From my personal experience in using Mastodon, the node operators basically have different ideas about what is acceptable or not and black/white list different nodes based on these ideas rather than leaving it up to the user to decide who they want to see posts from.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.
I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.
The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.
"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...
Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.
I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.
The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.