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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   985 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 28, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way?

Any communication platform that's already widely used, has easy to find groups, allows groups of massive size and keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people. The list of suitable platforms isn't huge once you account for those.

has easy to find groups

keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people

Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?

For the rest of it I don't see any limiting factors. Web forum can do any of these and more very easily, and I've been using web forums over 2 decades ago.

Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?

Not at all. It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.

This is unlikely to work in English but can work much better in other languages when the censor-happy employees (usually not speakers of said language) don't even know what to look for (and having the group be "closed" prevents them from accidentally seeing the messages that use more straightforward language / imagery).

The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media. This makes it super easy to both join such group as well as recommend it to people you know (and thus gather critical mass).

It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.

Yes, about all forum software I know about supports this option. Private mailing lists of course predate this by another couple of decades.

In fact, Facebook is about the worst platform for this - if you want to coordinate a genocide, on FB it's enough to have one snitch in the group who would alert the moderators and your group is gone. If you do it on a forum, and the admins of the forum either friendly to your cause or neutral, you'd have to resort to heavy artillery like pressuring their provider or cloudflare or similar providers and you'd have to have much more proof, and likely by the time you pull it off their deed will be done. And even if you succeed they'd just find a more sympathetic provider - see the story of kiwifarms, for example.

The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media

That may be true today, because FB is easier, but before FB existed a ton of non-nerd people used forums. If FB becomes less convenient, they can move back. Using forums is not hard at all, it's just a bit less convenient, but if you're planning a secret genocide, you can tolerate a little inconvenience as a price of not being discovered and executed, I think.

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