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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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I agree with the other commenters who say that the issue is primarily that the Lemmyverse is too small for the grifters to bother influencing, but I also think federation (and the non-profit nature) plays into this.
A site like Reddit generally does not ban members just for being Conservative and expressing relatively mainstream right-wing beliefs. They have to present at least a veneer of "free speech" except in the case of hate speech and violence. In addition, they don't want to drive away Conservative users, because that's where their money comes from.
To a small Lemmy instance, these motives don't come into play. More users actually costs the admins more money. And while they generally don't ban users willy-nilly, they feel they have a right to ban people just for being right-wing dicks.
Ultimately right-wing ideology cannot survive in a space like this except in explicitly right-leaning instances; which will be subject to the "Nazi Bar" effect until those instances are defederated from the rest of the Lemmyverse.
What's "Nazi Bar" effect?
It's a story with a good message
A guy was sitting at a bar one night. One of those dive bars where you make love to your booze and shut up. A guy in some punk clothes walks in and sits down, before he gets to say a word the bartender turns to him and says "No. Get out." The punk argues that he isn't doing anything, he's a paying customer. Bartender reaches for something under the counter and repeats himself "Out, now" and the punk leaves.
First guy turns to the bartender and asks what that was about. Bartender explains that he had Nazi shit all over his vest, iron crosses and other shit. Says you start to recognize them. It starts out nice enough, one guy comes in, he's polite and nice, so you serve him because you don't want to cause a scene, then he comes back with a friend or two, and they're fine, too. But then they bring their friends and it stops being cool all of a sudden and you realize "oh shit, this is a Nazi bar, now" when they take over. It's too late to try and kick them out at that point because they will make it a problem if you try. So you have to nip it early with the first guy no matter how reasonable he seems because the end goal of that guy and his friends is to make it a Nazi bar for him and his cohort of Nazis.
Why are you getting downvoted for perfectly answering the question?
Fascists already invading
Yeah, there are some, but the really low tolerance for them here gives me hope they'll get weeded out sooner than later.
Maybe. The upvotes outweighed them, though. There's also a chance it comes from the punk community. And I'm betting they're more likely to be here than Nazis at this point.
There's a big thing right now that has that community on the defensive trying to erase the connotation between punks and Nazis. I'm sympathetic to the community, actually. You can't control who tries to co-opt your aesthetic so there was a movement in the 80s and 90s aptly named "Nazi punks fuck off". About a month ago, a few videos went viral calling out the fact that they still had swastika patches even if there was a cross over top of them. From my perspective it was a misinformed, but well meaning argument and it's had much of the community on edge, since.
That's a good point that I hadn't considered.
I'd expect someone to raise it as a point, though, because I've seen the Nazi in a bar meme a million times but never has anyone pointed out the problematic linkage of punks and nazis.
I think it's more likely that there are bad faith trolls here already that, rather than engage in a discussion, downvote to silence views they don't like.