The thing is, Nazis are really unpopular, so if we have a free market, Nazi hellscapes will be unpopular, too.
This is a case where the free market is good at solving a problem, we know this because Nazis have been writing books for nearly a century, yet you probably haven't heard of any of them other than Mein Kampf.
Whether we have a free market in social media is up for debate, certainly the dominant platforms enjoy network effects and go to great lengths to keep their users locked in, even when they have Nazis running around on them and the users don't want to see Nazis. We even have evidence that some platforms will show more Nazis to you if Nazis trigger you and make you want to fight with them! But I think a landscape with more platforms is a good way to try and deal with this. If anything in the Mastodon world you have the exact opposite problem, platforms defederate each other for very small offenses, being a full blown Nazi is definitely not required.
And whether people use the Nazi hellscape argument genuinely or as a straw man/proxy for "things I don't like" is an open question as well.
This is the absolute wildest take I’ve seen in a while. How can any sort of free market ideas apply? Fascists operate by force. A tiny minority of fascists can take control over a much larger population through violence. Source: history
> Nazis have been writing books for nearly a century
Small, basement-run printing press? Sort of like nazi zines?
I remember seeing copies of "Soldier of Fortune" in the 1970's (US) but it was relegated to the one weird military-collectible-store-that-also-sold-Avalon-Hill-games. Extreme ideologies need buy-in from a printer, publisher, and distribution network — combined they create quite a series of hurdles, act as gatekeepers of a sort. I suspect that was enough to keep The John Birch Society and others in relative obscurity.
Letters to the editor in the local newspaper were of course heavily moderated.
The free internet with near zero-cost to print/publish/distribute due to social networks, site comments sections make the fringe voices just as loud as the mainstream ones.
Add bots into the equation and possibly determined state actors and it only gets worse.
Also algorithms that signal boost controversial/inflammatory content as well as unearth more of whatever the user has signaled what they believe in/enjoy/etc, not to mention artificial signal boosts via things like Twitter Blue… with all of this, with social media the extreme fringe can be made to appear popular. It’s like viewing the world through a funhouse mirror.
This is a case where the free market is good at solving a problem, we know this because Nazis have been writing books for nearly a century, yet you probably haven't heard of any of them other than Mein Kampf.
Whether we have a free market in social media is up for debate, certainly the dominant platforms enjoy network effects and go to great lengths to keep their users locked in, even when they have Nazis running around on them and the users don't want to see Nazis. We even have evidence that some platforms will show more Nazis to you if Nazis trigger you and make you want to fight with them! But I think a landscape with more platforms is a good way to try and deal with this. If anything in the Mastodon world you have the exact opposite problem, platforms defederate each other for very small offenses, being a full blown Nazi is definitely not required.
And whether people use the Nazi hellscape argument genuinely or as a straw man/proxy for "things I don't like" is an open question as well.