The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
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Yeah, I don’t even know how you would do that but if a platform I’m hosting and managing tries to tell me what content is or isn’t permissable it’s going in the bin.
Don’t need some big brother crap on my system controlling what I do with my hardware.
they aren’t controlling what you do, though. they’re just refusing to enable far-right content. software isn’t a natural right that is taken away when someone refuses to help you do what you want. it is a fruit of labor that enables you to do something you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise
Right, but for them to do so requires a level of monitoring what you use and open piece of software for, which is unacceptable to me. If you had an old style mp3 player that refused to play certain songs it would be seen as broken at best. If that selection of songs got updated at the discretion of some third party you start walking into ministry of truth territory.
This is different from something like YouTube or whatever hosted service refusing to platform content, this would cross into directly controlling personal consumption by forced removal. We call it bad when people start banning books, but it’s ok so long as it’s our person selecting the bans?
The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi, and it doesn’t force the content onto the public.
And someone who is against Nazis might want to read Mien Kamph, not because they agree with Hitler, but because they want to understand the enemy so they can be better equipped to stop Nazis.
Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Somewhat harder to do in the context of music like the app in question, but still not wrong. I keep copies of some old wartime propaganda cartoons around just for the ability to put context when talking about past events, despite them being pretty tasteless by modern standards.
that refused to play certain songs
Nazism songs.
The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi,
No but 100 copies of back issues of “Being A Nazi In 2025 The Magazine” probably would, and the present case is more like the latter.
it’s going in the bin
oh no! anyway.
I support that fight against Nazi content, but hard-coded blacklists in a open-source Fediverse software? Something is off here.
Hope they find a better way. Make it the default behaviour, include it in all tutorials, defederate.
On the other hand, open-source software enables one to disable or edit those blocklists with a simple patch. It’s just an extreme way of making it the default behavior, and therefore making their political statement stronger.
There might be a better way, but I’m not really concerned with this implementation.
Not just a patch, you also have to set up the build chain to compile it.
Are they blocking illegal content (such as content that promotes violence or issues threats) and content against the terms of service (like hateful, trolling, or disrespectful content)?
Or are they banning people based on their political beliefs or who they voted for, even if their content is not political in any way whatsoever?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
Why repeat yourself?
Because despite the insistence for years, those are not the same thing. Full stop.
This is what I suspected. I can get behind blocking actual Neo Nazis and hate groups, and illegal content, but when it becomes “blocking anyone who disagrees with me” that can easily be abused, especially if the people running the list can’t tell the difference between Nazis, MAGA, Republicans, Centrists, and Libertarians. Or someone who can’t tell the difference between a tankie, a communist, a socialist, a democratic socialist, or an anarchist. Contrary to some people’s beliefs, all of these things are not the same.
People are welcome to block whomever they wish and have the power to curate their own feeds, but when someone else does it, and there is no way to opt out of that, then it becomes censorship or suppression of information.
We’ve seen this happen a lot with Mastodon instances, where people have various beefs and disagreements, and it sometimes results in people advocating everyone blocks an instance regardless of what actually happened. Unfortunately, people are more likely to hit the block-button based on hearsay than they are to do research on whether the instance is actually a bad actor.
It gets super ugly sometimes, and has been abused in the past.
And I have seen block lists where most of the stuff is toxic and should be blocked, but then mixed in there are people who pissed off the person maintaining the block list, usually over some petty dispute or the fact that they voted for the wrong guy in the last election. Unfortunately a lot of these distributed block lists wind up becoming the maintainer’s personal weapon against enemies.
