Do you believe that people can hold a negative opinion of someone else and choose not to interact with them, or does your world view require that people are compelled to interact with anyone who demands it of them?
Caveat, I haven’t used mastodon or the fed inverse and might be off on the details.
Isn’t that how the fediverse works? You sign up for an instance based on if you like how they admin it, and if you don’t, you join a different instance?
I’m failing to see how that is a problem for users if they aren’t compelled to stay
That’s exactly correct. It’s a marketplace of policies. If someone thinks I allow too much trash through, they’ll go to another server. If someone thinks I block too much, they’ll go to another server. There are thousands to choose from, each with its own local culture.
People who’ve been on my server for many years implicitly mostly agree with my actions. If they didn’t, they’d have migrated.
Yes, but the different instance has a different set of blocks (both outgoing and ingoing), so the problem kinda persists even when you change instances. You can't have both A and B people in your feed when they (actually their admins) instance-block each other on sight.
Doesn't this mean you can just go to an instance that has mutual open communication with both other instances and then have access to both feeds? This is what happens IRL when I have two friend groups that don't engage, I engage with them both as a separate person.
I hear variations of that logic so often and it’s frustrating. It’s impossible for me to infringe someone’s freedom of speech on the fediverse. Someone can spin up a brand new server right now and start saying whatever they want. I can’t stop them, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. But if I blocked them from my own server, some people are quick to complain about my “censorship”, or whatever.
No. In exercising my freedom of speech to say I don’t want to hear their trash, and I don’t want them harassing my users. Their freedom of speech doesn’t say they have the right to force me to listen to them.
(For people following along at home: the speech I’m talking about here isn’t a debate about appropriate fiscal policy, but about vile escaped-from-4chan trash. I’d never block someone for disagreeing with my politics. I’ll block their ass in a heartbeat for a timeline filled with swastikas and death threats.)
Yea, with his clarification in the other comment it’s clear that this guy is one of those types who probably calls himself a Libertarian while unironically advocating for the removal of people’s right to assembly
You were projecting hard in your last two comments - i generally do not think by constructed group identity. And i'm lost what parts of my wishes you consider authoritarian. I'm just pissed that instance admins install blocks that leave me unable to make my own decisions who i want to interact with - blocking people i like on my behalf.
Typical scenario is that someone gives me their fedi ident and i can't follow them because either my instance blocked theirs or theirs blocked mine.
Ideally i'd have a tool that knows all fedi blocks, where i can specify the people i want to follow and it tells me on what instance i need to register to be able to do that.
Couldn't you just spin up your own instance that only consists of yourself in that case? I'm not being facetious I'm genuinely baffled as I thought this kind of custom plug-and-do-yourself-if-you-dont-like-it is fundamental to how fediverse works and is considered a "perk" of it.
Uh. That would actually solve the problem, but at the cost of having to operate that setup. I saw many people who self-hosted their instance but it seemed rather stressful dealing with some technical aspects, so initially didn't consider it.