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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

You sampled one instance in a fediverse with thousands upon thousands of instances. Do you think none of them have a community more aligned with your worldview?

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Most likely, yes. Those with a different worldview are cut off from the fediverse and many client apps blacklist those instances that gain momentum from being usable in the client app. For example, Gab.

Do you have a link to the instance(s) that were blacklisted you're referring to?

The blacklist is visible on the about page of each instance. Feel free to go sample a few. The first one I tried had literal swastikas in the user name of the first post. It went downhill from there.

> Those with a different worldview are cut off from the fediverse

I find this happens most often to people with a worldview that is objectively incompatible with civilization.

Evidenced by the fact that they disagree with the progressive orthodoxy of the moment.

I find this to happen between groups of instances which audiences has different stamps on the front cover of passports.

In case that is going to turn out to correlate with “worldview[s] that [are] objectively incompatible with [the other] civilization”, … what could it mean …

They are more than welcome to spew their incompatible worldview on Twitter. I don’t understand why anyone would be upset they don’t feel welcome on Mastodon; they got everything they wanted on Twitter from Musk.

Civilizations were built on slavery, imperialism, xenophobia, exploitation, theft, appropriation and intolerance.

Isn't that the free market you want? You can build your own client (even by forking!) if you disagree.

In my experience, the blacklists are all pretty sensible. Mostly porn, neonazis, that kind of stuff.

I haven't opened Gab in a while so I just loaded the front page, and I can see why Mastodon moderators don't want to deal with them either. The content is not as blatantly illegal as many other blacklisted sites, but the front page is incredibly toxic and hateful. I would block most of those posts if they woulf ever hit my personal instance.

Feel free to join (or set up) an instance that doesn't employ blacklists, though. The default Mastodon configuration comes with an empty blacklist so I'm sure there are servers out there that will let you access Gab and other blacklisted servers if you wish.

However, other servers are allowed to block you or your server at their digression if you're boosting or posting content they don't care for. After all, freedom of speech does not imply any obligation to be heard.

its kinda easy to be labelled neonazi these days

Is it? Hasn't been a problem for me.

That's because you're not in the "basket of deplorables"

That would seem to be a very easy place to avoid.

How? One's political views are largely an expression of innate personality traits. And, as we have seen, the basket of deplorable includes anyone who is not explicitly left wing.

"the basket of deplorable includes anyone who is not explicitly left wing."

Nah. It tends to include neo-nazis, neo-confederates, racists, sexists, white supremacists, kiddy diddlers, and the like. It's not a particularly difficult group to not be a part of.

No. It includes anyone who is opposes left wing ideas and is effective.

Nah. It includes some of the most disgusting members of society. Curious how you rise so adamantly to their defense.

You're attitude to people is absolutely toxic. Why are you surprised that people side against you?

I'm not surprised. I consider it a badge of honor that neo-nazis, neo-confederates, racists, white supremacists, sexists, kiddy diddlers, et al, side against me.

You might consider being concerned if your ideas and attitudes align with those of the aforementioned deplorables. And yes, that would be the correct term.

Edit: Calling people by the correct descriptive terms is not smearing. I'm sorry you are confused.

This is all in your head guy. You started throwing all these smears around, and now having done so, you congratulate yourself for having such virtue and integrity for despising these people.

It all just boils down to a fig-leaf for your hatred.

It's not really a problem if none cares who you are.

Speaking from personal experience?

There are a lot of neonazis around these days...

And yet, somehow, I have avoided it. Curious.

You're neo-nazi!

lol, nice.

Yeah, you don't have to be an actual neonazi, just be friends with and support them and their views.

being labelled neonazi is about as easy as being labelled "libtard". The very left oriented people often have a strong sense of moral superiority, and will directly accuse anyone who does not agree of being a neonazi. in general i would say though, when you are pointing with one finger, 4 are pointing back at yourself (and by this I dont mean you, its an expression)

Except that when you're marching with swastikas, and displaying nazi signs and slogans, it's kind of difficult to claim you're not a nazi. But you keep right on assuming you have a moral position.

I was accused of white-supremacism for questioning the mask.

I think that illustrates the way these things work pretty clearly.

