Have encountered racism, hate speech or homophobia on the fediverse yet?

Personally I think kbin and @ernest should take a more backseat approach to this stuff, apart from very radical exceptions. If you don't like content/people/magazines that you see, simply block it. If you want to join a community that will outright ban people who disagree with you, check out Tildes (left) or SaidIt (right) which are more 1:1 Reddit replacements (not in the fediverse though)

Time will tell what the overall approach for this is on kbin, but the great thing about the fediverse is if things get out of hand or take a turn here you don't like, you can simply find another instance or a different fediverse site altogether and still interact with mostly the same people/content. But I personally very much like the relaxed and not-very-political space kbin has been so far

While I tend to agree with your opinion, that people should be allowed to express their political view of the world, I also think that intolerance is not a political view. It's just the heritage of a mob mentality that's more suitable for the dark ages, rather than the globalized world we live into.
So if you want to spout about dumb non-facts like "ethnic replacement" and such, you can take a walk and come back when you'll have a mindset more appropriate for this century.
- I agree with your first sentence and that's what I meant when I said "radical exceptions". I think the issue is many people coming from Reddit will equate anything that is right-leaning as racism or hate speech. Like I don't want ernest to be in here during the US elections banning magazines supporting the Republican candidate
  Sure, get rid of the users talking about how the Jews control the world or are going on frequent racist tangents. But I think there's a lot more to gain about getting perspective from a place I might not necessarily agree with than just getting rid of it altogether. I hope people can be mature enough here to feel the same
- What people consider "intolerance" is not a consensus. I consider some people to be very intolerant, while they think they aren't intolerant at all. when you say intolerance shouldn't be allowed, you have to say which one of us is right. who is getting kicked off for their "intolerance"? because whichever one you pick, they'll be upset and think you are intolerant.
I strongly disagree. If there are a bunch of magazines here with racist / anti-LGBTQ+ / etc content, the site as a whole will get a reputation for it, other instances will block it, and people who don’t want to deal with that stuff will go elsewhere
It's up to the owners of the magazines to build good moderation teams. And if the mods don't do well - switch to another instance's version of that magazine's topic.
I think individual instances should take whatever stance they want. If you don't like it, you can choose a different instance. And if you DO prefer a space without bigots (as most people do), you can use an instance which takes a hard stance against bigotry.
I personally couldn't engage long-term with any instance which doesn't stamp out bigotry. There's no reason to expose myself to bile like that on the regular.
- The problem instantly becomes "who decides what counts as a bigot?" to me, the "transgender movement" is filled with transphobic and homophobic bigots. but if you ask large social media companies, they think any opposition to that movement is bigotry. These are two conflicting views about who is considered a "bigot". They can't both be right.
@ernest can only control what happens on the instances he controls, i.e. kbin.social and the others. If you're on an instance, and find a magazine that is poorly moderated, that would be an issue to take up with That Instance and their Ownership/Moderation team. It's not an issue for the software developer to be stepping in on.
- Ernest can still block people on other instances, and whole instances themselves. If hateful people from hateful instances are intruding, we shouldn't let that happen

I have not seen it yet, though I have no doubt that it exists.

I believe that in real life as in the fediverse, hate speech and bigotry of all kinds needs to be very firmly shot down. Immediately downvote and block that shit. It has no place here, or anywhere.

That being said, debating or even engaging with these pricks is worse than pointless because you’ll never change their minds and will only give them a platform.

