For the past 2 years Mastodon has been promoted as a place without Nazis. Anyone familiar with social media technology knows that it’s not necessarily possible to entirely make such a promise, especially with a network which allows users to set up their own village to invite their friends.
The Fediverse is the interconnected villages of decentralized alternatives of popular social networks such as YouTube (PeerTube), Twitter (Mastodon), Facebook (Hubzilla), SoundCloud (FunkWhale), Instagram (Pixelfed), to mention a few.
It isn’t immune to Nazis, but offers the tools to everyday users, and local leaders (administrators and moderators) to protect their village from them. On Twitter you can report, and block, but then you have to sit around and wait for that content to maybe get removed or maybe not. On Mastodon you get the chance to join a village, where you know that the admin has made a promise to you that Nazis, racist, or homophobes etc. aren’t welcome there. If your admin doesn’t fulfill this promise you have the power to move to a different village. With Twitter you simply can’t do that.
Nazis on the Fediverse: Gab
On the 4th of July, a big group of Nazi’s migrated into their own little village: Gab.com. They used Mastodon’s software to run the village. Gab has been a home to Nazis for a very long time, and anyone who’s been keeping an eye on social networks that keep popping up knew that their policies would welcome a lot of dangerous people. Gab the Social Network actively encourages people to harm other people, and let people run loose with harassment, all in the name of Free Speech. They have also been directly linked to a mass shooting. Yes, we could argue that mass shooters have been on Twitter and Facebook too, because duh it’s social networks. The major difference is, this place has become a breeding ground for these kind of ideas, and they are actively encouraged.
The Vice Article
This migration into the Fediverse by these racists and Nazis caught the interest of VICE, who wrote an article now proclaiming that Mastodon “the nazi-free alternative to Twitter, is now home to the biggest far right social network”.
This is incorrect. While Gab has made their home in the Fediverse, they are not the…