That's because the Overton Window have shifted to the right so much.

Perhaps, but the people I'm referring to actually promote the idea that Jews deserve to be killed for being Jews.

This is incorrect.

With some charity, you could say Gab has a different worldview. However, there are also people who think sex with children is ok. That is also technically 'a different worldview'. You see, there is a reason Gab has been cut off, and it is not just that he has a different worldview.

If you don't list the specific reason, you distort the most important part of this particular moderation. I noticed this is a fairly common myth in what seems like a right-wing frame of 'progressive politics trying to limit freedom of speech'.

I have looked at about forty instances, most of them being for specific interests. EVERY single one, without fail, regardless of the subject, was flooded with American politics, over whatever it was actually intended for. I went to a music group and had to search through two weeks of American politics related posts to find a single post on music.

In the case of Pleroma, it was much the same, but with way more fringe lunatics and right wingers. I don't want to find a community "aligned with my worldview" that shuts out people unaligned with them, I want to find a community of mentally healthy adults, and that does not seem to exist in the larger Mastodon or Pleroma fediverse, unless your hobbies include pearl clutching about perceived racism or making infographics about white genocide.

If I'm a casual user without any great motivation for learning the arcane ways of "The Fediverse"... someone just looking for someway to get into this Mastodon thing I keep hearing about: a normal, everyday user. I'm going to probably go to some search engine and type in "Mastodon" or "Mastodon social network". Using DuckDuckGo, many of the first links show up pointing to mastodon.social or server lookups operated from there (assiming joinmastodon.org is affiliated). The point is that someone that is relatively disinterested in "The Fediverse" or the technology per se and just wants to participate in social interactions... the fine tuning you're suggesting may be required is probably on the wrong side of the cost/benefit ratio.

But, wanting to give your point a chance... I went to the first 10 servers that were suggested by joinmastodon. There was very little difference just scrolling their landing pages in terms of content than that of mastodon.social. Not surprising: Federation is suppose to allow this sort of decentralized sharing of the exact same content across instances. Of those, only really the instance run by the makers of the Vivaldi Browser seems to be notably toned down on the political muck.. and they probably for business reasons.

Then I went different interest specific group servers and scrolled through their landing page content. And they were also very reflective of my mastodon.social experience... many of the same Toots. The kind of community didn't really matter so much for the most part (I'm guessing a fair amount of lazy configuration to be honest).

Here's an example: birds.town which bills itself as...

"A server primarily meant for people who like birds, birding and nature in general, but obviously everyone is equally welcome here! Have fun cawing about "

And I almost was happily surprised. The top Toots of the feed (or whatever it's called in Mastodon-land) were, in fact, about birding! Unfortunately I kept scrolling. Oh dear.

"I'd find conservatives attacks on “woke” funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Woke people fought and won the battle against slavery.

Woke people went to war and defeated fascism in WWII.

Woke people fought for and won equal rights for women and people of color.

Woke people battled for rights for workers like 40-hour workweeks and safety protections."

https://birds.town/@augieray@mastodon.social/110049850172355...

Yes, because that's what I want to know when participating in a social network focusing on bird watching.

Your link is pointing to the general mastodon.social instance and not to birds.town. To see local birds.town posts, go to [0]. Looks like birds-only to me w/o any politics, tho I'm not aware of any of these birds' political preferences.

And generally, whenever there's people annoying me, I just unfollow/mute/block them - problem solved.

[0] https://birds.town/public/local

Cool, there's a mastodon instance about government drones.

Yeah. Blocking / muting is required to shape ANY social media feed to your liking.

This is correct, but the birding server served that link to me while just perusing its default landing page.

The point I was answering was that I saw what I saw because I used a single instance of a Federated service (mastodon.social)... my counter-point here was that the instance really didn't matter. I was served, by default, largely the same toxic content across the 20 or so servers I ended up landing on.

Yes, I can unfollow, mute, block, etc. anyone that I decide isn't someone I want in my life. But I'm pretty sure I could do that on Twitter, too (could be wrong, I've not been there for a long time). Life's too short. Maybe the local feed would have been much better... or maybe the warm cozy Mastodon isn't that which competes with Twitter, but that which competes with Discourse or Discord.

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