atomicpoet

I’ve never once heard “bro” used in a genuinely positive way. Not once.

At best it’s fake-jovial. At worst it’s a way to diminish, antagonize, or mask hostility.

Case in point: this very thread. People kept saying “bro” not out of warmth, but because they thought it would piss me off. That’s not camaraderie—that’s toxicity.

And no, “bro” is not the same as “mate.” “Mate” might be regional slang. “Bro” is gendered. Which means it’s exclusionary by default. It assumes something about the person you’re talking to that may not be true. That’s not inclusion. That’s presumption.

So unless someone is your literal brother, why keep it around? If a word carries a whole lot of negatives and almost no positives, why pretend it’s harmless? Better yet—why does your urge to use a toxic word override my goal of building an inclusive community? Would you defend other toxic words the same way—words with even sharper malice baked in?

And if you would, then maybe the problem isn’t me banning “bro.” Maybe the problem is what you’re really defending.

You’re framing visibility as if it’s accountability.

But mods aren’t accountable to users—they’re accountable to admins. If a mod aligns with an admin, users can scream all they want, nothing changes. If a mod sides with the community but not the admin, the admin overrules both. That’s hierarchy, full stop.

Let’s be real. The whole conceit of YPTB is a farce. You’re not “holding mods accountable.” You’re doing populism dressed up as anarchism, aligning with admin tastes when it suits.

Out of all the possible people in the community, it just so happens that the true authorities—the ones setting the norms and nurturing the culture—are the same ones holding the keys to the entire server. And those are the very people wielding YPTB as a cudgel in the name of “accountability.” That’s not accountability. That’s a closed loop.

If lemmy.dbzer0.com were serious about anarchism, the admins would say: “No mods, no users, no hierarchy—everyone go operate their own nodes.” But they don’t. Instead, this community exists under the admin’s keys, which feeds an illusion.

And that “visibility” you’re pointing to? It’s not accountability—it’s branding. Admin branding. It only exists because lemmy.dbzer0.com allows it to exist, and only as long as the server remains federated. Flip that switch and your visibility, your supposed accountability, evaporates overnight.

Got it. So it’s less confusing to users who don’t know what an FE or BE are, but it’s more confusing for new admins who do.

“Instead of running Soapbox on Soapbox, I’ll run Fedibird on Soapbox. Scratch that. I’ll run vanilla Pleroma with Soapbox instead of Soapbox.”

Fair enough—I probably came in sharper than I needed to. I get that you’re not denying the power imbalance, just framing it differently.

We’re closer in view than it might have sounded. My aim wasn’t to dunk on you, just to stress that these structures aren’t neutral. If we’re both pointing in the same direction, then good—that’s where the real work begins.

Can you tell me a little bit more about how Soapbox FE and Soapbox BE differ? I’m out of the loop on that one.

Space isn’t “just a space.” Space is what makes words accessible. A post that nobody can reach might as well not exist. Infrastructure isn’t neutral—it’s the condition that makes communication possible in the first place.

And admins don’t just have the power to end a space. They have the power to prevent speech from ever happening. They can de-platform, silence, or exclude before words are written. That’s not trivial. That’s systemic control over what gets created, not just what gets erased.

And sometimes communities really are families—both literal and ad hoc. People pour years of energy, conversation, and memory into them. When they get obliterated, it’s not “just a space” disappearing—it’s a shared history wiped out because one person with keys decided it was over.

What makes your comment even more striking is that it contradicts your earlier points. First you downplayed hierarchy by saying admins are just neutral facilitators, now you admit they hold systemic power but dismiss it as “no big deal.” Which one is it?

That’s the imbalance I’m pointing at. If we want real commons, that has to change. Otherwise we’re all just tenants, and the landlord can decide at any moment to bulldoze the building. Dismissing that as unimportant is exactly how these power structures stay invisible.

I’m not arguing for extremes at all.

On one side you’ve got pure authoritarianism—admins as unchecked rulers. On the other side you’ve got utopian anarchy—peers moderating themselves with no hierarchy. I’m not in either camp.

What I’m pointing out is the middle: these platforms are hierarchical by design. That means admins do hold systemic power, but it also means admins have responsibility for how that power is exercised. My stance is simply to acknowledge that reality instead of pretending hierarchy doesn’t exist.

Selective federation is part of that. It’s not about isolation or domination—it’s about setting clear boundaries for what I’m willing to host and connect with, while still participating in the broader network. Users still have choices. They can join another server or start their own. That’s federation working as intended.

