Mastodon is like E-Mail: You chose who hosts your profile. YOu can send messages to people on other servers, but still the server which hosts your account, is your "home server": If it goes down, your account/profile is lost.
Also choosing your Mastodon server is about your personal interests: Mastodon servers have local timelines, which only show posts by users on the same server. These timelines often are topic related. E.g. on metalhead.club you will find more metal music content compared to e.g. mastodon.social.
Mastodon servers / instances group users by interest and still let all Mastodon users communicate with each other.
Btw: I don't consider the terms of use "leftist". They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly". Metalhead.club is not political, but the Terms of use try to prevent hate speech.
They are certainly reasonable and human-friendly! But "you shouldn't be xenophobic or transphobic" is still, unfortunately, a relatively left-wing idea. It excludes people who openly hold beliefs that are very popular within the mainstream American right.
You can hold whatever selfish, "fuck you, got mine- try being born into better circumstances next time, losers!" opinion you want. Your free speech doesn't mean everyone else has to listen intently and earnestly and keep themselves from thinking you're being an a-hole for holding the opinions you do. It also doesn't mean some private social media outlets can't tell you to piss off for posting them in a forum about metal music. There are plenty of places online where you can post such an opinion and be back-slapped and congratulated; lamenting that one takes a preemptive stance against opinions you hold is pretty tender for one who takes such a cold-hearted stance against refugees.
See how libertarians see taxes. They could also write some melancholic paragraphs like yours. "Imagine you're a hard, honest worker and someone told you part of your money is not yours, you have to give up some of it and give it to the government. Would you consider it a personal attack? Someone challenges your very right to have your own property... and that's not personal?"
The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance. Brexit happened over less! We should be able to have and express our own political ideas as long as we don't go out of our way to harass people over them.
This is not about that Mastodon instance in particular, since most instances have the same left-leaning rules.
>The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance.
We were talking about refugees, not immigrants.
Most refugees are economic migrants, as their going to the most favourable countries instead of the closest ones shows: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/europe-grapples-distincti...
Anyway I'm over with this, I was defending free speech, this "refugee" charade is already finished anyway.
It's a really sad time for humanity if common courtesy is now considered "left-wing".
The rules literally say:
>You shall Fight racism and discrimination
Which, on my book, is left wing. (And open to be arbitrarily enforced. How do I prove I've been fighting discrimination?)
I don't really understand why you've taken such an objection to the very concept of keeping hurtful comments to yourself on some specific public forums; but in any case I get the feeling that you're now just arguing for the sake of arguing.
That's also part of what is freedom. Your freedom ends at the point where you limit the freedom of others. Otherwise the other person wouldn't be free.
That's also why most non-right-wing thinkers don't consider that another point of view, but simply selfish and asshole-ish.
Therefore if you want to argue your point, maybe you shouldn't highlight what you fight AGAINST (i.e. "left-wingers out", "refugees out") but what you fight FOR, which in some regards also boils down to respecting each other's freedom, right? Show that and you will find that doors will open for discussion.
I personally discuss with both people who would be defined as left-wing as well as with people who would be defined as right-wing. Both sides have reasonable people and some reasonable arguments, that are sadly sometimes hidden underneath many layers of bullshit.
The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.
There _might_ be filters. Mastodon server admins can filter posts from certain foreign servers. For example the metalhead.club administrator chose to filter some instances which spam a lot or post extremist text and /or child pornography.
Often these filters are necessary for legal reasons, e.g. some jananese servers allow sketches of naked children ("loli"), which are considered child pornography in Germany and are therefore illegal in the server's home country.