That is very interesting point. For me, judgement is “work” and comes at the end, after gathering facts, whereas for some they seem to take shortcuts to rush directly to that part. Proper judgement of matters - as we see in fields such as science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, education (STEM), as well as law, history, especially philosophy (liberal arts) - is difficult and not to be joked around about. So perhaps discussion of such is entirely incompatible with… not quite “the internet” bc that is simply a tool to be used however we please, but rather with “social media” (as you brought up).

Although (even here I cannot allow myself to rush to judgement in order to say that!? 😜) perhaps that is an oversimplification since we all can fall prey to biases in our thinking at some point along our chain of thinking. It is just that some people actually seem to care about that while others not so much; read that as in: not at all. And ofc some think in manners that are diametrically opposed, not as in a 180 reversal but tangential as in truth serves the end of emotional gratification combined with might makes right hence authoritarianism, e.g. “I don’t like what I see and since I have that power I will downvote it” - but not bc it deserves to be thus, and instead bc it feels good to do so.

So now I will judge the ml admin team - although with the major caveats that they are 100% free to do as they please, and that I support large portions of their work as well as the process by which they went about it: they absolutely dared to be the change that they wanted to see in the world, and the highly successful Lemmy is the result of that. Also… it is always much easier to criticize rather than create. All that said, two wrongs do not make a right: discarding some of “Reddit” while keeping other parts of it are not to my tastes, and will lead to Lemmy ultimately being unsuccessful in the Western world. Which they are aware of, and actively okay with: they made Lemmy for themselves, not others. I do not entirely respect people who use alternative facts, though I respect them as developers infinitely more than their followers who don’t question anything and simply make fun of Western society bc of groupthink, exactly like Hexbear just less extreme, so like in kind if not to the same degree. (And I am entirely ignoring all of leftist philosophy itself since we’ve discussed it before - everything here is completely ignoring content and focusing solely on process.)

And I think differently about the .world admin team: they have a hard job, but they are doing it? Not halting entirely but pausing discussion of jury nullification for like - what was it? - 3 days while they consult their legal standing seems entirely different to me. Also defederating from Hexbear I actually agree with. Most of what the trolls seem to blame them for I end up siding with the reasonable-seeming (to me?) LW admins rather than the complainers. I might be ignorant here: is there something huge that I am missing where the LW admins are somehow acting like the ML team? I’m legit not seeing it - I know people claim that but I do not know why?

Both end up censoring and removing stuff, but the difference is that LW is transparent from the beginning about precisely what that is - leaving people free to move to another instance if that is what they prefer - whereas the ML is disingenuous in claiming to be purely an instance focusing on FOSS and privacy, leaving people having to find out the hard way the actual facts of the situation. In essence they refuse to have consideration that some other side to the topic even so much as exists, much less deserves to be mentioned or explained what their stance is about - “Russia is (apparently?) awesome” and they will brook no dispute about that, on pain of instance-wide banning, but nowhere do they ever actually SAY that (that I have seen, and I spent hours looking).

As for leftist, I no longer feel comfortable discussing in too much depth my own thoughts (I live in the USA and could literally end up in a concentration camp for even misperceptions about such), but I will say that the most hated groups by authoritarians tend to be the “with me but not as with me as I would hope” camps. Purity testing will continue until morale improves, smdh 😞.