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Comment by repler | Hacker News Reader

It’s like when my toddler tells me I’m not playing with his toys right.

“You’re using it differently than I like to use it!”

Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving them away for free and sometimes accepting donations.

Oh, and they aren't a toddler, they're adults.

Oh, and they aren't your kids, either. Not related to you at all.

Now your analogy is much more useful.

> Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving them away for free

This just makes the toddler's position that much more stupid. As the owner of the toys, he's free to set the rules for how they can be played with. But not if he's giving them away.

Those toys have been given under certain (More or less precisely/adequately defined and communicated) conditions that are constantly violated now. I still remember when ppl cared about little thing called netiquetteamd now even written terms aren't enforced :)

There you go. That's exactly the position they are in: if you want to play with mastodon.social's toys, mastodon.social gets to set the rules. If you want to play with the toys that they have given away, over by yourself, you get to do that.

We are currently in the in-between phase where a swarm of kids have shown up to play with the neat toys, are ignoring the rules, and are about to be kicked out to go play with their own toys, unless they can learn the rules.

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