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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

On Mastodon, people can choose to pick an instance that will rarely defederate anyone and follow or mute on an individual basis, or they can choose an instance where moderators will take a firmer line.

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The trouble is how to judge them. Automated censorship of others is invisible unless they announce it or you somehow know what you should have been able to see.

Mastodon instances have a section on the About page (under “Moderated servers”) which shows you exactly that. You can even get it programatically: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#domain_block...

Thanks, it looks like they fixed some prior complaints about not being able to see this.

Mastodon instances tend to have admins who are if anything pretty loud and argumentative about what their mod policies are. If that matters to you, you can easily find instances that make a point of being open about what they block. A whole lot of people don't care about the how or why as long as they're not subjected to content they don't want to see, and that's their choice.

So the alternative to Twitter is Balkanized safe spaces where you only talk to like-minded people.

This is a weird way of saying "a platform where you can't force other people to read your posts", yeah.

That's vastly superior to Twitter, which routinely shoves stuff in your timeline from people you do not follow.

And that is how you end up in an echo chamber where it looks as if your ideas are the only ideas and everyone obviously agrees with you.

Well, and like, the entire rest of the world.

If you choose to only talk to like-minded people, that is your right, as it should be. And might well be one of the reasons most people aren't on Twitter, and many who are subscribe to extensive block lists.

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