Saw some in the comments of a post yesterday about Starbucks and Target. It'll likely pick up as more and more people come onto these spaces just by virtue of a larger population.
- I saw that too. I asked and if you click on a person's username you can then just block them.
Won't it make them angrier and more racist, though?
- Racist is racist. Fuck them. I have no interest in appeasing these people, and even if I did, it wouldn’t calm them down or make their hatred tolerable. Sexists, racists, homophobes and the lot should be shunned without compromise. As the saying somewhat goes, there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
- Accepting them and letting them continue being bigots won't make them stop being bigots.
- Who cares? They aren’t going to stop being racist so just let them bang on their keyboards in frustration.
- To change someone's mind, the person needs to respect you. Bigotry largely comes from a place of disrespect, so the targets of bigotry cannot change that person's mind.
  Now, when my mom was starting down a pretty homophobic path, I had the opportunity to talk to her, to explain that her misconceptions weren't what most gay people were like. Because she respected me more than she respected internet strangers, I was able to change her mind.
  But to strangers, no matter how much I type, or how convincing I am, I'm never going to convince someone who's racist or homophobic to stop being that way. They simply do not respect me enough to believe what I say, to trust me over their own friends, family or news sources. I don't have the time to build the trust and rapport with someone to be able to change their mind, so the best thing to do is just minimize the trouble they can cause me by blocking them.
- Yeah, and then once they are banned from the public places they find the hell holes with the other racists and form groups that dress as nazis and march on washington. We literally drive them into echo chambers where people will agree with them, whereas we should be heckling them and showing them that the general public at large disagrees with them. It's impossible to show that your community is the general public when you ban people right away. Then they think they aren't allowed to be there and it's not because they're wrong, it's because you're woke or whatever. You can't concentrate the evil, you have to dilute it.
This is the great part of the fediverse - if one server isn't moderating a magazine well, another server can step in to help blacklist that other server's instance pretty easily.
- You're phrasing this as if it's something great about the fediverse, but centralized sites can just ban the magazine-equivalent directly (since they only have what we'd call local magazines). In fact, the fediverse may be worse. What's stopping bad faith actors from constantly creating new servers pushing bad content? Centralized sites can generally do more to control who can use them with things like captchas, but federation can't have such measures.
Almost certainly, as you say, only way to control it is report it wherever you see it. Don't let it spread.
- I try to wake up each day and not be offended by everything. This way I don't see a racist/bigot behind every tree.

A little bit once federation got turned on in kbin, but it was pretty easy to just block those users and move on.

I assume the rest of the fediverse can just opt not to aggregate the garbage sites, right?

A couple years ago, when Mastodon started rising in popularity, some far-right instances popped out among others, the most notable being Gab.
But the nice thing about the Fediverse is that you can exclude the connection your instance has with those harmful environments. And that's what most instances does actively.

If you want to look deeper, I suggest this video that gives a better overview on this particular case.

I've blocked a handful of people for spouting far right rhetoric and trans/homophobia so far, as well as three or so xtian instances (am I using 'instances' right?) that have shown up in the 'new' feed.

I like being able to block bigots and hateful subs, it's really weird to me that ither sites (squabbles) don't have this feature.

'instances' are websites. you might be thinking of "magazines" (subreddits).
- 'Magazines', that's the one. Thank you!

I will report it if I see it (hate speech, I don't care about being edgy as long as it's not hurting someone).

So block my account ahead of time if you can't be decent. A block it not an insult, and it is way less effort all around if you block me ahead of time so I never see it in the first place.

Yup. And it's been a thing. I'll go as far to say that Mastodon has a racism problem.

My first move is to just block-- individuals, and whole instances if need be. Hell, I'm quick to block instances anyway! The Internet is vast; I don't need access to every instance nor give every one a chance. I'll report if I feel like it'll do anything.

It also helps when you're on an instance that takes this sort of thing seriously-- you need Mods That Actually Do Something. Furthermore, there are tags you can follow to keep up on what to block, at your discretion.

Sure there's instances dedicated to being human trash as you've put it, but in the general discourse it's not an issue I've noticed, and I think there's a few reasons for that:

There are no "Agendas" here yet: Make no mistake there are people spending a lot of money to define the discourse on major platforms. An example people are fairly comfortable acknowledging is the existence of Russian content farms, - a lot of what stirs up bigotry on platforms isn't genuine users sharing their experiences or hobbies or whatever, it's people with an agenda astroturfing discontent so their backer can point to it and say "see, the ordinary people are revolting, they would prefer our regime/product/way of life". I'm not saying every racist on Reddit is a paid actor, I'm sayinga lot of people who haven't given things much thought are being prodded and goaded into being insensitive through consuming the fake bullshit those people put out.
There are no advertisers here: Again, look at the major platforms, they sideline content and spaces about sexuality or race because they see these as unpalatable to advertisers. YouTube faced a lawsuit last year for “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.” On YouTube, content is separated not by target age, or [N]SFW status, but advertising palatability.
These spaces are not US centric. The US has some stupid laws, which Spez alluded to in relation to NSFW content, an example of which is FOSTA-SESTA. This is one of the reasons Tumblr and Only Fans attempted to go SFW. The laws claim to be anti sex trafficing but in reality they're just social conservatism for the internet age, you'll note in the link above regarding YouTube, the platforms defense of discrimination was that they were only abiding by the US Communications Decency Act, of which FOSTA-SESTA is an amendment.

