Hacker News Reader

Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com