[whatshisface]

I think the issues with server blocks are mainly related to the way administrators use them to settle personal beefs or play a nuclear negotiation game with other admins who they want to impose their moderation policies on. "Moderate my way or you'll all be defederated."

Mastodon administrators aren't "faceless corporations," they are people with as many personality flaws and weaknesses as your coworkers or any other group of techies you didn't get to choose to work with. Some of them are Machiavellian narcissists, who want to decide how the entire network functions - and they're not afraid to use their ability to sever social connections with unaware users as a negotiating tool.

[phoe-krk]

> Moderate my way or you'll all be defederated.

And it's a feature, too. The users trust their administration team with their presence on a given instance and actually defer their moderation choices to them - something that's impossible on other, centralized platforms. If a moderator of an instance serves the moderation wishes of the users of that instance, and everyone on that instance is happy, then what's the problem?

[whatshisface]

You might be imagining a server full of spam and Nazis, totally unmoderated except for compliance with basic laws, when you think of a server block. I am talking about a case such as where an admin had an argument with one user on another server and then blocked the entire server as a negotiation tactic to force the user's admin to ban them. The users on the Machiavellian admin's server didn't know this was happening because server blocks show up in the form of mysterious disappeances of some of your friends.

The free market argument for the belief that everything an admin does is necessarily good if they still have any users left after they do it is flawed, because users do not know all that much about what their admins are doing, and don't have a way of knowing whether a server they're thinking about switching to is better or worse.

[camgunz]

You can imagine all kinds of scenarios, but it comes down to "are users of server X forced to handle content from server Y". It can be both good and bad, but either way the Fediverse chose "no".

[whatshisface]

If the reason for "not forcing them to handle content from server Y" is that the admin of server X had a name calling spat with an individual user on server X, the fact that the fediverse makes instance admins into miniature dukes and dutchesses, complete with wars and Honor, is an unalloyed pain. ;-)

[camgunz]

Again it doesn't really matter because it's just the way it works, but it's also a feature for server admins. Imagine being harassed by someone, or imagine that person harassing your users, blah blah blah. Is there some hypothetical where this feature is abused in a super petty way? Sure. Welcome to all features in all software.

[whatshisface]

Let's take a gun as an example. You could use it to shoot a bad guy, but there are a lot of times where the person who got shot was a good guy, and a lot of other times it's by accident. The same goes for moderation - you can justify handing out the power to cut off connections between entire communities to random people by thinking of the ways it could be used for good but it doesn't get you out of dealing with the ways it can be used to harm.

[phoe-krk]

No, I'm imagining arbitrary servers. The admin's right to block a server still stands even over petty arguments like that, and it's the whole instance that will get to bear the consequences, with the admin being the one responsible for the block and the users being responsible for trusting that instance's administration team. That's the trust that Fediverse is actually built upon - everything else flows from there.

I'm not saying that everything an admin does is necessarily good if they have users left. I'm saying that if a user disagrees with something their admin does, they're free to reach out and dispute it, or switch instances. Some users won't notice, others won't care - but if they don't notice and don't care, then there's no problem to solve.

[whatshisface]

"If you don't like it, you can leave," is an argument with limited effectiveness. First, unless users spend a lot of time talking about servers, they won't know where to leave to. Remember the great migration, where we were all saying it didn't matter which server you picked because they all federated? It turns out it does, and they don't - and all the new users who were anxious about joining the "right community" were right!

Furthermore, if users did spend a lot of time talking about their admin's moderation, I guarantee it would come in the form of a lot of complaining, maybe even entitled-sounding complaining, without much deference to the admin's right to do what they want on the server they are, admittedly, paying for. There is no way for the community to figure out who's servers are good to be on without continually hashing out who is doing a good job, which means, in some cases, disapproving.

As for contacting your admin to say you think they're being petty... That is not likely to work! You'd probably just get yourself banned before having a chance to migrate your followers!

[phoe-krk]

> First, unless users spend a lot of time talking about servers, they won't know where to leave to.

You can literally see everyone's instance right next to their name on most Fediverse clients - I'm Michał "phoe" Herda, but also @[e-mail], which already gives people one more possibility to choose from as long as they see my posts pop up. Then, there's some independent instance browsers, and, finally, you can just ask a #question in a public post and ask for boosts.

> As for contacting your admin to say you think they're being petty... Do you think that would work?

Yes. I'm a mod on functional.cafe, we've had a few instances of our users contacting us with moderation questions and we've asked our users for feedback several times as well, and we've managed to resolve them to almost everyone's enjoyment. I'll probably repeat - if you can't trust your instance admin, then it's on you. There's no higher authority to appeal to, so quite literally the only option is "if you don't like it, you can leave", except you have hundreds of choices with distinct moderation policies.

It's the same as with great migration - if you ended up on an instance that doesn't resonate with you, then hopping to another one is even cheaper than it used to be (with the new "account moved to" feature that, AFAIR, wasn't there during the great migration).

Finding a good instance that suits you well isn't exactly cheap; you're not a product, meaning there's no one who makes money on you always having a good initial experience. That's the cost associated with the meaning of you being a person, not a product - you need to find your place in society, and there are instances as generalist, specialized, bland, and wicked as you can imagine for you to choose from.

[whatshisface]

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said finding a server with rational administration is not cheap. The competition - for those who can tolerate one-liner Twitter culture - is free.