue is colored by that. I do take the threat of extremism seriously, because it’s already alive and well here, and growing. I think that figuring out what to do about the form in which it’s most likely to become a horrifying reality is fairly important. If Jews wind up going into modern-day concentration camps, they won’t be the first. They’ll be an afterthought, long after Trump’s political enemies and big segments of Hispanic (and maybe arab) people have gone in. If you’re serious about the threat to Jewish people and want me to take it seriously (which is fair), can I ask you to be serious about the threat to all the rest of us?
What is your solution to the people who want to write “shoot the Democrats because they stole the election and took away your country”? People who say that every day and platforms that give them voice? My feeling on it is the same as what I said to you about Nazis. But what, according to you, should we do that will work? I am more concerned about that, as a present-day urgent issue, than about “put the Jews into gas chambers” propaganda, although that’s clearly also horrifying.
Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)