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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Which I'd assume will be filled with alt-right and similar content (banned from other platforms usually for good reason), anime avatars and a liberal dose of poor taste (and potentially illegal in certain jurisdictions) content such as "lolicon".

None of this is something most people want to be anywhere near. While mainstream social media has many flaws, at least I am grateful for the fact that it bans, discourages or significantly dilutes this kind of content so that it isn't visible in most cases.

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Not really, actually. Pixelfed (and mastodon, at least the official instances) aren't at all anti-moderation, for better or worse. They're more about moderation at the local instance level. I don't run in to any alt-right content on either pixelfed or mastodon. Not that I'm a huge user of either.

As long as you stay away from sites that are purposely for that audience like Gab, you will be fine.

Most Mastodon users feel the same way we do, and block users and instances that promote toxic content. Join an instance with similarly minded people and you will never see people be shitty in those specific ways because they're blocked from engaging entirely.

Lots of the servers simply block based on tribalism though, irrespective of "toxic content".

My single-user instance, for example, which is entirely free of "toxic content", even with an extremely critical viewpoint, is blocked by an admin of a popular public instance of 17k users, none of whom can follow me (or can I follow), simply because I publicly disagreed with him about the virtue of instance censorship.

These things tend to naturally centralize, and that's always going to enable small groups to have an invisible, unearned, outsized influence over what people can see or read.

I think client-server is the wrong model for p2p networks. Look at the issues with the deliverability cartel and the relative inability of normal people to deliver messages to Gmail users without paying money into it.

Ask for censorship and you will reap the controlled and powerless society that you have sowed.

So that's a yes, then?

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