If the policy is defined then I don't see a problem with that. The issue with Twitter is that Musk openly tweeted that he's a free speech absolutist and even said the things he now started to ban, were allowed.
I think Musk and his followers must realize that free speech is a marketing campaign, and Elon's hypocrisy on going back on free speech is embracing the reality of things.
Musk said the ElonJet account was allowed even though he thought it was a "direct personal safety risk".
He went completely against that and journalists that reported on it when he banned the account and the journalists.
Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying. He just woke up on the wrong side of bed and decided to ban, perhaps to see how far he could push things and whether his "fans" would support him.
He then starts a Twitter poll to democratise the decision to unban the journalists. The result is to unban them now. He didn't like that result and did another poll, except with the news that he was doing it again, the poll was even more in favour of unbanning them now.
He's a hypocrite deciding what to do based on what some brown nosing fan tweets him or what he dreamt of that night.
>Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying
99% of a dox is taking public information from obscure sources and making it easily accessible in one place. Doxxing can be sharing public information about someone without their permission. Being public doesn't make it not doxxing.
So if I used publicly available information (property tax records, court records, vehicle registration records, whatever) to post Brian K. White's home address, it "wouldn't be doxxing"?
Do you really agree that making the public location of Elon's plane more public and easily accessible is doxxing though? I get it if it was the real time location of Elon within 100 meters, or his personal house in a forum with the intention to do harm or something, but the location of a plane that narrows your location down to a city and requires government grade anti air missiles to realistically expect to take down while in flight? The increased security risk of the latter seems like a rounding error to me, which makes the justification for removal very suspect because the thing it does dramatically increase is the public knowledge of how much of a climate hypocrite the guy is flying as much as he does.
Yes, I definitely consider it doxxing. Whether doxxing someone should be allowed is another question and twitter for years has decided that doxxing is against the rules and doxxers typically get shadow banned.
The information shared was not from an obscure source nor was it from a site that wasn’t easily accessible. It was the mirroring of 1 piece of information from 1 location to another location.
I think the fundamental problem, if we ignore Musk's hypocrisy is that Musk appears to be using his newfound moderator abilities capriciously to silence people he dislikes, without any sort of standard for behavior. With the plane thing it seems like he invented a rule to justify his behavior, and it gives the impression he will continue inventing rules whenever it suits him, not because these rules are good, but because he needs a rule to justify banning someone who annoyed him. And eventually he'll be in the classic corrupt regulator situation where he has a rule to ban pretty much anyone who annoys him, and they will be selectively applied only to people who annoys him.
He needs to show he's a trustworthy moderator who won't behave like this, and his behavior makes it pretty hard to believe he will be.
People did in fact have a problem with Twitter too.
It's just more obvious for Musk since 1) he prioritized himself over doing a more general sweep including more than what affects him alone and 2) he has been obnoxiously vocal for multiple years now, painting a massive target and begging the public to troll him.
At this point, this formulation of "free speech" complaint is nothing but a dog-whistle, "they're not interested in platforming my racist trolling, wah! So much for the tolerant left."
Which is true, but also, I don't care, and I'm happy with it, because we're better off and other speech flourishes.
Realistically, each Mastodon instance sets its own policies. Most publish lists of the instances they've banned. When I looked at those lists a month ago, it seemed like the median instance banned 6-10 other instances. Typically, the banned instances included a particular instance which publishes a lot of Nazi symbols, which are illegal in many European countries. Other frequently-banned instances included ones with lots of NSFW content, including a now-extinct instance used by sex workers. Also, spammy instances got banned a lot.
However, a handful of Mastodon instances, mostly ones used by frequently harassed groups, banned dozens of other instances. This was one of their major selling points to their users: "Join here, and we'll provide a curated experience with fewer harassers."
No instance that I saw banned linking to Twitter, and I can't think of any instance that banned journalists from major mainstream papers.
But the thing about Mastodon is that if you really want to talk to Nazi wannabes, you can always set up your own instance. However, many people may choose not to talk with you, because many people dislike wannabe Nazis and their buddies and don't invite them to the cool parties. Almost every worthwhile social space has always had rules about who's not invited.
Elon Musk has every right to shout loudly about freedom of speech, and then ban journalists and links to competitors. And his critics have every right to mock him for this.
It seems reasonable to define the "main Fediverse" as the set of servers that most other servers federate with. There are distributed blacklists of servers like https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock, and I would not consider the servers listed there to be on the "main Fediverse" since they cannot communicate with many of the larger Fediverse servers.
The fediverse to which the most popular instances, such as mastodon.social, belong.
All the instances in the main fediverse have practically the same moderation rules and if you don't apply them to your instance they ban you and stop federating with you.
I think those ideas are not as contradictory as you assert.
small private forums also had some draconian moderation (well, some of them did for sure), but the key point was that they were small, targeted and competitive with each other.
Too draconian, and people leave; too loose and people abuse.
The thing is, you kinda know what you're in for with small forums (or in this case mastadon instances), the servers themselves do more to say what they're targeting and what niche they have; they do not pretend to be an apolitical platform or to not have opinions.
That's the major difference, you can go to other Mastadon instances and find people you enjoy being around. With Twitter there are some hidden "rules" (which used to align with the US west coast ideals, and now seem to align more with the trumpy right-wing thing), with Mastadon it's more likely that you know what the rules are.
Yes, but the main difference is that twitter (and all the centralised social media players) are trying to have their cake and eat it.
> You can't prosecute us for things that are published as we are a platform for communication, we're not responsible for what's communicated!
> We can moderate and ban you for saying things we disagree with based on what we interpret our "rules" to be (in social media's case: whatever the West-Coast likes and Copyright violations)
With Mastodon (or phpbb forums of yore) the former is false, so it's at least internally consistent, and of course you have the choice to move away, it's not 1 moderation style for the whole planet across all cultures.
Completely agree! A world with lots of private property that people can enter and exit freely is one compatible with liberalism. A giant privately owned public square is a terrible idea.
Mastodon used to appeal mostly to the fringes that Twitter never served properly. That means queer people, but it also means Nazis, including the self-described ones. So having good moderation is quite essential to a good experience.
It's the hypocrisy which is the issue there.