the lemmyverse is toxic and they were constantly facing attacks of various types

This is a very subtle but very powerful way of recasting what actually happened. I’ve dealt with this in conversations face-to-face with conservative people who’ve had interactions online, so I know how unfortunately powerful it is.

I’d be very surprised if any substantial number of the users on exploding-heads got “attacked” – as in, had child porn posted to their servers by their ideological enemies, or got doxxed, or anything like that. What they got was disagreed with, or defended against.

If you frame being disagreed with as an “attack,” then it means that anything that your enemy says that makes sense is a threat. You have to double down and find a way to “strike back.” Or you have to withdraw from the conversation and talk about you’re “always getting attacked.” If your whole mental model is that way, then anyone at all who might understand the world a little better than you is all of a sudden your enemy, and worst of all, if what they’re saying makes sense, then you must withdraw from the conversation, because now you’re in danger of becoming an “enemy” to your ideological friends, if you start agreeing with that person. It’s like in a big fistfight if you all of a sudden switch sides and start beating up your friends. Why would you do that?

And so, your viewpoint can never change, because that’s “defeat.” That’s the insidiousness of this whole framing.

Furthermore, if you’re brigading or trolling or being offensive, and someone blocks you or defederates from you, then you’re being “attacked” or “silenced” or whatever. Any offensive behavior of your own is just good clean fun, even if you’re trying to ruin some feminist critic’s life or posting child porn. Any action that makes it difficult to do that is just evidence that the whole system is rigged against you, and a reason to start whining about unfairness.

I have a couple of conservative views, and I actually sorta sympathize with the idea that the lemmyverse is pretty one-sided in how it views certain issues. But going beyond that to say exploding-heads was “constantly facing attacks” is only true if you torture the language in a very specific, deliberate, and insidious way.

The point was to have a place they could be free to talk about things the establishment were censoring.

I’ve deliberately made a point to express some views here that I know are extremely unpopular (very sincere views of mine, but ones that I know will cause controversy). Not once was I censored or prevented from speaking. On reddit, yes; certain subreddits “on the left” will ban you if you say certain things, although it’s still way more common from the right. Here, I’ve been downvoted all to hell, but Lemmy’s actually configured in a way where (at this scale of userbase) that doesn’t really make much difference to how many people can see your stuff. Not banned or had my stuff removed for ideological reasons even a single time.

Again, it’s an insidious reframing of language. Your saying “could be free to talk about things” only makes sense if that really means “could be free from anyone else’s ability to disagree.” They’re free to talk here, today, and they always were. What they want is to be able to freely talk and no one else disagree (or to be able to freely threaten or bully anyone who disagrees.) Quite frankly, what you’re saying is bullshit. I’ve gone to conservative forums on reddit and asked, hey, can I talk to you about this topic we’re in, without me being censored? They said sure, we welcome all points of view here, we don’t do censorship. Guess what happened literal minutes later?

Trump does the same. He literally had all his social media accounts in place, and a podium in the White House where he could literally stand up and say literally anything he wanted into the camera and it’d be broadcast, and he was still whining about censorship. He didn’t mean anything of his was being censored. He meant he was being “censored” from everyone being forced to broadcast his stuff without being allowed to disagree.