We go where they go.
Social media use is going down, or so they tell me. I wouldn’t know- the only social media I’ve used in the last two or three years has been one fediverse instance or another. The decline of twitter and other aging centralized platforms at least makes sense, considering most of the hangers-on to centralized platforms are aging themselves, or explicitly fascist. Young people seem to be moving offline, or to smaller, more decentralized platforms.
The return to a partially decentralized internet means the tools used to combat fascism on the centralized internet are now outmoded. We have for years been fighting to take back the public discourse as a contiguous territory, one we blundered our chance to shape as the large platforms began to take off. Now that territory has ceased to hold most of its relevance.
The existence of Nazi fedi poses both problems and opportunities for antifascist organizing. Fediverse servers aren’t terribly difficult to deploy- competent operators frequently spin up ‘single-user’ instances, for example. This means Nazi fedi (and the fediverse in general) can grow rapidly to accommodate additional social circles, and interoperability and (semi-functioning) user transfer between instances mean users can easily move around inside those circles and dodge concerted pressure campaigns against individuals. Additionally, since each instance is typically owned and operated by the fash themselves, deplatforming individuals is nearly impossible. The non-fash fediverse makes use of publicly available instance-level blocklists to overcome this issue and limit their exposure to hitler particles.
I propose we use these blocklists in reverse. The hard work of identifying and tagging nazi fedi instances has all been done in the name of deplatforming them for the average user- why not mount campaigns against the instances themselves? Many domain providers have terms of service that include bans on hate speech, for example, and smaller instances may be vulnerable to more direct tactics as well.
We’re no longer in a world where the model of ‘fighting over territory’ makes any sense- all three sides in this fight now have powerful capabilities to create social space. It’s time we learned to destroy theirs.