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I somewhat agree. I think it's important to not censor anyone.

However, it is necessary to curb bad-faith actors: users who don't engage civilly and get in the way or overwhelm other types of civil discourse.

Disconnecting between instances should be reserved to such extreme cases. Otherwise, (if there are too many bad-faith actors in a single instance), you should leave to individual users.

Moderation is an important concept. How do you promote a healthy atmosphere? Downvotes are a kind of crowd-sourced moderation that seems to work well. In a federated context, you could assign weights to votes of different instances (i.e. trusted instances get some weight, untrusted instances carry none).

Any system with weighting/voting will inevitably become biased in some way or another. I would like to see a social network with only individual entities allowed (no companies, or organizations), verified accounts (but people can still choose to be anonymous on the frontend), with simple counter-spam features. People can be free to block people they don't want to hear.

Hahaha, Mastodon has all of these features, and yet people still bully their admins into silencing other instances that hold communities that they don't agree with, or perform some act of virtual injustice, instead of blocking at a personal level.

Civility is a really bad way of deciding who to keep. The transphobe sounds perfectly civil when saying "it's all in their heads" when it's incredibly incivil

Crazy. You dropped civility in your hypothetical when you called the example a transphobe.

That's the problem, isn't it? What one person perceives as civil, another person may perceive as uncivil.

Unfortunately the peer pressure inside each mastodon instance (and especially against Gargron as the sysop of one of the biggest English speaking ones) is not really conducive to applying moderation in decisions. If the vast majority decided an instance is fostering only wrong-speak there's no end to their bullying of the moderators, admins and everyone that might hold a more lenient opinion about banning full instances outright.

From that Twitter thread it doesn't sound like they were outright blocked, right?

It seems to say a permission check was added for those users, so they had to accepted as followers by people on Mastodon.social before they could interact with them or view their posts.

That's a divisive thing to do, but it doesn't seem the same as a full disconnection - if there's anybody you know on the other server who wants to talk to you, or if there's anybody you were already happily following & talking to there then everything continues working just fine.

It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles default-private. I don't know anything about the specific objections at the time so I can't comment, but in general that seems like a fairly sensible way to deal with bad actors.

> It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles default-private.

Not exactly. Requiring follow requests be approved, and defaulting new posts to other than fully public status, both exist as orthogonal profile settings in Mastodon and all forks of which I'm aware.

I don't have any specific familiarity on the Inditoot situation, but it sounds like the action taken by mastodon.social admins amounted to effectively overriding the "follow requests have to be approved" setting to true specifically for requests from Inditoot members. That seems fairly reasonable to me, too.

> If you remove the communication links between those nice round planets shown in the animation, they become drab and dreary, and not worth having at all, and you're back to twitter.

True, if you are the toxic community that was cut out. You know who still thinks the Mastodon is worth having? Mastodon.social users, who were able to protect themselves from unfriendly/unwelcome users, and didn't have to go back to Twitter.

Also, you gave an extreme example, of a left-leaning and right-leaning instances not agreeing with each other. But I see no reason why an instance mainly populated with geeks and an instance mainly populated with gamers/musicians/sport fans can't peacefully federate.

> You know who still thinks the Mastodon is worth having? Mastodon.social users, who were able to protect themselves from unfriendly/unwelcome users, and didn't have to go back to Twitter.

Per the parent anecdote, nobody thought Mastodon was worth having. The users all went back to Twitter, along with all the unfriendly/unwelcome users, because that was where the action was. I also suspect a few dropped out entirely.

> The users all went back to Twitter

It was just the Indian users that went back to Twitter, as per: https://mastodon.social/about

83.7K active MAU

The greater group of people on mastodon.social stayed.

And you assume they went back because of the block based on...?

Surely it couldn't be that they disliked the UX, that their other friends failed to move over, or that those indie-operated websites lacked in performance. No, of course we must assume it's the lack of fighting.

I switched to Mastodon because it is much much easier to build a walled garden in which I want to experience.

Twitter ist just a toxic hole with groups of people that seems to have nothing more to do than to annoy and harm you.

I left Twitter after the algorithmic news feed came in. “How bad could it be?” I wondered. Really bad. Despite carefully curating my Twitter feed to be almost all creators doing interesting stuff, Twitter decided what I really wanted to see was awful racist politics.

I had a think about it and deleted the app the next day. You can blame twitter’s users if you want. I blame twitter’s algorithm for actively finding the most vile stuff and shoving it in everyone’s faces.