[skissane]

> That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation

People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.

But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.

Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.

[pera]

Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!"

At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.

[skissane]

Big e-mail providers are primarily concerned with spam–which is defined by the volume and unsolicited nature of the messages, rather than the opinions they express. Sometimes their attempts at stopping it impose collateral damage, and their response to that collateral damage can be arbitrary and capricious–but that's a different issue from what we are talking about with Mastodon coordinated de-federation, which is much more intentional than collateral.

The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.

By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1

[worrycue]

> But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.

That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

On this Lemmy thing I guess the solution is to just maintain multiple accounts - each on a server connected to a particular cluster of servers.

[TeMPOraL]

> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

Almost no one runs a personal instance. Most people have accounts on multi user instances. This is unlike reddit, where accounts are global and independent of subreddits. On reddit, mods from subreddit B can preemptively ban you after they learn that subreddit A doesn't like you. But they can't ban entire subreddit, say C, so that every user that's subscribing to C can no longer interact with anyone subscribed to B. This is the scenario that plagues Mastodon - not individual blocks, but defederating whole instances.

[skissane]

> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

I've been avoiding Reddit recently, but when I used to use it – I never agreed with that kind of behaviour, and any subreddit which does it is one I don't want to be part of.

However, that said, that's community-level not instance-level, and so I'm not sure what that has to do with federation.