[cjslep]

You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange.

Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason.

Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs.

Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.

[sneak]

It isn't contradictory or incompatible to say that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and also simultaneously believe that censorship, especially the silent or invisible kind, is bad.

Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...

[cjslep]

Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here.

This is a categorically different problem than MITM.

[dependenttypes]

> Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons

There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content).

In addition most mastodon instances do not disclose their policies via AP. See for example https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation

[cjslep]

You're right, my mistake. In some cases it is not transparent.

However, this is not a systematic censorship problem, unlike centralized services with opaque policy language and a complete boot out the door. People are free to run their own instances or have multiple accounts across different instances.

Whether you think they're correct is irrelevant to the question at hand. Freedom of speech and association means you're free to not federate/talk to those problematic instances, and maybe you'd be much happier for it. On the other hand, not being OK with it and trying to fight for transparency means you're trying to externally force these communities to be run in the way you want, which may be received well, but not always b/c forcing unwanted change is exactly the opposite point of Federation: communities will be built the way their members want to build it. Like the real world, some value transparency and some don't.

It's one thing to argue specific bans about specific instances and disagree on the other party's interpretation; it's a totally different claim to say that the entire system is corrupt with opaque censorship.

Mastodon != Fediverse

[dependenttypes]

Do not put words in my mouth. I only replied to the point regarding transparency in your post. I really don't care about the rest.

[cjslep]

I'm sorry! Based on context, I understood your post to refute mine to support sneak. And sneak and I have had heated debates about the Fediverse before, and you've stumbled into the latest one. :)

In the future, it would definitely help me and others understand your motivation better if you could even include one more sentence in your communication like "Just here for a correction: some instances are transparent..."

I will strive to be more charitable.

[zaarn]

>claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content

That can be a simple issue of jurisdiction. Mastodon.social is hosted in Germany (IIRC), so they have to adhere to German law. That means, for example, while hatespeech isn't strictly illegal in the US, it certainly is in Germany, it even has a fairly good legal definition. Or take the Japanese instances, which aren't well federated or have media-bans because of differences in media legality. And lastly it can also be simply the case that the instance is not moderating (ie, they write 'no illegal content' but do not care).

Both the statement that an instance shared illegal content and that the same instance was banned for illegal content can be true at the same time.