[mariusor]

> moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?

[bouncing]

I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether alt text is “required” for images.

Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.

It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.

[M2Ys4U]

>I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques.

It's social networking. Of course there are going to be cliques. That's what happens when you put a non-trivial number of humans in one space (be it virtual or physical).

[vidarh]

So is Twitter, and every other social network. They just don't give you the tools to clearly delineate boundaries.

[bouncing]

There are debates and groups on other networks.

But there aren’t schisms over alt text or content warnings for food on Threads.

[prmoustache]

I haven't observed any debates on these topics from my fediverse account so I guess you see them only if you are looking for them.

[vidarh]

Is it a feature to you that whole sections of society are absent from it? Because otherwise those views would be there.

[sharperguy]

I think it's more of an arcitectural issue. If you were a node operator, would you peer with a dedicated racial hatred AP node? What if a small minority of your users complained that you blocked it.

With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users can just get that content from some other relay without having to create a new account and move their entire social graph over.

[vidarh]

This, to me, is an argument against Nostr.

To elaborate, I prefer that the barrier is greater.

[echelon]

Why should minds be put in jails? Why should we segregate into like-minded and undesirables?

We're better than this.

I grew up with [x views, y political party], but because the early internet was open and accepting and not at all like this, I was able to see the broader world and wholly new perspectives. Now the bias is to shit on, shame, and block everyone. That's not going to build a better society.

The internet pioneers would be aghast at all of the "happy little" censorship happening today.

I've been banned from several subreddits for leaving comments in subreddits the moderators dislike. Removed completely by automation. They don't even realize my comments weren't in support of their favorite issue to hate on.

Censorship is wrong. Put blinders on your own feed all day long if you so choose, but stop trying to put cages on other people's minds and voices.

[vidarh]

No minds are "put in jails".

But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.

I'm free to choose to set standards, and the standard of requiring them to have a second account if they both want access to me and to content I find deplorable is a really low barrier.

And others are free to choose to commune with me in the spaces I want to spend time in, and communities are free to set their standards.

I've not argued for censorship. I've argued for my right to shield myself very mildly from people I want nothing to do with, and for others to choose to do so with me.

You're free to say what you want on your instance or those of people who believe as you do or are fine with your speech.

Nobody is stopping your speech, just your ability to impose it on those of us who does not want it near us.

[echelon]

> No minds are "put in jails".

I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly troubling.

I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me on sight, which figures. From that moment, I've been auto-banned from several trans and liberal spaces for posting in /r/conservative. I'm LGBT and my partner is trans.

This authoritarian censorship is toxic and pervasive. It's just not right. Stopping the flow of ideas is how the pressure valves stop working. It's how polarization deepens and is how our democracy ends and authoritarians arise.

> But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.

You can block me all you want. You can subscribe to a list of HN contrarians to filter forever. But you have no right to filter me from other people that don't willfully subscribe to your banlist.

Lock yourself in your house all you want. You can't keep me from enjoying the outside public [1], from meeting people in the public, or from me seeing and meeting other people you've locked out of your house. Or even going as far as to say you can't lock people inside your house without their consent or knowledge.

You do what you want in your house. But don't desire to make your house rules the default for all humanity.

[1] "the public" is an allusion to a P2P, non-federated, user-first social media protocol. Something like email.

[vidarh]

They willfully sign up to my ban list if they join my instance, same as users on Reddit willfully sign up to the the rules and the moderators when they join a subreddit.

Nobody has argued for the power to keep you from enjoying the public. But my instances are not public space, neither are subreddits.

If you want to run an uncensored space for your city, you can. If you want an uncensored place for conservatives, you can have that too. And so on. The reality is that no such places stay functioning if they are uncensored, and so the question tends to be if they are open enough that you don't notice.

I'll note we're having this discussion on one of the more heavily moderated forums available.

[prmoustache]

You are pretty naive if you think there are barriers on networks that allows you to publish publicly.

Someone blocks you? Fine you can still access in incognito/private mode anyway. This is true on twitter, activitypub, AT too.

If you really want barriers, you should use networks that work on encrypted private groups.

[vidarh]

You are pretty naive if you think these choices were made without thinking through the implications.

That someone has to use icognito/private mode is a barrier.

Sometimes it's an insufficient barrier, but in practice what we see is that often minor little limitations like that are the right tradeoff between restricting access in ways that starts to cause problems vs. adding enough friction to deter a whole lot of unwanted behaviour when your goal is to keep the system as open as possible.

