[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.

[paul_funyun]

People moving to Mastodon fall into two groups, by and large - people who like it for normative reasons, and people moving there to see what the buzz is about. The first group sees practical concerns as an obstacle to be defeated; they would say you ought to move to Mastodon regardless of technical problems or lack of utility. The second isn't defending it in offsite discussion board.

In terms of utility for social networking, there's no defending Mastodon relative to a Facebook or Twitter. The small userbase is reason enough not to switch; what use is a social networking site if the people you want to interact with aren't on it?

That there are so few if any people who both recommend Mastodon and don't have moral/political objections to Twitter is damning. Where are the objectors who recommend it on purely descriptive grounds? It's a bit like GNU - it's cool, but don't try to tell people it's a viable replacement for Windows.

[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.