EDIT: the article mentions shitposter.club as a blacklisted instance. I've been following https://shitposter.club/moonman for years with only minor migration issues.
It's not, but counter.social users are blacklisted by Mastodon folks who don't like how th3j35t3r[1] is running his Mastodon node.
Wonder what kind of speech (which you only defend by its supposed legality) you're concerned about being banned.
You're a perfect example of what they're complaining about. They've said nothing even remotely offensive, just that they don't agree with shared block lists, and you've already decided that they're wrong and a nazi. I've seen people get added to shared block lists on twitter just because they commented on a thread saying that they both political parties in the US should work together instead of being so devisive, so it's not like only trolls and abusive people get added to those lists.
I hope you enjoy your self-imposed bubble, where everyone you disagree with is a nazi.
It's about building a national socialist state. Some people might feel that it's the best way to organize large number of people. Just because they hold that view doesn't mean that they are somehow bad people or have bad intentions. By itself it doesn't require any fucking with others but since most such people are also authoritarians and fascists it has lead to that in the past.
>It is about separating people who they disapprove of and killing them.
It doesn't necessarily require killing people you disapprove of. But one of the goals of nazis is to remove people of other ethnicities from their sphere of influence.
>If you're trying to normalise Nazis
Discussing something isn't normalizing it.
>you are one of them
Discussing national socialism doesn't mean that one supports their cause or shares any of their beliefs.
>and the 88 dogwhistle doesn't look good.
The 88 in his name could be reference to literally anything. It could be some athlete's number or birth year. It could be just because he likes the number. Could be anything really. You automatically assuming that it means that the guy is a nazi is just pants on retarded.
Many, many people believe in unfettered free speech. You should assume anyone who supports free speech is doing so in good faith as it's historically been the norm.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it".
Just everyone who values freedom of speech then?
>so many people invoking it are doing so in bad faith.
You really think people who support freedom of speech are doing so in bad faith?
Maybe they play the piano (88 keys)?
Maybe they're a ham radio operator ("love and kisses")?
Maybe they're a big Kill Bill fan (Crazy 88s)?
Maybe they think it's a lucky number (Chinese culture)?
There's a million possibilities[1] besides this baseless ad hominem attack in which you're implying they're a neo-nazi. This moral panic over white supremacists supposedly hiding under every bed is really tiring.
A little bit of trivia: turns out in France a "département" is a country subdivision which receives two-digit codes, and it's quite common for people to include that in their online identity pseudonyms as a suffix. 88 is the Vosges department[0].
EDIT: Given the ambiguity, I do not support the use of the "88" thing at all, yet one cannot detract from the fact that cultural context and localization is a tricky subject. Even as a location thing I was not supporting it anyway as it's a terrible practice, being leaky information-wise.
There is no overarching authority on these instances, so there's a lot of options, it may just be hard to find the one that meets your needs.
People definitely should have the ability to put restrictive rules in place in place if the association with that community is voluntary, and nobody forces you to use mastodon.
I find strictly moderated communities very pleasant because I have no interest in debating trolls, nazis or whatever else crops up on the internet, and many mastodon instances as a result of this, especially the smaller ones are a lot more pleasant and feel more like a community than twitter.
Or you simply get the best of both worlds and stay on Twitter.
I like the "make the internet weird again" stuff, revivals of Geocities and tilde clubs and so on. My impression of the Mastodon-era fediverse is that the culture is about as far as you can get from that - it was designed by people who thought Twitter wasn't sanitized enough.
You'd think, but no. Some instances are run by "free speech absolutists" (in quotes, because they're really not) who block instances which, in their opinion, are "too aggressive" about blocking spam and bad actors. For example, mastodon.social blocks counter.social, preventing all counter.social users from federating with mastodon.social users.
In other words, Twitter users have to deal with the opaque decision making of one @jack. Mastodon users have to deal with the opaque decision making of a bunch of @jacks.
Also: your Mastodon admin could well be someone you know personally, rather than @jack.
Ah, assuming that's true this is the first I'd heard. My guess is that we'll see more of this as a handful of instances dominate and (in at least some cases) consolidate.
My point about @jack is that, for now, you're trading one benevolent dictator for many. The result is a Tower of Babel of moderation and federation standards. Maybe that's a feature and not a bug?
