I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
While it’s fair to note that this is a pretty raw assessment of the data and could potentially be skewed by any number of variables that aren’t being accounted for, it agrees with my anecdotal experience and therefore I choose to believe it.
Some servers take a more laissez faire approach and others take a more authoritarian approach, and that’s fine because joining a server is a voluntary act. No one is being subjected to anything unwillingly, they are choosing an experience that works for them.
Tangentially related ruminations
But I think it’s definitely valuable for people to recognize and be aware of the fact that certain servers tend to censor dissenting voices and create a walled garden environment. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it can be frustrating when users develop fairly extreme viewpoints as a result of this curated environment, and then react strongly when confronted with more mainstream perspectives.
It’s good to explore different perspectives and see what the mainstream is getting wrong, but if you insulate yourself from the mainstream entirely, you kinda reduce your ability to actually challenge it. Like you can follow your own intellectual path and end up wherever you end up, but that’s a solo mission. If you feel like where you ended up intellectually is better than where you started and you want to share that with others, you actually need to walk back down the path, reconnect with the mainstream, and lead others step by step down your alternate path.
It’s not effective to just stay in your obscure branch and yell at people about how wrong they are, you need to actively lead them through the sequence of rational steps that got you from point A to point B. And in many cases, they will nitpick and try to disagree at each step, because there’s an inherent inertia where humans simply don’t like to change their opinions unless it becomes absolutely unavoidable. Furthermore, the intellectual path that you followed could just be straight up wrong/illogical, and the opinions you are trying to change could actually have been right all along, and you might be the one who is actually wrong. So it’s a very scary thing to engage in such a way.