[oopsman88]

Because most of the bigger instances have shared blocklists. I am not interested in Mastodon as a tech stack, I am interested in joining a social network. But the truth is that it's all aligned to the political left. And I'm sad because I think Twitter is very politically charged and its alternative should be neutral. You can create your own instance or join a small instance you like, but that would be like IRC. I already use IRC every day, I don't need another IRC.

[jmarinez]

I agree. No single person or group should have the capability to "censor" anyone. On an individual basis, any single user should decide to block, hide or completely ignore anyone they want at will. And here's the thing, Mastodon already has all kinds of controls like that for all users. Why the need to have a "benevolent dictator" that can by popularity or influence can decide what an entire group gets to read or see. That's censorship in my book.

[Barrin92]

people have the freedom to associate in communities that censor if they are okay with it. You don't curse in a church, yet plenty of people find them pleasant to visit.

People definitely should have the ability to put restrictive rules in place in place if the association with that community is voluntary, and nobody forces you to use mastodon.

I find strictly moderated communities very pleasant because I have no interest in debating trolls, nazis or whatever else crops up on the internet, and many mastodon instances as a result of this, especially the smaller ones are a lot more pleasant and feel more like a community than twitter.

[CharlesW]

> people have the freedom to associate in communities that censor if they are okay with it.

You'd think, but no. Some instances are run by "free speech absolutists" (in quotes, because they're really not) who block instances which, in their opinion, are "too aggressive" about blocking spam and bad actors. For example, mastodon.social blocks counter.social, preventing all counter.social users from federating with mastodon.social users.

In other words, Twitter users have to deal with the opaque decision making of one @jack. Mastodon users have to deal with the opaque decision making of a bunch of @jacks.

[egypturnash]

Uh no. Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation.

Also: your Mastodon admin could well be someone you know personally, rather than @jack.

[CharlesW]

> Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation.

Ah, assuming that's true this is the first I'd heard. My guess is that we'll see more of this as a handful of instances dominate and (in at least some cases) consolidate.

My point about @jack is that, for now, you're trading one benevolent dictator for many. The result is a Tower of Babel of moderation and federation standards. Maybe that's a feature and not a bug?

[egypturnash]

I think it's a feature. Benevolent dictators motivated mostly by what's most likely to pay rent in the Bay Area are not very benevolent in practice.

----

I run a Mastodon instance and I sure am not blocking counter.social and I sure do not see a single toot from them anywhere in my database. Mr. Actual The Jester followed me for a day or two and then just vanished from federation along with the rest of his instance.

[mirimir]

OK, I'm convinced that Mastodon is evil. I'm quite able to avoid what I don't like. And I don't want anyone else deciding for me.

Edit: Damn, that was a stupid comment, but I'll leave it as penance. I just wasn't seeing that Mastodon is perfectly setup for compartmentalization. So my Mirimir persona would have an account on some instance that focused on privacy, security and anonymity. And I would be protected from off-topic trolls. But I could have other unlinked personas on other instances, with different topics and blocking criteria. That's very cool.

[oopsman88]

Exactly. I get your point. But mine is: Mastodon shouldn't be publicised as an alternative to Twitter because it's not. It would be like publicising HN as an alternative to Reddit. HN only works as an alternative to Reddit for a very, very reduced group of people. People who share the same interests more or less, and with similar ideas about what flies in tech, politics, social movements, etc.

[freeone3000]

Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. That's the entire point. The moderation policy of the server at mastodon.social has no bearing on the moderation policy of social.wxcafe.net or switter.net. Your complaint of "it's like irc" isn't quite true, because of a number of obvious technical and user experience differences. "Everyone should be able to reach everyone else" is proving to be less and less desirable.

[80386]

Sure, Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. But the massive influx of Mastodon users to the fediverse changed the culture to the point where I didn't see any reason to stick around.

I like the "make the internet weird again" stuff, revivals of Geocities and tilde clubs and so on. My impression of the Mastodon-era fediverse is that the culture is about as far as you can get from that - it was designed by people who thought Twitter wasn't sanitized enough.

[oopsman88]

Moderators of highly restrictive instances (the most populous ones) blacklist all the instances they don't like. In fact most of those instances use a shared blacklist. So you have to make a choice: either you choose a restrictive instance and you can't talk about whatever you want (because with so many rules, where are they even drawing the line), or you go to a free instance and can't talk to anybody in the most populous instances (most of the network).

Or you simply get the best of both worlds and stay on Twitter.

[geofft]

I don't want to spend my time manually figuring out who I should block, work that I suspect a lot of people with similar values have already done; that's just wasted and repeated effort. I'm on the Mastodon instance I'm on because I trust my moderators to have values pretty close to mine and there are network effects in sharing this load (all of the users can mention things to the moderators), and then we have more time for the things we actually want to do on the site.

[ocdtrekkie]

I'm willing to bet most of the instances that a large group of instances have blocked federate with each other. There's definitely kinda a split among Mastodon instances, between free speech instances and fairly moderated instances. I wonder if you could find an instance which plays well with both sides.

There is no overarching authority on these instances, so there's a lot of options, it may just be hard to find the one that meets your needs.

[danharaj]

Freedom of association is the dual of freedom of speech.

[egypturnash]

I run a Mastodon instance. And to be honest the reason a lot of us tend to block right-wing instances is because there is a heavy crossover with trolling behavior. Or at least that’s mine.

If a right-leaning instance showed up that actively cracked down on people who hang out on the federated timeline looking for people to argue with, and other trolling behavior, I wouldn’t block it. But I haven’t seen such a thing. It’s just an endless sea of Pleroma installations with an admin who has an anime girl avatar and posts shit like “watch me get blocked by twenty more instances: [ethnic slur]”.

[stevenicr]

I am appreciating this comment, not because I agree or disagree, but it contains some views I had not considered and they may be important for others who I might want to attract to a mastadon instance if I set up one.

I've been keeping on eye on this project for many months, and it's been very interesting. A recent post about moderation and mastadon was very nice to read, but I had only considered the info there from my personal perspective.

I had not considered the network affects of shared blocklists, and now I wonder if this is put up front and center on each instance - are people who sign up notified of the blocklists each instance has?

It's also interesting to consider the end user who does not care about the tech and it's possibilities, and instead just looking for a social network that is easy to use and different than the other big networks in one way or another.

I do not see how creating an instance is like IRC, and I have not seen anything about joining small instances and how that would be like IRC. To me IRC is like a download and run, with mastadon you have to host an instance. I guess it could be just run on someone else's though.

If it was self hosted as an app or browser extension, I suppose it could run something like scuttlebutt and just re-sync when it re-connects - that would be interesting.

That makes me wonder what it could be like if it was installed on a million routers like nextcould is doing(?) - not sure I read that recent post correct.

I am still interested in mastadon, my idea is to somehow make it, or something like it has various bouncers you can follow / make part of your stream. So rather than depend on or have one block list server wise, you could have open servers and subscribe to different bouncer lists, kind of like the adblock lists - and that way some people could choose bouncers that block certain types of material they may want to avoid and be comfortable with certain people or groups making those kinds of, for example left or right leaning, or even block all trump and kardashian news, or all kinds of neat bouncers that could be created.

The future looks interesting and more possible to be less non-federated, I think the world is more ready for that now.

[pmlnr]

MastOdon. Not Mastadon. It's the same word as the giant ancient mammal.