The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.
But also, that's a complete strawman. No serious group I am advocates medical treatment without parental consent. There is a strong movement to let 12-year-old choose what pronouns to use in school even without parental consent.
The idea that there is one globally correct way to moderate is demonstratably completely untrue, regardless of what your actual views are. There must be multiple moderation standards that users can pick from.
To answer your question; because they are demonstrably required. Different subreddits already moderate to different standards - why do you insist that each community needs to fit in as part of the same whole?
Groups that promote hate speech and misinformation do so by invading other communities and being disruptive. Brigading and doxxing have been their tools for a long time.
Personally, I've seen that breaking up groups that promote hate speech and misinformation helps the remaining members to enjoy the community in peace.
Mastodon's approach allows you to outsource a part of that by just joining an instance that doesn't even allow "alleged hate speech" into your timeline. That's the appeal of that.
But the point of federated Mastodon is not to have a platform that is solely moderated less than Twitter.
It's that:
- it's not twitter (or rather, it's a "twitter clone" that's non-commercial, not reliant on a single entity, has a degree of data portability built in - decentralised)
- it can allow for the spectrum of moderation styles to exist. The majority of bigger "mainstream" instances are probably going to opt to moderate similarly-ish to social networks, but this doesn't negate the other reasons for mastodon to exist. You can have instances that have an even stricter moderation standard, or even looser.
But at the end you don't need to get why one person prefers a network in one way, because federation means different ways can happily exist, and you chose what you prefer. Just don't be surprised if other people aren't enthusiastic about the people you hang out with.
"Non-default" sounds too harsh here. It's literally a big tab saying "Following". It's only default for the very first time you log into Twitter, afterward it will remember your decision (it will be "default").
> , replies, likes, and retweets will often put content from people you don't follow into your timeline.
No only retweets will show in the Following tab. Which seems reasonable, as retweets were historically done via copy&paste. The other things aren't the case anymore for the "following" tab since Musk introduced it. (By the way, after pg himself asked him to add that possibility!)
I agree that Facebook is way worse in terms of moderation, but Mastodon doesn't seem an improvement over Twitter, quite the opposite. Those moderators are moderating for users, when this should be simply left to their decision of whom to follow. People or posts will be hidden from users who would not have hidden those themselves.
The decentralized approach sounds cool initially, but it leads only to even more segregation / filter bubbles / echo chambers. As if the choice of whom you follow didn't cause enough of that.
I think that's a real issue. Political polarization increases since the amount of media channels increases. When there were only a handful of newspapers or TV channels, they couldn't be too politically biased, otherwise they would scare away most other people. This changed when the number of media outlets increased. And with social media, every user now is able to create their own little reinforcement chamber.
Having to choose between politically charged "you can't read that" gatekeepers is a dystopian nightmare. Yes you can make your own, but next thing you know is "block this list of servers or we block you".