[class4behavior]

The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.

>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?

Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.

[ShadowBanThis01]

But why force people to categorize themselves? There's no special type of Twitter for people who are musicians, for example, or people who do airbrush paintings of squirrels. Who knows what you might want to send messages about tomorrow or next year or in half an hour?

Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.

Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.

[shadowfacts]

No one's forcing people to categorize themselves. You can be on a non-specific server, or you can be on one for a particular community—but even then, nothing precludes you from talking about other things. It may be the case that instance pickers/lists/descriptions aren't clear enough that you don't _have_ to limit yourself, but there's nothing forced about it.

[neltnerb]

The reality is that every server will have some local version of a bunch of the most popular things, and that will eventually reach a steady state with a tail. A few big ones, more medium size ones, decent number of small ones...

There's no point denying it, discoverability will be harder and communities will be smaller. So if you actually know of a really good community or magazine to point someone to, just do that. They can read the content without logging in. If they want to participate, then the server that they found a community they want to participate in is the obvious place to create an account, from which they can see everything else as you've said.

Little is being forced by the choice of server/instance, but that's not helping solve the hard part. The hard part is them finding what they need to find. They need a librarian, not a tech support desk. Tech people constantly assume the solution is technical... make the popular destinations popular by talking about them everywhere.

[TeMPOraL]

> The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.

Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.

Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.

[sxg]

Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.

[cubefox]

It would be interesting to know how many moderators Twitter has. They do have ad income, so they can afford to employ full time staff. Then again, Reddit does well with volunteer moderators.

[croutonwagon]

I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

[vGPU]

Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard.

This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.

[WJW]

Well, turn the automagic updating of the banlists off then. It's configurable, but it's not the default because most people are not interested in seeing the posts of (as an example) people who upload kiddie porn, nor do they want that on their hard drive in the off chance the FBI comes by with questions.

[cubefox]

So the possibility of highly illegal content justifies a block list which perhaps includes mainly blocking unwanted political opinions? That argument sounds familiar.

[JohnFen]

I think the point is that the blocklist is optional. If you don't like it, don't use it. Or make your own that is more directly tuned to your tastes.

[cubefox]

It's the default, and I guess people mostly won't notice if it blocks too much. So the effect would be pretty similar.

[nobody9999]

>I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

IIUC (and I may not) there are blocklists that are shared between fediverse instances that, depending on the configuration, are automagically updated/applied on a regular basis.

Perhaps that's what's going on with your instance?

Edit: Modified comment to address GP's specific issue.