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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

people have the freedom to associate in communities that censor if they are okay with it. You don't curse in a church, yet plenty of people find them pleasant to visit.

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.

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> people have the freedom to associate in communities that censor if they are okay with it.

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.

Uh no. Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation.

Also: your Mastodon admin could well be someone you know personally, rather than @jack.

> Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation.

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 think it's a feature. Benevolent dictators motivated mostly by what's most likely to pay rent in the Bay Area are not very benevolent in practice.

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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.

OK, I'm convinced that Mastodon is evil. I'm quite able to avoid what I don't like. And I don't want anyone else deciding for me.

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.

Exactly. I get your point. But mine is: Mastodon shouldn't be publicised as an alternative to Twitter because it's not. It would be like publicising HN as an alternative to Reddit. HN only works as an alternative to Reddit for a very, very reduced group of people. People who share the same interests more or less, and with similar ideas about what flies in tech, politics, social movements, etc.

Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. That's the entire point. The moderation policy of the server at mastodon.social has no bearing on the moderation policy of social.wxcafe.net or switter.net. Your complaint of "it's like irc" isn't quite true, because of a number of obvious technical and user experience differences. "Everyone should be able to reach everyone else" is proving to be less and less desirable.

Sure, Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. But the massive influx of Mastodon users to the fediverse changed the culture to the point where I didn't see any reason to stick around.

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.

Moderators of highly restrictive instances (the most populous ones) blacklist all the instances they don't like. In fact most of those instances use a shared blacklist. So you have to make a choice: either you choose a restrictive instance and you can't talk about whatever you want (because with so many rules, where are they even drawing the line), or you go to a free instance and can't talk to anybody in the most populous instances (most of the network).

Or you simply get the best of both worlds and stay on Twitter.

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