[irusensei]

Let’s say you are a journalist or wathever today profession that depends on reaching people. After the twitter fallout you went to this new journalist centric instance and managed to recover a good following. Months later and you had a bad intercalating with the server admin which ended up not being a level headed person as you previously thought. He deletes your account… not even a chance to use the migration tools to redirect profile.

[mariusor]

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

[irusensei]

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

[CM30]

I'm pretty sure they'll ban you if it's 'inconvenient' not to, like if a company raises potential legal hell, your posts get mass reported, you end up in the midst of a huge internet controversy/witchhunt, etc.

A large company is no more immune to that than a small one, or a community run site would be.

And at least with an individual or small company/group, you have someone to put your case to in that situation. Someone who can probably offer support and potentially lift the ban rather than the 'Get fucked' attitude of Facebook, Google, etc.

[fragmede]

I assure you, individuals, especially ones with the tiniest bit of power, as just as capable of telling you to "get fucked". Some of them work at Twitter or Facebook. Others run your HOA or are university professors. Or Mastodon servers.

The server admin can kick you off just because they feel like it. At least with a large public platform there's the possibility of public exposure of bad behavior.

[mariusor]

Tell that to Kathy Griffin and Jeph Jaques. And even before that, I doubt that people getting banned were considering it as "not personal".

[irusensei]

Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts?

I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.

[mariusor]

I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.

[irusensei]

I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear that I’m glad people are enjoying Mastodon but I take issue when everyone seems to be omitting the tradeoffs. To make things worse im being seen as some kind of concern troll for pointing it out.

[skybrian]

How would you find them? There's no website describing fediverse admins and their reputations. Most of the time you don't even know who the admin is. It could be anyone.

This isn't different than other websites. It's true of web forums too. It's fine, just don't post anything you can't afford to lose.

Experience: on my third Mastodon account. The first one disappeared without notice.

[toofy]

i think in many cases users are closer--node wise and influence wise--to their server admins than they were to twitter's moderation team. always? of course not. but, if this is a major concern for you, then its easy to either start your own server with a group of people or even spin up on your own. this was not possible under twitter.