[AustinDev]

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

[TulliusCicero]

People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all.

It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.

[arcade79]

The problem is centralized rules. Different cultures has different rules. Joining it up to one platform and then enforcing one cultures rules on all the other culture is Not Okay.

There are different views on nudity around the world. Nipples are normal where I'm from. There are different views and limitations on speech around the world. There are different views on copyright around the world. What's the term limit? There are different views on what constitutes animal abuse around the world. Try posting about the local bullfights on facebook. Or try posting videos from the cockfight from the cockfighting arena.

Different mastodon servers, and heck, maybe different fediverses, will fuel diversity in this regard, without One Set of Rules to Rule them All.

[TulliusCicero]

On some level I agree. However, a huge part of what made Twitter appealing to people is precisely that it was essentially one giant instance, with sort of shared culture and rules. While I think Mastodon is fine for some people, it may not have the same 'global appeal', limiting its ability to really be a Twitter replacement.

[rhn_mk1]

Mastodon has censorship tools built in. It's up to instance admins to use them.

[smaudet]

Makes me wonder if you can even build something like this, if decentralized systems must spend more time filtering junk, on a system which makes it easy to send it, it will always be too easy for malevolent actors to takedown.

Unless you can incur a significant cost to these activities, e.g. requiring social capital (burning social capital with e.g. hate/disinformation), or physical (e.g. access requires boxes which cost some small fee and can be blacklisted)...

Perhaps some of mastodon inefficient behavior can be leveraged here?

[jimbob45]

It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.

[nagonago]

Depends on your definition of interesting people. If you mean celebrities and public figures, I agree that most will probably never join the Fediverse because of the high barrier to entry, although I think there's more to that problem than just a lack of centralized moderation.

That said, in my opinion there are plenty of interesting people in the fediverse already. Personally I don't really care if the fediverse is widely adopted by celebrities and public figures or not.