[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.

[camgunz]

You could say the exact same thing if federation could be forced. You can make whatever facile analogy you want; my point has always been there's bad scenarios no matter what.

[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.

[camgunz]

> finding a server with rational administration is not cheap

Sure it is: choose the server everyone else chose. We know exactly how all this stuff works out because we already hashed it out with email. Everyone will just use the equivalent of Gmail and you'll have to do what they say or they won't deliver your emails/posts.

Nilay Patel was right when he said the essential product of social media is content moderation (or a spam filter, whatever you want to call it). Some service will come along and say "we filter out 100% of the stuff 80% of you don't want" and that'll be that. Services/protocols that don't facilitate that will be replaced by those that do. Maybe it's hard to see now, but we're in the "overthrow our tyrannical overlords" phase of the internet cycle. Next up is "please someone make this safe/usable for mere mortals". Centralization etc. is a red herring.

[phoe-krk]

Your claim that Twitter has rational administration is a very bold one. (Which accidentally strengthens your confirmation of me "hitting the nail on the head".)

[whatshisface]

I was thinking of Bluesky when I said that, but it was true for Twitter for the use of the word rational I am talking about (keeping personal beefs out of it and at least trying to be impartial). Elon Musk has since made himself, and X, the perfect example of an instance admin on a power trip! That's a good analogy, actually. You might be on a moderation team with sensible feedback policies but the odds are very high of a new user ending up on the property, and following the rules, of a miniature Elon.