Not intentionally. Mastodon is also a name of a Twitter-like social network. So the title here makes perfect sense for people like myself who hadn't heard of the band with the same name.
This is just one of those occasions where name collisions happen through nobodies fault.
The River Thames through Oxford is locally known as the Isis, so there are dozens of businesses called things like the 'Isis Guest House'. Many of them have rebranded.
I imagine it's a recurring problem. There were probably some people named Hitler in the 40's that faced the same problem. I imagine Adolf too, to a much lesser degree.
As someone else has pointed out, Mastodon is only one implementation of ActivityPub/OStatus, and arguably not the best (especially if you prefer Elixir/Phoenix, but I digress).
Would it be appropriate to request we stop referring to a mastodon (software) instance as anything other than an ActivityPub/OStatus instance? A more terse name would be ideal but naming is hard and I've not had enough coffee to be creative yet today.
No it's not. Mastodon is not Twitter. Mastodon does not compete with Twitter. Mastodon was not meant to replace Twitter. It was meant to replace GNU social. Mastodon is also not the entirety of the fediverse.
Join Pleroma. Because it wouldn't eat your RAM and ignore the ActivityPub spec arbitrarily. [1]
Another Mastodon instance hosted in Germany with the same copypasted left-leaning AUP[] from all the other Mastodon instances. What's the reason for this to exist when all Mastodon instances are linked to each other and this instance has the same ruleset and is hosted in the same country than the rest of instances? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the way Mastodon works and instances are not linked?
A little less sceptical but still I wonder about the same thing. If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to? Are there filters between each server? Is my data only hosted in this server and goes down with it when the server hoster decides he invested enough into his hobby?
> If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to?
Mastodon is like E-Mail: You chose who hosts your profile. YOu can send messages to people on other servers, but still the server which hosts your account, is your "home server": If it goes down, your account/profile is lost.
Also choosing your Mastodon server is about your personal interests: Mastodon servers have local timelines, which only show posts by users on the same server. These timelines often are topic related. E.g. on metalhead.club you will find more metal music content compared to e.g. mastodon.social.
Mastodon servers / instances group users by interest and still let all Mastodon users communicate with each other.
Btw: I don't consider the terms of use "leftist". They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly". Metalhead.club is not political, but the Terms of use try to prevent hate speech.
>They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly".
They are certainly reasonable and human-friendly! But "you shouldn't be xenophobic or transphobic" is still, unfortunately, a relatively left-wing idea. It excludes people who openly hold beliefs that are very popular within the mainstream American right.
Under those rules, for example, you can be expected to get banned for saying "refugees do not belong in Europe", which is not a personal attack and is pretty much a normal right-wing stance to take.
No, it's not. It's asking you to simply not post nasty stuff. It doesn't mean you have to embrace other cultures, sexualities or whatnot. It doeesn't even mean you have to like them. It just means keep any nasty comments about such things to yourself (or go say it elsewhere).
It's a really sad time for humanity if common courtesy is now considered "left-wing".
What most "right-wing" thinkers ignore is the fact that they consider excluding others IS THE REASON that people exclude THEM.
That's also part of what is freedom. Your freedom ends at the point where you limit the freedom of others. Otherwise the other person wouldn't be free.
That's also why most non-right-wing thinkers don't consider that another point of view, but simply selfish and asshole-ish.
Therefore if you want to argue your point, maybe you shouldn't highlight what you fight AGAINST (i.e. "left-wingers out", "refugees out") but what you fight FOR, which in some regards also boils down to respecting each other's freedom, right? Show that and you will find that doors will open for discussion.
I personally discuss with both people who would be defined as left-wing as well as with people who would be defined as right-wing. Both sides have reasonable people and some reasonable arguments, that are sadly sometimes hidden underneath many layers of bullshit.
Each server can have its own rules and can choose to block whichever other servers it wants. But besides that, they're pretty similar. The big draw of Mastodon is that it doesn't really matter that much which server you use. If the admin of your server starts doing stuff you don't like, you can move to another server and direct your followers there. (Compare this to centralized social networks like Twitter and Facebook. If you don't like what their owners do, your only option is to leave and lose access to the network entirely.)
In addition to the other replies: one big draw of specific servers/instances is the local timeline, a feed of every post on a server. While you can connect to anyone, discovering new people is much easier on the same instance. For this reason people prefer small, specific instances.
The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.
There _might_ be filters. Mastodon server admins can filter posts from certain foreign servers. For example the metalhead.club administrator chose to filter some instances which spam a lot or post extremist text and /or child pornography.
Often these filters are necessary for legal reasons, e.g. some jananese servers allow sketches of naked children ("loli"), which are considered child pornography in Germany and are therefore illegal in the server's home country.
I noticed that too with a lot of instances, the one I settled on has rules that sets off less red flags (and honestly, I'm really tempted to self host)