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Comment by CrampusDestrus | Hacker News Reader

Comparing Mastodon (or ActivityPub-related endeavors) to email is silly.

Mastodon is an open platform where people can post things publicly.

Email is private communication between individuals.

Petty disputes exist on Mastodon because admins can see what's being posted and talked about in other instances and so can choose to ban them just for personal spite.

How about your instance admin peeping into everyone's DMs and seeing which servers hold the most people talking against the Democratic party and then blocking all those instances?

Would you like that?

Well, that's what would need to happen with email to achieve a same 1:1 comparison

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Are you saying email administrators are somehow above this all? They absolutely make weird personal choices when it comes to blocking servers and users. Microsoft will purge your account if it detects what appears to be a names child.

Take, for example, email delivery: if you're simply running a Tor relay (not an exit node) on the same IP address. You'll end up on a weird lists of blacklists not because there's any chance of abuse, but simply because they don't like Tor (or because they're too incompetent to distinguish between the two or too lazy to look up what those IP address lists mean).

The biggest difference between Mastodon and email is that you're less likely to interact with the petty administrators because people send fewer emails than they send toots. I promise you that free, community run email servers will be just as petty, shady, or unreliable as any hobbyist Mastodon instance.

Email admins are not above this, but they have waaaayy less information available in order to ban stuff

How is you private life have way less data then you public life?

Email accounts have waaaaayy more information about you than a public social media account. I can find out your private thoughts, the things you buy, who you owe money too, your social graph, tons and tons of data. I can find out way more about than from some comments on a nerd forum.

If an email admin looks into your private correspondence your first thought is to get the hell out of his servers, whereas if a mastodon admin constantly monitors public posts from your and other instances then it doesn't seem like a big deal

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