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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks.

I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and promptly began spamming every sub with their obnoxious behavior which chased off everyone else. They shouldn't be surprised that they have a reputation for being a haven for people too toxic even for Twitter/Reddit.

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> You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks.

Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?

None of the instances I've used tolerate the harmful examples such as racists or lolicons, that you've incorrectly lumped together with perfectly cromulent lifestyles, and thanks to that I've barely seen any. And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on. This happens maybe five times a year, if that.

> What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?

If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly.

> And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on.

Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

You’re trying to redefine “federation” and failing…

It’s a protocol for independent systems to automatically exchange some information.

It’s not a distributed system of interchangeable instances.

> You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

Why not? A person is only banned from one instance, they are free to choose another and federate across any instances they haven’t been banned from. That sure sounds like having both federation and the ability to ban.

These are not public utilities. A person or organization doesn’t have to support someone with opposing views to them. And that’s ok. And that doesn’t break federation, except to specific instances for specific people.

The big lesson from places like USENET is the opposite:

Functioning federation depends entirely on good tools for users to filter and ban people and content.

> You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

That's not incompatible. You can go anywhere you want but you can get banned from place if you're an ass there is entirely sensible way for federated network to work.

More than that, it's necessary if you want any resistance to bad actors

Referring to furries as a "perfectly cromulent lifestyle" is such a probably unintentionally fraternal salute in terms of antinormativity/cultural openess. Good vibes.

Voat was specifically marketed towards the "free speech above all else" crowd, which will always attract people on the fringes since they are the ones with opinions too distasteful for the rest of society.

Many instances of mastodon on the other hand are happily engaged in real meaningful moderation. The owner is expected to moderate what type of content is allowed on their instance, with the federated aspect ensuring the "free speech".

That's not to say mastodon is without issues. The issues of voat just can't be transferred wholesale.

I don't recall Voat ever being specifically marketed as such, although it was certainly characterized as such in the press. It was literally just Atko's .NET knockoff of Reddit.

The only "marketing" a mastodon server does is the description on the main website though, what matters is who joins the server. It seems that people who would join a server that was characterized in the press as "free speech above all else" love racism and porn. It's the people on the server, not whatever the administrator claims to want.

I'm on mastodon.scholar and the most risque thing anyone has posted was a closeup of Neptune's uncensored moons. I don't disbelieve you, mastodon is part of Earth and unfortunately that means there are racists there, but I don't think your experience is typical.

You also dont have to look very hard for large communities that absolutely will not tolerate racists.

The difference between the fediverse and most other online places for manyyyyyy fediverse users who use it day to day is that if a bunch of racists show up and start making things shitty then somebody (mods) will ACTUALLY do something about it whereas every other online platform just didnt really care or defend the vulnerable.

Are there large communities of racists on isolated parts of the fediverse? Sure. It is an open source software, even Trump's shitstick social network tried to steal and use mastodon.

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