----
I run a Mastodon instance and I sure am not blocking counter.social and I sure do not see a single toot from them anywhere in my database. Mr. Actual The Jester followed me for a day or two and then just vanished from federation along with the rest of his instance.
Edit: Damn, that was a stupid comment, but I'll leave it as penance. I just wasn't seeing that Mastodon is perfectly setup for compartmentalization. So my Mirimir persona would have an account on some instance that focused on privacy, security and anonymity. And I would be protected from off-topic trolls. But I could have other unlinked personas on other instances, with different topics and blocking criteria. That's very cool.
If a right-leaning instance showed up that actively cracked down on people who hang out on the federated timeline looking for people to argue with, and other trolling behavior, I wouldn’t block it. But I haven’t seen such a thing. It’s just an endless sea of Pleroma installations with an admin who has an anime girl avatar and posts shit like “watch me get blocked by twenty more instances: [ethnic slur]”.
I've been keeping on eye on this project for many months, and it's been very interesting. A recent post about moderation and mastadon was very nice to read, but I had only considered the info there from my personal perspective.
I had not considered the network affects of shared blocklists, and now I wonder if this is put up front and center on each instance - are people who sign up notified of the blocklists each instance has?
It's also interesting to consider the end user who does not care about the tech and it's possibilities, and instead just looking for a social network that is easy to use and different than the other big networks in one way or another.
I do not see how creating an instance is like IRC, and I have not seen anything about joining small instances and how that would be like IRC. To me IRC is like a download and run, with mastadon you have to host an instance. I guess it could be just run on someone else's though.
If it was self hosted as an app or browser extension, I suppose it could run something like scuttlebutt and just re-sync when it re-connects - that would be interesting.
That makes me wonder what it could be like if it was installed on a million routers like nextcould is doing(?) - not sure I read that recent post correct.
I am still interested in mastadon, my idea is to somehow make it, or something like it has various bouncers you can follow / make part of your stream. So rather than depend on or have one block list server wise, you could have open servers and subscribe to different bouncer lists, kind of like the adblock lists - and that way some people could choose bouncers that block certain types of material they may want to avoid and be comfortable with certain people or groups making those kinds of, for example left or right leaning, or even block all trump and kardashian news, or all kinds of neat bouncers that could be created.
The future looks interesting and more possible to be less non-federated, I think the world is more ready for that now.
or just make your own and associate as you please.
Pleroma culture, on the other hand, is generally geared more toward free speech.
[0] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/wikis/Message%20r...
- marking incoming messages with media from a given account or instance as sensitive
rejecting messages from a specific instance
- removing/unlisting messages from the public timelines
- removing media from messages
- sending only public messages to a specific instance
Luckily for you, there's also https://pleroma.social where they might align with your values[1] a lot more.
1 - I am pro free speech, however many on the right these days seem to think that free speech means they should be free to insult, abuse, impose their religion etc. on others, while also being free to ignore people's right to kneel, protest, worship Satan, support Palestine or whatever else they might want to do.
If that is the sort of "free speech" you're looking for, Mastodon might not be for you, otherwise it's a perfectly free speech tolerant place.
Where did I say this? I said I am pro free speech, especially one that I disagree with, that's the whole point. However I do not think me speaking means that people HAVE TO LISTEN to me. I do not want to be banned from speaking, but I do not demand an audience for my speech, therefore if someone blocks me because they find me annoying, that just means I haven't convinced them to be a part of my audience, as long as I can still speak freely, that's their personal choice.
My problem is with people who pretend to be free speech absolutists, but really aren't in that they'll make a fuss if you disrespect the flag, kneel etc. even as those are very clearly protected by freedom of expression. They're free to not watch someone do these things, (akin to blocking on social media), but not to go beyond that, in my opinion.
I am saying two things:
1. If someone blocks you, that does not violate your free speech, they don't have to listen. As long as they don't take action beyond blocking you it's within their right to do so and they do not violate your free speech.
2. That you should only complain about lack of free speech if you yourself respect speech you disagree with. If you think it's free speech to throw your stuff at people's ears, but then disagree with other people saying stuff YOU don't like, then you should not complain about anything free speech related, (see the whole NFL kneeling controversy for an example of what I mean, or people complaining about a statue of Satan, yet wanting to have In God We Trust in public schools etc.)