I agree, it's not something to throw around lightly. I might be misinterpreting your message, but I don't believe I called all the users of an instance nazis (in this case, I guess we'd be taking about sh.it.just.works). I realise in a comment lower in the thread, they say "defederating from exploding heads", but that's not exactly correct because that's a community, not an instance. I am not calling all sh.it.just.works users nazis, and I'm not calling all exploding heads users nazis either. It's just that that sort of community tends to attract some nazis, so I would say that exploding heads would attract and retain a higher number of nazis than other communities.

What I did say, regarding the stadium metaphor, is that instead of having a stadium with a comfy corner of hate for nazis (a community in an instance that facilitates such people and behaviour, which could seep into the rest of the instance and other instances), if you defederate, it would make the whole stadium more comfortable because there isn't a corner with nazis (which would make it more inviting for other people to visit. Who would want to visit a stadium with a corner for nazis?). It would mean that the non-nazi people of that instance would also be moved to their own stadium with the small group of nazis, but they are free to create an account on another instance if they want to move. That's the power of Lemmy; you can find an instance that aligns with your values and join that.

Okay the more I write in this stadium metaphor the more I realise it's harder to make it make sense haha, I hope this makes some sense

[–] Alkuam@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not something to throw around lightly

People have crippled the power of many words by overuse.

Nazi, racist, bigot, -phobe, and so on.

[–] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

There are definitely people out there who espouse the same beliefs as the Nazi Party and use the same strategies to weasel their way into popular discourse. Even as far back and as mildly as the US election with Obama, I was struck walking through the German History Museum in Berlin by how similar Nazi propaganda posters were to the kinds of rhetoric seen on Fox News and spoken by Republican politicians. Calling everything they don't like Socialism, or Globalism, for example, when the targets are hardly aligned with those ideologies, is literally copy and paste what the Nazi Party did. Not just "everything I don't like is Nazism," but like the specific phrasing and strategies they use against specific targets like Black, Jewish, LGBT+ people, and foreigners are nearly identical. When the mainstream dismisses it as "economic anxiety" or "ignorance" or "right wing populism" we're failing an open book test, because it's all been written down for 80 years and you can tell that these neo-Nazis have read it.