[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.