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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

The big problem I have with Mastodon is that it has a culture of censorship equivalent to Facebook. My recollection is that to be listed in their directory of instances, you need to abide by the content rules created by key Mastodon people, and those instances in turn are required to only peer with other instances that follow the same rules. Those rules basically include moderation based on various progressive political stances, so you can’t honestly discuss controversial topics from different perspectives. It creates a federated network that is still an echo chamber rather than a platform for civil discourse and free thought. And if that’s the case I am not sure why I need Mastodon or why I would lend it attention or credence.

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Mastodon follows the activitypub protocol. There are other backends that implement the same protocol, like Pleroma; the Fediverse (all the systems that use activitypub) is bigger than mastodon, and much bigger than mastodon.social and co.

There's a sort of blocking firewall around mastodon.social and sites broadly on the same 'side' as it, in that all these servers tend to share blocklists. One of the things they'll block a server for is being 'free-speech maximalists'.

But outside of the mastodon.social bubble, there are lots of free speech maximalist fediverse instances that don't block anyone, or block different people.

Pleroma instances tend to be more free-speech oriented (because the technical choice of using Mastodon or Pleroma as your backed became part of a signalling game). I think Pleroma's better software, anyway.

We at mastodon.social don't copy our blocklist from anybody and don't consider ourselves to be on anyone's "side". Our blocklist is of a quite reasonable length for 5 years of operation and based on personal experiences of our moderation team only:

https://mastodon.social/about/more#unavailable-content

I've seen your blocklist, and meant more that smaller instances that are cut from similar broad-culture cloth are likely to copy mastodon.social's blocklist (I think doing that makes sense if you know you share sensibilities with mastodon.social's moderators).

I follow plenty of people on mastodon.social, mastodon.tech, etc., as well as people from a lot of the suspended instances in your list, and I can clearly see/feel two (really more) different 'cultures' in the fediverse.

The GP is more aligned with the second culture, I think- the culture you could label 'free speech maximalist'.

I don't really think mastodon.social should change- you've banned things you don't like, you perceive certain messages as pernicious enough to warrant a ban, that's fair- you've made a space with a certain tone and flavor, that suitable for a certain type of person.

But people are diverse, and so there are plenty that find the culture and tone of mastodon.social inferior to, say, Poast.

I think people with different sensibilities are suited to different spaces, and that it makes sense to point out that some of the spaces on mastodon.social's blocklist have value- maybe not to the median member on mastodon.social, but to people not of your culture.

To be frank, you're progressives. There's nothing wrong with that! Some of my best friends are progressives! But it's a lens that colors how you view the world, and what's ban-worthy. Again, nothing wrong with making a space that conforms to your sensibilities- but I wanted to make it clear to the GP that there are plenty of instances that don't have the same sociopolitical 'flavor' as mastoson.social, and that mastodon.social sits at the graph -centre of a particular subset of the federated network that is of similar flavor.

> My recollection is that to be listed in their directory of instances, you need to abide by the content rules created by key Mastodon people, and those instances in turn are required to only peer with other instances that follow the same rules. Those rules basically include moderation based on various progressive political stances, so you can’t honestly discuss controversial topics from different perspectives.

Here are the requirements for us to promote your server:

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

The only hard requirement related to content is that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia be not allowed. There is no requirement to peer with anyone or have any specific political stances. If your political stance or perspective requires you to dehumanize people of different races or sexual orientation, then yes, you are not welcome.

> The only hard requirement related to content is that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia be not allowed.

I don't know anyone who's a self-declared racist, sexist, homophobe or transphobe.

But these things mean different things to different people.

So let's say JK Rowling wants to join. Would she be welcome?

What about Glenn Greenwald?

Or Andy Ngô?

On one hand this might be a problem, on the other hand, one has to realize, that someone hosting mastodon is also in some regions of the world, responsible for taking care of preventing illegal content on the service. If I hosted a mastodon instance for example, I would have to check everything, because of upload filter rules, and if other people uploaded or posted inappropriate stuff, then I might face legal consequences for it. This needs to be kept in mind.

I think you are correct about having your instance listed, but I created my own server from a digital ocean droplet (newathens.net) (its quite easy) and I can follow anyone. So I don't know about that second part

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