I saw talk of them being federated with instances like “exploding heads” (literal neo-nazis) and “posting lolis rocks”, along with having interactions from users there. Is that true? idk how to check for that, I can only just barely stumble around the normal forum interface.
If so, why? They’ve been going hard on purging communists user-by-user and comment-by-comment, which seems like a little bit of a secondary concern to nazis and pedos, especially something as simple as just blocking the instances at the very least. What’s going on over there?
What I mentioned, if it is correct, might not be exhaustive, I’m just repeating what I heard about.
I think that’s a somewhat reasonable argument when such people are actually congregating in your space, and their presence necessarily impacts everyone else in that space.
In your example, by telling those people to leave you would necessarily be taking away what they believe to be their space and hindering the ability for group members to talk with each other. In the context of federated communities, it doesn’t matter when you block an instance (if and when such actions become necessary) because they’ll still have both of those things.
In your example, all interactions would constantly be influenced by the presence of that group and non-group-members would understandably associate that group with that space. In the context of a federated community, anyone can easily and instantly remove all influence on them by that group. Non-group-members wouldn’t make such associations because that group’s influence on non-group-members would by default be minimal.
That’s not how Nazis and other disgusting groups operate, though. Once they’re part of a community, they’ll start trying to get any other unknowing people interested in their content, so they start creating communities in disguise, trying to gain any new members, and make sure anyone who feels like an outsider, like they don’t belong, will feel welcome there, which in turn only strengthens those types of communities.
4chan used to be a pretty diverse community, which while it was definitely always pretty intense and insensitive, had a bit of everything, but after the American 2016 elections, /Pol/ started spreading to other boards until the /Pol/ folk became a very sizeable group everywhere else.