Hey @admin@socialism.social! I see you’re currently running an instance dedicated to socialism, and I think socialism can be pretty cool. I don’t know if you’ve read Karl Marx, but he has some pretty interesting ideas regarding it, as well as its ramifications on how we conceptualize human rights. In fact, when describing the “rights of man” afforded by liberal (capitalistic) society [as enshrined by the Jacobins in the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen in 1793], he explicitly notes:

« [N]one of the so‐called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species‐being, his species‐life itself—society—rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.

It is somewhat curious that a nation just beginning to free itself, tearing down all the barriers between different sections of the people and founding a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the justification of the egoistic man, man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should even repeat this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic sacrifice can save the nation and hence is urgently required, when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is highly imperitive and egoism must be punished as a crime (Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793). This becomes even more curious when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the POLITICAL COMMUNITY, to a mere MEANS for preserving these so‐called rights of man and that the citizen thus is proclaimed to be the servent of the egoistic man, the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeois rather than man as citizen is considered to be the PROPER and AUTHENTIC man. »

This is to say, according to Marx, indicative of a capitalistic liberal society is the raising of the individual, EGOISTIC rights of man (to speak freely, to own property…) above the SOCIAL rights of man (to form community, to participate in society, to receive the benefits of that participation…). What defines socialism, then, is the reversal of this relationship—that is, prioritizing the SOCIALIST rights of people over their individualistic, liberal freedoms.

This obviously has ramifications for the operator of a Mastodon instance! My questions for you are this:

1. Are you willing to counter misinformation, demand content warnings in cases where there is a clear and obvious social benefit, break federation with bad actors, require image descriptions on posted images, and enact similar such policies, acknowledging fully that these are restrictions on the LIBERAL rights of your users to freely speak and associate, but thus protecting the SOCIAL rights of the queer, disabled, and otherwise marginalized users of your platform to fully participate and receive its benefits?

2. If the answer to the above question is “yes”, how will these policies be enacted and enforced?

I checked your instance description, but it was sadly lacking in this information, so additional clarity is requested :) .