You are right about worsening economic conditions leading to the rise of far right movements. I was more speaking to their digital footprint. If you remember early Facebook, it was nothing like what people use today.

yes, precisely. if normal instances federate with the nazi ones, this won’t be true any longer because their content WILL flood the feeds of many people. this will have disastrous consequences for lemmy as a platform.

If lemmy A is federated w lemmy B (the nazi one), it means:

• Users on Lemmy A can subscribe to communities and users on Lemmy B and vice versa
• Users on Lemmy A can comment on communities on Lemmy B and vice versa

It does not mean:

• Posts from lemmy B show up on Lemmy A (except in the “global” view on main page, which is non-default, and likely won’t show up their either due to massive downvoting). I would imagine, in time, that the global tab actually gets entirely removed since you have a problem where a single lemmy instance can massively inflate their vote count to make their votes the top voted posts across the whole network. You can’t enforce instances to follow the rules on this and you can’t audit their compliance. There are certainly some solutions to this involving blockchain but that’s an aside and those are at least a few years away afaik. 90% of users never do the “non-default” option in whatever app they’re in.

So this flooding the feeds scenario, I just don’t see it. In user-moderated platforms, vocal minorities don’t show up anywhere, they get moderated out basically automatically except in their own little enclaves. There is no scenario in which Lemmy as a federation provides a good platform for them (outside of their own nazi-friendly instance), because Lemmy doesn’t work like other social media works.