[skissane]

Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?

Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?

[lost_tourist]

I don't, but I don't want to see it either or allow them to see my stuff since I'm extremely anti-nazi and anti-fascist and don't them to come trolling me. Nor do I want them using my resources to try and bring young impressionable people into their fold.

[fzeroracer]

> Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts

Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track.

> Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?

Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider.

> Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?

Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.

[skissane]

> Email providers very explicitly do care.

That wasn't what I was asking though – I was asking whether a user should care. Why should I care who else uses my email provider, if I never interact with them?

> You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example.

Gmail will only ban you for "especially egregious things". The Mastodon Server Covenant clause 1 calls for banning people for things which Gmail would not consider "especially egregious". A big difference.

> Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare

I don't consider who a CDN's other customers might be when deciding which CDN to use. I'm sure many CDNs provide services to websites advocating viewpoints which I view as foolish, even reprehensible–but I don't see what relevance that has to my own decision as to which CDN I should use for my own site.

> Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits

I think that kind of behaviour is toxic, and I would never knowingly participate in any subreddit that did that. But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.

[fzeroracer]

> But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.

Instance == Community. The rest of your post I've already addressed and I'm not going to go over again. You calling out the Mastodon Server Covenant does not particularly make sense because it's not an authority, it's a listing of servers. Again you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works given that you keep using incorrect comparisons.

[skissane]

> Instance == Community

A whole instance is not necessarily a single community.

People keep on defending Mastodon by comparing it to email – an email provider is not necessarily a community.

If we are talking about a federated Reddit-clone (Mastodon is more a federated Twitter-clone) – the communities are the subreddits (or whatever the clone chooses to call them) not the instances.

[fzeroracer]

An instance is a community, period. This is like trying to argue that subforums on a forum is not a single community. They may be smaller blocks within a larger community, but they still form a larger community as a whole and adhere to a generalized ruleset.

You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop. Simple as that. Ctrl-F this thread and every response that has to do with email starts with you. I've explicitly compared it to IRC and forums.

Your last point is incorrect. Beehaw is a reddit alternative. They defederated from other instances because other instances had free registeration, which was resulting in users from that instance trolling and doing low quality posts in their community (according to them). They can do this because the instance is the community.

[skissane]

> You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop.

In previous discussions here about Mastodon, people have been defending it by comparing it to email.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35579181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582762