[cemerick]

"We'll see how it goes" and "it can't be worse than what we have now" are my basic postures to this kind of critique. It's very, very clear that Twitter (for example) is hardly an exemplar. If you are concerned about moderation being in the hands of just a few people, I presume you're super-concerned about Twitter, facebook, etc etc.

Again, I think it's important to be explicit about what you mean by "free and open speech", "dissent", etc.

I don't really see the analogy to sub-reddits, or shared forums in general. On my instance, the only stuff that's eligible for ejection is illegal porn, hate speech, abuse/harassment, etc. If that's an "echo chamber", then we don't have a shared vocabulary here.

[dkhenry]

I don't think it will start out as an echo chamber, but as time goes by the desire to limit the speech of not just those limited categories will lead to at least some, and if history is an indicator most, of the instances limiting their connectivity to the network to keep out speech they don't agree with, but that decision will be made by the few who run the instances and control the peering, and even those who have good intentions will be faced with going along with the swarm ( limit speech ), or face their node being cut off as well. These kinds of protests and ultimatums are common on twitter ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+t... ) ,but thankfully no one has enough clout on twitter to make them actually do anything. That will not be the case on a Mastadon instance when 25% of your server threatens to jump ship if you don't de-peer a node over some comment they don't like.

[cemerick]

To paraphrase what you're getting at with the ~slippery slope argument:

""" 'Free speech' means absolutely nothing can be off limits, ever, because in some theoretical future timeline, that means we won't be able to voice controversial opinions. Bluntly, if oven memes are at risk, then that means we won't be able to have dialogue on race relations or tax policy. """

You're right that, in general, this has been the state of affairs on Twitter, and it's a top-3 reason why a lot of people are interested in exiting that platform. Few want to spend time in a 4chan dystopia.

[dkhenry]

I think of it less as a slippery slope and more of a base state. All systems will regress to the base state and this one is designed with a base state of segregated walled off partitions, not because people are evil or want it to be that way, but because that will be the easiest thing to do.

edit: Also this isn't some theoretical, unproven thing that will happen to far future generations. At this point its almost a surety that it will happen in less then ten years.