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Fediverse has the unique problem (or benefit depending on your perspective) of the instance owners being able to cut their users off from other instances, which is unheard of in email. At face value this is done to keep users from being tormented by pedophiles and internet nazis, but my experience is that most of the server admins get a weird power trip out of blocking things, and will overzealously block anything that they personally find offensive or disagreeable.

This extreme amount of curation is why each fediverse instance is its own community. You only get to experience fediverse through the lens of your instance admin's moderation policy.

And then you take your account to a different server where you feel you fit better or that it doesn't cut the experience you want.

but then you lose your old acvount.

Surprisingly not, you can easily transfer your followers and follows. Even your bookmarked posts can be saved and transferred. You do lose your old posts you've made, but in the grand scheme of things that's not the worst loss

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

You keep most of what you'd expect when you transfer, but you do lose your posts.

However, I agree with you that (over-)moderation is a huge issue facing Mastodon. However, that's true of any online community run by users.

The ideal, in my opinion, it's improving the process for people to self host instances. It's simply too hard for the average person currently and the copy on websites such as masto.host is ambiguous for people who may not be experienced with such concepts. My belief is that Mastodon will thrive when there are more communities of smaller groups.

Ive always wanted to try hosting my own pleroma-of-one but i know somebody who tried that and they ultimately gave up because they felt really isolated since the only servers that federated with them were the ones they had followed somebody from.

> unheard of in email

Not true- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

I think the parent comment was referring to blocking access to other server instances rather than blocking individual users.

Overzealous spam filters seem like the email equivalent. I have reoccurring issues trying to get self hosted email received by GMail/outlook addresses. Although these filters are an impersonal corporate policy rather than up to an individual instance admin's discretion.

Greetings ordinary and non-remarkable commenter who has no special insight into Mastodon's workings! I don't know anything about the project but I have been watching the journey of the big social networks with interest. If you're taking questions - what do you think are the typical needs of new users as they hear about and start trying mastodon? How do you envision onboarding happening?

Number one priority for onboarding is giving new users something interesting to see. We've made big strides in this direction this year. There's a new "Explore" screen in our official apps that shows trending posts, hashtags, and news articles. We also have a system of follow recommendations.

This is only true among mastodon servers that connect to each other. As I recall, most servers would not talk to gab's servers.

Further, once you pick a server, if you are kicked off, you lose all your followers because they are following you@thatserver which you cannot get onto anymore.

...so why isn't there another layer of abstraction, where you have like a DNS to register where you (and here's your public key) are currently: you@thatserver, and you sign it... And then you can change (using the same public / private key pair) to be: you@someotherserver?

This seems obvious to me as a necessary feature...?

There is a move feature so you can transfer your account and its following relationships to a new server, without your followers having to update anything or any key signing at all. You can't use it if your account has been nuked, but it's not weird in "we're asking you to leave"-type moderation.

There are a few issues for that, but they haven't seen any activity in a while:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/3796 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668

>This is only true among mastodon servers that connect to each other.

Most do, the default is open federation.

> As I recall, most servers would not talk to gab's servers.

It's hardly a surprise that most people don't want to associate with neo-Nazis and others with similar worthless ideologies.

The fact that admins can firewall off instances if they're are run by arseholes is a good thing.

The problem with this idea is that if by some unfortunate accident of history, Nazis gain power again, they'll say exactly what you just said except replace the word Nazi with Jew.

I would flip what you just said on its head and say practically the opposite: the virtue of Mastodon is that when the Nazis seize power not all instances will be forced to censor Jews (whereas Twitter will be forced to do it or shut down).

What exactly is your threat model — every single country will simultaneously become a nazi dictatorship? Is their a world domination beforehand which somehow misses the “nuke the Earth” part?

For a server to operate you only need a very basic power source and internet connection, even in an occupied country it seems plenty doable.

Example: an extremist government comes into power in the US and orders all social media and traditional media companies to censor a certain type of speech. They could very well have popular support if there has been a war or a depression or some other crisis, it was only 75 years ago that we had a literal Office of Censorship, were putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps etc. US media is very concentrated today, the government only needs to go around to a handful of companies to censor the vast majority of outlets Americans get their news from.

Sure someone can set up a server somewhere and publish whatever they want but if no one reads it it won't really matter. Most people won't change where they get their news overnight even if the government does impose censorship. That's why federated social media is so valuable, widespread use of it ASAP is a benefit to society. It can de-concentrate the ownership of media distribution, decentralize control and make the next Office of Censorship's job much harder.

> This is only true among mastodon servers that connect to each other. As I recall, most servers would not talk to gab's servers.

Being able to choose which other servers your server federates with is a feature, not a bug.

> you lose all your followers because they are following you@thatserver which you cannot get onto anymore.

Not true as of recent (May 2022 or so) versions of Mastodon.

>The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed.

I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.

I remember early mastodon marketing being criticized for emphasizing federation _too much_, and that it would confuse new users.

The sixth sentence on the project homepage: "Joining a server on Mastodon provides you with the power to communicate with any server across the globe."

Not sure how much clearer it gets.

To be fair, that sentence has only been there for a couple days. We redesigned our project homepage completely. Some of the copy is still in flux.

>I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception

You must be part of an exceptionally small minority then. I, too, have known about Mastodon since it's inception, and this was not news to me. As another commenter said, a debate during that time was that users were beaten over the head with too much discussion of federation and instances.

This is always how it's worked, and it's nearly impossible to join any instance without following & interacting with people from other instances on a daily basis. It's like the one thing about Mastodon you can't escape knowing about even if you actively try.

>This is always how it's worked, and it's nearly impossible to join any instance without following & interacting with people from other instances on a daily basis. It's like the one thing about Mastodon you can't escape knowing about even if you actively try.

I don't use Mastodon, so perhaps that's why. It always seemed like a Twitter clone except with fewer people and, importantly for this particular discussion, where you can't interact with anyone.

Guess I was mistaken, but that's why I never bothered to learn anything further about it.

> I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.

How can you not know, since it's clearly "decentralized" in every claim made about its service. That's the textbook definition of decentralized.

This is the theory. In practice, this is what happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195851

There is a kernel of truth though. Many communities are organized per instance, so if you want to be part of multiple communities you must register on multiple instances. You can follow an account, but you can't follow an entire instance and have all toots of everyone there displayed in a timeline on your own instance.

Humans are naturally converging towards communities, and Mastodon leaned into that. But it's actually not the right tool, because in the end it's centered around individual accounts. Lemmy is the closest thing to what the author wants I guess.

It seems like it should be trivial to extend the Mastodon protocol and software to support following other instances. Is that not so, or why has that not been done?