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by leereeves 1324 days ago
That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation.

But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
2 comments
cmrdporcupine 1324 days ago
It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary split like you describe.

Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.

Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.

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RobotToaster 1324 days ago
IIRC both Gab and TS disabled federation, so that isn't a good indicator either way.

It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.

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leereeves 1324 days ago
How does "it would be up to each node" work?

Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.

Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?

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cmrdporcupine 1324 days ago
I am not fully clear on how threads are handled, but, yes, in principle visibility of users and posts is based on who they choose to federate with. So C would not see any content that originated out of B. Which AFAIK includes replies, etc.

I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.

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LuisAPI 1324 days ago
No.

Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.

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leereeves 1323 days ago
> C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.

Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?

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Cyberdog 1324 days ago
This more or less has already happened, though there are more than two "groups" depending on how you define such things. Broadly speaking, there are free speech instances which allow edgelord teens to come in and N-word their hearts out (as well as do more mundane things like question the mainstream narrative on elections, the pandemic, and, yes, this Pelosi story) so long as they don't do anything actually illegal, and there are more regulated instances where "hate speech" is explicitly forbidden. As the instances in the latter group don't like the practices of the former group, the former insulates from the latter by defederating those instances, meaning that insances in both the former and the latter can generally only federate with each other. (Then there are the pro-MAP/CP/lolicon instances, which are generally defederated by both of the previous groups and also can largely only federate with each other.)

Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.

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