No, it’s saying that it’s not enough of an improvement to warrant the gulf of work required to make it compelling to anyone beyond the few people who use it today.
We really need to move beyond this mindset where we think anyone will use an exact replica of an incumbent with some silver bullet tweak nobody actually cares about. It’s like thinking “Twitter but built with Rust” is compelling and getting mad at the sheeple when they couldn’t care less.
The second paragraph is lamenting the fact that other instances can refuse to federate with you:
> Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like.
No, it's like me telling you that you can't be talking to 'tgsovlerkhgsel, or I'll start petitioning everyone you know to stop talking to you, giving each of them the same ultimatum to ensure maximum compliance.
The toxic part here isn't someone banning/defederating you, but someone who didn't ban/defederate you getting threatened by others that they'd better do that or else everyone else will defederate them.
The point is that this isn't a characteristic of the platform but of the users. The users don't want to be federated with someone who is federated with someone they don't like.
How do you fix that, just force everyone to federate with each other? How do you stop people from forking their own clients to remove the forced federation?
Right, it's users, not tech (it's always people, not tech - Twitter is a problem not because it's centralized, but because of decisions made by people at the helm).
What both 'tgsovlerkhgsel and I are trying to say is that there is this kind of realpolitik going on at Mastodon, of which you should be aware before considering to join. You start going against the "party line", you risk getting defederated or, if you're an user on someone else's instance, having your instance's admins pressured to ban you on the threat of the whole instance getting defederated by others. And it's a significant threat, because as much as Mastodon is distributed, people still want to stay connected to the major instances.
I myself moved from Twitter to Mastodon a while ago and very much enjoy it, but I also try to not say anything there that would attract interest of the defederationists.
So start a federation that doesn't do that. Yes, it probably won't have many users. Once again, it's a people problem, and a hard one.
Maybe a blockchain? A public and unalterable ledger (which is what a blockchain is, of course). But being completely unmoderated users will use tools to moderate for them, tools that can block content they don't like. Indeed, users would coalesce and build lists of who to listen to, and who to not, and they'd keep that list on the unalterable and uncensorable blockchain.
At some point, people learn that their lives are better without this or that group constantly coming in and will take protective/separatists measures. Which is exactly what you are seeing.
That is fine when done at the individual level. What people are complaining about is when the platform makes that decision for you. It is fine to block a phone number from calling you, it is not fine to block people from being able to use a phone (by means of blocking access to all phone networks) without a court decision.
Now individual networks are private companies and might chose to have stricter moderation, but 1) that should place them in a different legal category, and 2) there should be enough competition to provide valid alternatives to the people being blocked from such networks, otherwise it risks abuse of dominant position, given the monopoly of access.
We are discussing Mastodon, so that complaint is not valid. If you don’t like that your instance has stopped federating with another, you are free to join a different one or start your own.
We really need to move beyond this mindset where we think anyone will use an exact replica of an incumbent with some silver bullet tweak nobody actually cares about. It’s like thinking “Twitter but built with Rust” is compelling and getting mad at the sheeple when they couldn’t care less.