So this isn’t an extreme position. It’s the pragmatic one: take responsibility for the space you run, be upfront about the structure, and don’t pretend current software is something it isn’t.

Just want to point out that I use Mangane, which is a fork of Soapbox, on my Akkoma server—and it absolutely connects to Lemmy.

From what I understand, Soapbox is just a front-end. The backend is Pleroma/Akkoma.

And by the way, one of the great aspects of the *oma services is that the frontends can be swapped out.

The feast metaphor doesn’t hold. If I pay for a banquet hall, the guests can mingle—but they don’t control the locks on the doors, the electricity, or whether the venue even stays open tomorrow. If I decide to shut the place down, the party ends whether they like it or not. That’s not neutral infrastructure. That’s systemic power.

I’m not saying the admin “owns” people’s words. Users own what they write. But whether that writing continues to exist, whether it stays visible, whether it can even be reached—those are all contingent on the admin. Content lives inside infrastructure, and whoever holds the keys controls the environment where it persists.

And people absolutely are confused about this. Look at lemm.ee: did the community want to vanish overnight? No—but the admin pulled the plug, and everything disappeared. The same happens on Reddit when admins close subreddits, or on Discord when a server gets nuked. People routinely find themselves blindsided because they mistake participation for ownership.

That’s the point I’m pressing: software that demands admins and mods creates hierarchy, no matter what ideals we wrap around it. If we want a true commons, the architecture has to change—there can’t be “users,” only peers, each running their own node. Until then, pretending otherwise is just comforting metaphor.

I get what you’re saying, and I even sympathize with it. I would love a true public square owned by the commons—something where people’s conversations aren’t at the mercy of whoever happens to run the machine.

But that’s not how Lemmy, Mastodon, Misskey, or any of the current platforms work. These systems are hierarchical by design. They require admins, they require mods, and everyone else becomes “users.” That’s not a public square, that’s tenancy.

Even donations don’t change that. If the admin holds the keys, they hold the power. Look at lemm.ee—did the community there want to be wiped out overnight? Of course not. But the admin pulled the plug, and that was the end of it. That’s the architecture working as designed.

If we really want a public square, then we have to stop talking about “users.” There should only be peers. And that means each person owning their own node, not donating their content to someone else’s server and hoping they’ll be benevolent forever.

That’s the uncomfortable truth: until the design itself changes, we don’t have commons. We have hierarchies dressed up in populist rhetoric, and every user is just one admin’s decision away from disappearing.

The problem with your framing is that it treats software as neutral when it isn’t.

Social media software encodes structure into how communities are organized. If the software is hierarchical, the community will be hierarchical. There’s no way around that unless everyone literally operates their own nodes.

And that’s where the real vulnerability lies. If you don’t run your own server, you’re not sovereign. You’re donating your content to someone else’s machine and trusting that their standards, moderation, and moods won’t turn against you. Ideals won’t protect you if the design itself makes you dependent.

If you really care about a sense of ownership, then you should be running your own server. That’s what freedom of association actually means. It isn’t allegiance. Allegiance locks you in. Association multiplies your choices—pick a server that matches your values, or start your own. That’s the entire point of federation.

So let’s not pretend mass platforms or wide-open instances are some higher form of democracy. They aren’t. They’re just populism sitting on top of hierarchy. The lowest common denominator gets to shout “this is the people,” while the actual levers of control stay exactly where they’ve always been—with whoever holds the keys.

Yeah, I get why the word “own” makes people uneasy. There’s a sincere belief that communities should belong to the commons—that no one should control the space, that it should be shared, stewarded, collective.

I sympathize with that. I really do.

But that’s not how the software works.

Lemmy isn’t structured like a commons. Neither is Mastodon. Neither is most federated software. These platforms still rely on admins, moderators, and users. There are hierarchies, permissions, access levels. Someone has root. Someone pays the bills. Someone can click “ban.”

If you’re building a community on someone else’s server, you are doing so inside their infrastructure. And under the law, they are the legal operator and data controller. That gives them full authority—technical and legal—over the domain, the storage, the moderation tools, and the continued existence of what you built.

So yes—everything you post on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter lives behind walls. Even if you retain copyright, you’ve handed over a perpetual license to do whatever they want with it. They own the platform. They control the archive. You’re not publishing. You’re donating.

The Fediverse is better—but let’s not pretend it’s structurally different. If you build something inside someone else’s instance, they own the keys. If they kick you out, it’s gone. That’s not a glitch. That’s the model.

