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Comment by gtunic | Hacker News Reader

Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out, it's not going to get anywhere near as much usage as Twitter. If you don't follow a very narrow political viewpoint then you'll almost certainly get banned from whatever server you signed up for.

They all enforce this on each other as well, with a shared block list of servers on which the operators allow users to say things outside of this narrow political viewpoint.

This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. Instead it's more like an authoritarian state where you have to be super careful about what you say, under threat of exile.

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> This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely.

I disagree with your overall take for a few reasons. Some of the best forums on the Internet in the days of yore were heavily moderated. Some of the best subreddits are the most heavily moderated (AskHistorians is the example people provide routinely).

Not every place should be about an open free speech debate about everything. Having topic-focused spaces is perfectly reasonable and you as the user are owed nothing if you join one and start posting off-topic content.

Users are not owed a spot in any given community.

I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance by a mob.

The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day, the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins.

The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes, regardless of what the "rules" say.

The Wil Wheaton example is actually something that absolutely could have happened in the IRC days - a big mob flooding another channel to ban user X could lead an oper to decide the same thing (this was in fact the source of much drama back in my EFNet days).

There's nothing stopping a moderator/operator from simply blocking accounts on-instance who are erroneously flagging/reporting people.

There's also nothing stopping Wil Wheaton from finding a more sympathetic server admin or starting his own Fediverse server instances and ignoring people reporting his accounts (see also: Kevin Beaumont).

Dude it's an open protocol. You wanna dunk on the libs? Spin up a server. Presumably if you're on HN long enough to want to make a new account solely to bitch about the Fediverse's overall political stance then you have the skills to run one. Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, whatever, as long as it speaks ActivityPub it's on the Fediverse. Find new people who feel the same way by using #fediblock as a suggestion of people to follow, instead of people to block.

But the Fediverse is not one monolithic network. And nobody is obligated to listen to a single thing you say. So if you start hassling a bunch of people who are there to talk to their friends while also being openly queer, non-white, and liberal, then you'll start racking up the blocks. Keeping a community healthy involves kicking out people who want to destroy it, too.

If you’re on HN long enough you should know of a superior protocol called Nostr that doesn’t tie your identity to Federated servers.

By tying each individual to a server you are allowing cancel by association culture. Individuals should not be put in left/right buckets (or any other buckets) and have that association be used to censor/exclude them. The structure of the Fediverse encourages in/out groups. That’s why it sucks, and that’s why giving individuals the power over their own identity will be the future of social.

Honey, I run a Mastodon. At least half of the server blocks I do come from my users saying "hey have you seen this post on #fediblock yet". If I stopped dealing with that stuff, my users would migrate their accounts (and their donations for the server upkeep) to another server that's better at keeping up with that. They've got "power over their own identity" without having to deal with the network effects of using Yet Another Social Media Protocol that's completely incompatible with existing open protocols; part of their power over their identity includes delegating me as the social plumber who maintains the Asshole Filter on our social space.

It's pretty hard to avoid putting individuals into any buckets whatsoever. How do I discover community on Nostr? I connected to a few relays but nothing seems to be themed or organized around interests. On Akkoma I can make friends with people on my local server and sibling servers in our Bubble so it's very easy. Focusing on an independent identity at the expense of any kind of association is not particularly appealing to me. I'm not surprised it has tended to attract individualists in the crypto and libertarian crowds with those design priorities.

Nothing stops you from running your own instance for people who want to share the same ideas or want less stringent moderation. Freedom goes both ways: It includes others right to not want to deal with you. Just like Gab and Truth Social who both runs Mastodon have either wholly or mostly defederated.

And as it happens the reason most Mastodon instances are moderated the way they are is that their users demand it.

Mastodon and Pleroma seem to have just soaked up the worst of the Fediverse. Most of the big Mastodon servers are MASSIVE echo chambers. I didn't check Pleroma as much, but the ones that I did were the same, but with an "I live in a basement and make white genocide infographics all day long" flavor.

I've seen hobby chats that do not actually discuss the hobby they're designed for, because the keyboard warriors moderating the place have decided that their political flavor of the month is more important. It's not a healthy atmosphere for discussion, but it's the dominant one across the platform. And you WILL be aggressively blocked if you do not fit into it.

Peertube and Pixelfed have fared so much better, I guess because the SocMed(tm) format is inherently designed around creating a bubble.

Exactly my problem, I thought I had found a decent topic-focused instance, and then the local feed was dominated by one guy being pretty much who I didn't use twitter because of. I can block him, of course, but I'd rather we be able to talk about the techy stuff I signed up for.

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