The latter two points largely just hide or remove users from platforms, but that contributes to an overall atmosphere where bigotry goes unchallenged or bigot mods support bigot users. If people aren't seen as a valid part of the community things do go sour from there.

I don't think I've seen it on kbin, but I sort of encountered it in a community hosted on beehaw, iirc.

There was a thread in the lgbt+ community where the OP was asking why the average person hated lgbtq+ folks and one dude clearly explained why he hated them.

His explanation was basically "as a muslim", so as someone with the muslim identity, he was alright with "gays" first because he didn't care what other people did in their bedrooms, but "it didn't stay there" and the gays with their ideology started to show up everywhere and started cramming their ideology to everyone else.

So yeah, the guy thought islam was an identity but being lgbtq+ was an ideology.

im trans so, the answer is yes. my first day here i saw a christofascist arguing for genocide. very Politely lmao.

ive seen some outbursts on mastodon as well. i was harassed once, and ive seen a bunch of trash on social. my own small mast instance tends to defed when that happens and mastodon has been mostly good for me since i, on an account level, blocked .social.

here i reported the christofascist and it didnt get moderated over the course of the day and tho i know numbers here have blown up, i have some serious concerns about kbin.social that run in line with the nightmare scenario ive seen on mastodon.social (prior to blocking the instance.) even if they bring up the mod count, i suspect we'll still see neolibs, fascists, and centrists dominate discourse while trans people get treated poorly with little recourse.

with that said, it cant possibly be worse than reddit or twitter so whatever i guess :/

im probably going to get harassed, see tankie shit, see fash shit, see centrists arguing that my right to access healthcare isnt important or shouldnt be prioritized ("its identity politics!!!") until i find spaces that defederate from "main instances" bc "main instances" tend to exclude minorities in favour of protecting violent or proveably false speech, regardless of the harm it causes. im not sure that will change here. or anywhere.

polite disagreement isn't hate speech.

- It's difficult to tell if your outlook really lacks any nuance, or if you're just pretending to not understand.
  Imagine if there was a /m/slaveryshouldbelegal. Would it matter what posts were in that magazine in any given point in time?
  The way "antiwoke" is used colloquially leaves no doubt as to the path that magazine intends to walk down. I, for one, would rather take proactive action against it than reactive action later on. And making it not my problem by blocking it only lets it fester.
  Edit: And surprise, surprise-- the same user made both.

None so far. But I'm also for free speech and think mods should only block the worst of the worst like CP or extreme racism. Conspiracy theories and ordinary bigotry/extremism (not directed at a specific person) are fine.

Ironically I think "extreme racism" is fine for people to post, while "ordinary bigotry/extremism" aren't necessarily so. Often times, the super racist stuff isn't actually being hostile or antagonistic, they're just stating some super fucked up views (often in a polite way). Whereas run of the mill bigotry is often super heated, hateful, directed at someone, etc.
Conspiracy theories should always be allowed unless you're afraid of actual discussion and truth lol. like what you got to hide? conspiracy theorists just have some wacky beliefs, what's the problem?
Free speech is not a right to force people to listen to you. One of the good features reddit added was personal block lists. As a user, I should be able to completely ban and not see speech of people I don't want to engage with. If I could have my own personal AI filter assistant that would be even better, though I suppose that is best built client side.
- I'm a fan of the self-censor model. If you don't want to see something, you should be able to remove it from your view. but you shouldn't be allowed to determine that someone else isn't allowed to speak.