If you truly want a commons—a system with no admins, no mods, no hierarchy—you need to build software that works that way. But that’s not Lemmy. Not Mastodon. Not Misskey. Not PeerTube.

In this system, the only real recourse is to run your own server. That’s where your power begins. That’s where your autonomy lives.

And that’s why I say: I want to own my community.

Because if I don’t, someone else will. And I’ve seen what happens when they do.

The Trump comparison actually cuts the other way.

Trump runs a Mastodon fork—Truth Social—that’s cut off from the broader Fediverse. That’s the textbook example of building a walled garden surrounded by yes-men.

What I’m doing is the opposite. I will be federating. The difference is that I’ll only connect with servers that are well-maintained, responsibly moderated, and respectful in how they interact.

The key is, I don’t control those remote servers. I can’t dictate their policies, their culture, or their moderation. I only control mine. That’s the entire point of federation—each admin curates their own space, and people decide which servers they want to call home.

So users already have choice. Anyone who doesn’t like my standards can join another server with open registrations or spin up their own. That’s not authoritarian. That’s freedom of association.

A selective federated community matters because it resists the flattening effect of mass culture. Big, open servers always drift into lowest-common-denominator populism—outrage cycles dominate, noise overwhelms signal, and actual discussion suffocates. Curation is not about surrounding myself with yes-men. It’s about creating an environment where real conversation can thrive without being hijacked by mob dynamics.

The irony is that pretending hierarchical software is flat and universal—that it magically represents “the people”—is closer to the politician/CEO move. That’s the populist trick. At least I’m upfront about the structure and honest about what I’m doing with it.

The endgame isn’t control for its own sake. It’s sustainability—a space I’m willing to take responsibility for, that won’t collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

I appreciate that you’re raising this in good faith because it is a complex issue. But I see real problems with the idea that infrastructure becomes morally owned by the community once it gets big enough.

Unless that community is actually paying the bills, this so-called moral obligation just shifts the burden onto the one footing the costs. That doesn’t strike me as moral at all.

And online communities are transient by nature. People show up, feel invested for a while, then disappear. To act as if their fleeting sense of ownership creates a lasting obligation on the admin is unrealistic.

There’s also what Ortega y Gasset warned about in The Revolt of the Masses. When something is said to be “owned by the community,” it rarely means real stewardship. It means the mass asserts itself and the loudest voices dictate terms. That isn’t democracy. It’s populism built on top of a hierarchy.

Because if the software itself is hierarchical but claims to be “for the masses,” that isn’t democracy either. It’s a pyramid structure dressed up in populist rhetoric. The admin still has the keys. The mods still enforce. The users still depend on both.

That’s why I insist on my own server. I’d rather be upfront: I curate and maintain a space I’m willing to take responsibility for. That’s not authoritarian and it’s not populist. It’s just owning what I host instead of pretending the power structure doesn’t exist.

The thing is, all communities on the Internet can only ever be what the system is designed to allow.

If a platform is built for hierarchy, then it is a hierarchy—regardless of the ideals people bring into it. No amount of goodwill or re-labelling (“provider,” “protector,” “facilitator”) changes the fact that the software has hard-coded roles with asymmetric power.

And this isn’t some quirky personal view of mine. People far more intelligent than me have been pointing this out for decades. Lawrence Lessig, in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), put it bluntly:

“Code is law. What people can and cannot do in cyberspace is regulated by the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is.”

Geert Lovink, in Networks Without a Cause (2011), made the same point about platforms and power:

”Design decisions are power decisions. Interfaces, defaults, permissions—they do not merely ‘enable’ interaction, they structure it, and in doing so they impose hierarchies.”

Helen Nissenbaum, in Values in Design (2005), sharpened it further:

”The architectures of systems—their technical frameworks—inevitably embed social and political values. Claims to neutrality obscure the ways in which they establish constraints and privileges.”

History is full of examples where egalitarian ideals ran headlong into the hard wall of software architecture.

Wikipedia was envisioned as a flat, peer-produced project—yet its reliance on admin powers and arbitration committees quickly created an entrenched hierarchy of “super-editors.” Reddit’s early culture thrived on openness, but its karma system and centralized admins ultimately entrenched a ranking-and-punishment order that couldn’t be wished away. Even early Usenet communities, which imagined themselves as free-flowing conversations, were shaped by killfiles, moderators, and backbone hierarchies dictated by the protocol itself.

So when I point out that Lemmy is hierarchical, it’s not some rhetorical trick. It’s simply recognizing that hierarchy is baked into the software.

