I’d be interested to see how this happens in practice. It’ll be hard to observe, because good moderation should stop it from happening. I have my view about how it happens and how big a problem it is, but my view might not be an accurate view.

My guess is that when this does happen, it’s a problem with the wider culture. If people are empowered to be noisy idiots who are shouting their opinions, then as soon as they get exposed to a minority community, there are going to be a whole bunch of noisy idiots shouting their opinions at the minority. That’s not ideal, with escalating not-ideal-ness according to the unpopularity and vulnerability of the minority.

I think a grander and better way to address the problem would be to try to address the culture of noisy idiocy at the root. If the culture in general is that you’re not supposed to berate people, and you’re supposed to be open to learning instead of viewing the purpose of the network as of dueling broadcasts of opinion, then my guess is that a lot of that “we have to censor hostile points of view lest they overwhelm us” pragmatism will go away, irrespective of how necessary it was in the first place. I don’t really like this attitude that we need to censor the hostile viewpoints, because however necessary it might be, it’s also going to censor reasonable dissent, and it’s going to make weird little echo chambers like exist in some corners of Lemmy. I don’t think either berating the minority community or creating the echo chamber to protect them is a good solution.

Addressing the culture overall is not easy, of course.