[thevtm]

I completely agree that you should have the choice to opt out of this toxic "content".

But I believe the issue that RC is talking about is that the control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual in Mastodon.

It allows something like GMail admins blocking their users to send/receive messages from HotMail, and then your only solution would be to create a second account in some other provider that doesn't block HotMail.

[glenstein]

>control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual

Control is in the hands of an admin, but not any particular admin, and that admin might be you.

[untog]

I think that just speaks to the way Mastodon encourages people to form smaller communities. The idea is that you'd trust your admins.

A more apt comparison than Gmail/Hotmail would be if one of the e-mail providers was whitesupremacy.net. Or, we-allow-white-supremacy.net. The admin of my we-dont-like-white-supremacy.net e-mail provider might choose to block it, based on the content it sends out. Anyone on that provider is welcome to choose another one if they wish to e-mail me. But if it is important enough to them to stay where they are, then they will remain blocked.

Long story short, if you don't trust the admin, don't sign up for the Mastodon instance. I agree that there needs to be some work on porting accounts from one instance to another seamlessly, though.

[thevtm]

Even in that case I believe it should be the user choice not the admin.

And communities should be instance independent the same way mailing list works.

[egypturnash]

FWIW, one of the things 2.0 added is the ability for users to block entire instances. So you could find/run an instance that chose to block absolutely nothing and let you handle all of this.

[untog]

The straightforward answer there is to join a Mastodon instance where the admin pledges to never block another instance.

[fragmede]

Funny you should mention Gmail - getting past their spam filters is notoriously difficult. Great as a user who doesn't want to receive any spam (at the cost of false positives), terrible if you're honestly not a spammer, but am just not that into Google controlling everything.