You can call admins “facilitators,” you can hold elections, you can promise benevolence—but the structure is still a pyramid, and it will always tilt power toward whoever holds the keys.

That’s not a matter of interpretation. It’s a matter of design.

Thanks, though—our back-and-forth did get me thinking about the feasibility of true peer-to-peer software that offers Reddit-like topical functions.

Something where there aren’t admins, mods, or “users.” Something anarchist by design, not just by branding.

Appreciate the inspiration.

It really doesn’t matter how many admins you’ve got or how you divvy up the titles. Lemmy, by design, requires an admin for it to even function. That alone makes it hierarchical.

Any community can only be what the software allows it to be. And Lemmy hardcodes a structure: admin → mods → lowly “users.” (Isn’t it funny how both the software industry and drug dealers refer to people as “users”?) Your ideals can’t undo the fact that this is a hierarchy baked into the system.

If you truly believed in the purity of your anarchism, no one would “own” the server. Hell, there wouldn’t even be a server. It would all be peer-to-peer nodes, something closer to Secure Scuttlebutt.

But instead you’re here, running software built from the ground up for hierarchy. And you’re an admin of it. How very anarchist of you.

So if you ever abuse your power, you’ll be held accountable… by the other admin.

The other guy sitting at the top of the hierarchy.

The same guy who named the whole server after himself.

Yeah, no hierarchies or egos here. Just pure, uncut anarchism.

You’re describing elections, not the absence of hierarchy. That may make your server representative, but it doesn’t make it non-hierarchical. Someone still fits the role of admin, someone still has the keys to the machine, and someone can still pull the plug on the entire server at any moment.

That’s not egalitarianism—that’s hierarchy with window dressing. Elections don’t erase the structure. They just decide who occupies it. And the structure itself carries the same asymmetries: technical control, federation policies, enforcement of rules, the ability to de-federate or delete outright.

Which is fine—server administration is hierarchical by design. But it undercuts your attempt to paint my stance as authoritarian. I’m upfront about what the role entails: curating and enforcing standards in the space I’m responsible for. You’re doing the same thing, just phrased differently.

And that flourish about “pointless debating points” is cowardice. You’ve been caught in your own contradiction—preaching anarchism while holding the keys to a server—and rather than face it, you try to wave it away. That’s not an argument. That’s an admission you’ve got nothing left.

While at the same time passing judgment and adopting a disdainful tone towards disagreed with your opinion. That is the most objectionable part.

Pointing out where I draw boundaries isn’t disdain—it’s clarity. I’ve said repeatedly that not all of Lemmy is bro culture. What I won’t do is pretend that dismissive behaviour (“cool story bro”) is just harmless slang. That’s not disdain, that’s naming behaviour for what it is.

And the only reason you had for calling those users ‘toxic’ is because they showed some sign of disagreement with your previously unpublished and unknown policy?”*

That’s not accurate. I didn’t call people toxic simply for disagreeing. I said if someone shows signs of being toxic or openly supports toxic behaviour, I take them at their word. That’s different from disagreement. You’re collapsing behaviour and disagreement into the same thing, and they’re not.

A ‘bro’ is the person who laughs at cruelty because it’s entertaining… I mean really? Talk about hyperbole. Any one of us could easily come up with 10 negative and 10 positive connotations for the word ‘bro.’

This isn’t hyperbole. “Bro” is rarely neutral in practice. It has consistent cultural functions:

• Fake familiarity (“cool story bro” from strangers isn’t friendship).
• Diminishment and mockery (it often carries sarcasm).
• Gender exclusion (assumes a male default in-group).
• Gender assumption (applies a label regardless of identity).

That’s not me inventing baggage out of thin air—it’s how the word is used in real contexts.

All you seem to be doing is mis-characterising the use of a commonplace word as problematic based on nothing but your own imaginings, and then using that mis-characterisation to vilify users you disagree with on the topic.

No. I’m not vilifying people for disagreement. I’m drawing a line against behaviours and tones that diminish others. That’s the job of an admin: curating the space they’re responsible for. The word “bro” as commonly used isn’t just “a commonplace word.” It’s a cultural signal that often carries exclusion, mockery, or fake intimacy. That’s why I’m flagging it.

As an anarchist, rigid hierarchies and those who create them aren’t to my taste.

But you are an admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com. That’s a hierarchical role. You set the rules. You decide federation. You sit at the top of the decision-making structure. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that—every admin does it. But it undercuts the idea that I’m somehow authoritarian for being upfront about doing the same thing. Running a server is hierarchy. The difference is whether you acknowledge it or pretend it doesn’t exist.