Going to encrypted private groups when just throwing up a minor limitation is enough to achieve the desired effect for most people would be wildly excessive. E.g. I don't care if people I block can see my posts - I care that I don't have to host their stuff on my instance. Others do care if people they block can see their posts.

As it is, Mastodon instances, and other parts of the fediverse, operate with multiple levels of privacy, from fully open, to somewhat selective blocks, to authorized fetch + limited federation (whitelisted federation only, w/only logged in users or whitelisted servers able to access posts at all), to at least one group with a dual-level instance setup where the "inner" instance only federates with the "outer" instance and outsiders have no direct access to the inner instance at all.

That we can pick and choose on a sliding scale how closed off we want to be rather than pick a binary is a feature (and nothing prevents anyone from adding encryption to posts using ActivityPub if they want to; in fact I have a side-project that probably will add the option of encrypted content).

[rsingel]

I see lots of folks I disagree with on Mastodon. But thankfully I'm now not seeing the Nazis, the fascist tech folks like Balaji S, or the Tankies.

I still hear about their awfulness, I just don't have to see it in my microblog timeline.

I'm not missing anything, make much better connections with people, have respectful disagreements.

Ain't nobody being censored. I'm just no longer wasting oxygen on the outrage mongers.

Oh and being banned from a bunch of subreddits says more about you, than about moderation.

Pretty sure I'm happy to have a feed that doesn't include you in it.

[vidarh]

> Oh and being banned from a bunch of subreddits says more about you, than about moderation.

While it is tempting to conclude that, and my initial reaction was similar, anyone would be banned from a lot of subreddits if they were to seek out controversy by going into spaces they disagree with and state their opinions. It can say a lot about someone, but doesn't have to.

I agree with you overall, though. There are outright Nazi instances - nobody is being censored. But they have no right to force their way into communities that do not want to interact with them, and on Mastodon we have the power to enforce that, or we can choose to delegate it to people we trust.

[saurik]

Because... you are terrified that you might manage to figure out how to access such content, and need to make it extremely difficult for you to do so, even on purpose? (I clearly don't understand.)

[vidarh]

No, because I want to be able to choose to interact with people who are fine with there being barriers to similar types of content.

If some feel they have a compelling reason to straddle both, they still can, so it denies them nothing, but sometimes even small extra barriers helps set a tone for communities.

[echelon]

> I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and they're broken.

You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that if they choose. But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone. Nobody should have that power.

Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't change.

> If you're not welcome in a community

This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that? You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're seeking to shun me already.

We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing petty team sports.

In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want to spend time or energy advocating for.

[mariusor]

> But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone.

In this hypothetical I'm only making the call for the people of my instance, not for everyone. Like I said, you'd be free to join other instances where people are willing to entertain your point of view.

The audacity of assuming that the server that I pay and care for should be a vehicle for content that I don't agree with is baffling to me. It's my house, my rules, simple as.

[echelon]

Sure, that's absolutely your right.

I just want spaces for me and others where this isn't the default imposed upon everyone. I don't want to subscribe to [x filtering] unless I choose.

House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons.

The legislators are going to make rules that enforce these technological straddles, and the defaults will slowly change in directions you neither anticipate nor enjoy.

We shouldn't accept ActivityPub as the end state solution to these problems. If anything, large instances (and thus their owners) will win out, and this just entrenches the status quo of tiny cabals in power censoring things that displease them.

[vidarh]

My Mastodon instance is not a public commons. If I choose to let you join it, it is on my terms. If you don't like that, there are others, or you can run your own. The "public commons" is the system of federation, not the instances.

[mariusor]

> House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons.

I can't understand how you can think that fediverse instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under the rules of the people that keep them running and not everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on their servers.

The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the many software that you can just pick up and run yourself.

[echelon]

Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media", when in reality it's not much different than Reddit without central corporate control and profit.

Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power dynamics and the end users are not powerful.

My concern is that we stop here and this becomes "distributed social networking". What we need more than anything -- more than Mastodon and ActivityPub -- are protocols that enable peer to peer communication where no node can impose its will upon others and the barrier to participation in the broad community doesn't demand fielty to powerful moderators.

[krapp]

The status quo is that most people don't want pure anarchy, they want communities, and communities have boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only results in the most aggressively toxic elements and effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy who runs Gab recently found that out.

If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certainly isn't what's needed "more than anything."

[yborg]

They mean the freedom to impose their views on others, because if the ignorant can just be made to hear the 'truth' they will believe it too. Having the ability to remove such toxicity from the much larger community of people who genuinely want share ideas is a strength of the platform, not a weakness.