Hacker News Reader

Comment by daliwali | Hacker News Reader

Since it's decentralized that means there wouldn't be an effective way to ban someone from the network without consensus. Anyone, "Nazi" or not, would be free to post offensive content without a central authority policing users as is the case with Twitter. I don't think this is actually a solution that certain users and most advertisers want.

View on HN

Mastodon.social would ban them, and if other instances don't police content sufficiently then Mastodon.social doesn't have to federate with them.

That doesn't sound very decentralized to me.

Other instances of Mastodon can make their own decisions in terms of banned content, and other instances can choose to not federate with them.

That's kind of my point. You end up with the option of 1) it's centralized. Everyone only cares about who Mastodon.social federates with. How it's built to work doesn't actually matter. 2) It's centralized. Users wrestle control from Mastodon.social and everyone cares about who some other server federates with. 3) It's a balkanized mess. You spend all your time worrying about who you're federated with so that your content and the content you want to see become accessible. 4) It's decentralized, but nobody really bothers with banning anyone anyway, because it leads to the other scenarios and they are worse.

It would defeat the purpose of federation if there's a different server for each political persuasion. Why bother with federation if you don't want to see anything you disagree with? Each server would be its own hugbox.

There is a big difference between "I would prefer not to be routinely confronted with literal threats to kill me" and "I demand my own hugbox."

The problem with that is there is no practical difference between the two points of view. Both lead to balkanization and isolation.

What do you think the purpose of federation is? I like federation because I can choose a server I like or run my own and still talk to people on other servers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com