Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it

I didn't claim it was, I also don't claim "maga" is bigotry. I'm saying both are something someone could take offense to.

What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven't had issues with mods either. I don't know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.

It is rooted in a worldview that’s all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior.

I think it's just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.

Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative "fascist," do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it's the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn't mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.

Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don’t make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!

Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as "neutral" news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I'm aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.

You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper,

I'm not talking about honor, I'm talking about freedom of speech. I'll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we're forced to elucidate why we hold them.

We don’t need Nazis.

But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we're doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it'll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.

I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel's talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It's incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he's doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they'll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells "safety" in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.

Being so scared of fascism that we won't allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.

I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it's unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it's a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.

Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.

That's not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.

This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there's actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That's how platforms should work IMO.

Conduct should be the only measure we use for deciding whether to federate. And not even just conduct of their users, but conduct of their admins and mods. If their users are consistently causing problems, but their admins and mods are consistently banning them, then we should stay federated because we can work with them. The moment we can't work with them is when we defederate.

Maybe that's the case right now, IDK, I haven't seen evidence either way, just people disagreeing with what little content they have and the domain name they used. I'm against this petition because it and the comments seem to day we should defederate purely based on political ideology.

The fact that most people who call themselves conservatives in the US are supporters of the MAGA movement speaks more about the US than conservatism in general.

You'll need to expound on this a bit. What exactly does this say about America? All this shows, IMO, is that people are tribalistic (what country isn't?) and don't trust the establishment (who does?).

If you ask conservatives if they agree with the way Trump is going about things, they'll likely say no, buy he has the right objectives in mind. They don't like how ICE is acting, but they do want illegal immigrants to leave and only return through legal means. They don't like that Trump is unilaterally setting trade policy, but they do want to see manufacturing jobs return and for the US to have a dominant trade position. They don't want the government to be shut down, but they seem to believe that Republicans actually want to cut spending. All "MAGA" means in their eyes is ths slogan Trump uses to pursue policies that will make their lives better.

I personally disagree both with Trump's priorities and the way he goes about them, but that doesn't mean I think his supporters should be shut out of the conservation. I believe the opposite, in fact. I want to talk to Trump supporters to understand what they think and why, and to have the opportunity to show how that doesn't match what Trump says and does. I used to be registered Republican and left when it became clear that they never do what I want (smaller, fiscally responsible government) and prioritize what I don't want (e.g. anti-immigration). I didn't join the Democratic Party for the same reason, they prioritized big government spending initiatives instead of expanding personal freedoms; we still don't have legalized gay marriage, we're relying on a court decision just like Roe V Wade...

The US has become just like russia

No, the difference is we still have the freedom to criticize the government and we actually have free and fair elections. So whatever you don't like about the US can change. The downside is it probably won't because you need to break through the tribalism to get people to agree on anything.

Russia became the way it is because of authoritarianism (Putin wanted control), the US became the way it is due to fear. The first can't be solved with conversation, the latter can.

How can we solve the problems in our democracies if we shut down conservation between tribes?

IMO, this is how we get echo chambers. I understand wanting a safe space, but that should be something community moderation should provide, not instance-level defederation.

To be clear, I disagree with the MAGA movement on pretty much everything. I used to consider myself Republican back when I thought Republicans actually want smaller, fiscally responsible government, and I didn't join the Dems because they never seemed to prioritize civil liberties (e.g. gay marriage became legal by court decision, not statute, much like Roe V Wade).

I left largely due to conversations and content online (mix of Reddit and YouTube), and that wouldn't be possible if popular social media sites cut out chunks of the conversion. In fact, I very much disagree with the aggressive stance YouTube took WRT COVID misinformation, not because I think misinformation is acceptable, but because it shut out anyone who was critical of the government's policies. I want to live in a society that values differences in opinion and is okay with that being uncomfortable.

There's a balance to be struck here, and I think that balance point is whether we can work with the admins of an instance to remove problematic content and users. I haven't seen anyone saying that's an issue, the arguments all revolve around the domain name and sometimes posts in communities that are obviously biased.

We defederate Hexbear not because they're tankies, but because their admins refused to take action against trolling. IMO, that should be the standard.