I'm curious what you mean by that. It seems hard to censor people when anyone can run an ActivityPub-compatible server on a $5 VPS.
Some examples of reasons stated for blocking individual instances from the Fediverse:
* “libertarianism”
* “TERFism” (feminists that oppose modern trans ideology)
* “Trumpism” (blocking nearly half the American electorate based on their political views?)
* “free speech”
* “federate with evil instances”
Sounds sketchy, right?
At least Twitter 1.0 had concrete guidelines that it could use to justify its censorship.
As can be seen from the list above, Fediblock is highly partisan and arbitrary. An ideal tool for political weaponisation of the Fediverse.
And if I join another instance and discuss “free speech” I will be swiftly booted out, lest Fediblock comes for their instance, too.
Can you see the issue with that?
Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”?
Am I the asshole?
Not really, no. I understand maybe being a little irritated, but not being upset about it. Just associate with instances where you're welcomed instead.
There are many groups who wouldn't want me to be around, in real life and otherwise. That's just life.
> Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”?
I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly. Your comments here don't make that very clear-cut. But it doesn't matter for this point.
The point is that it's a matter of freedom of association. Do you really want to hang around where you're not welcome, for whatever reason? I know I wouldn't. Life is too short.
I would think that the fediverse would be a thing that you, or anyone who is concerned about deplatforming and censorship, would be very happy about precisely because you can't be deplatformed or silenced on it.
You can join like-minded instances, neutral instances, or even start your own, do whatever you want. You have total freedom of speech. You just don't have the freedom to impose your speech on people who don't want to hear it. Freedom of speech does not in any way imply that you have the right to force others to listen.
1. Do or advocate for something unreasonable (banning and blocking people for having different politics than you, even if they're inside the Overton Window, even if their opinion is mainstream and perfectly fine);
2. Pretend the other party is being unreasonable ("I'm not seeing the problem here.", "Can you see the issue with that?" "Not really, no"), "gaslighting" them as the kids say;
3. When further pressed for detail or explanation deflect and feign ignorance ("I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly"), even if what the other person is asking is very clear (Do you think people should be de-federated or otherwise censored for expressing political opinions which are not your own?).
It is extremely, extremely obvious what the person you are replying to is concerned about but you don't actually care, do you?
I am neither banning/blocking anyone, nor am I advocating doing so. I am arguing that that instances have the right to do so, and that them doing so doesn't make the platform useless to others.
I never asserted that I agree with instances actually doing this.
> "gaslighting" them as the kids say
In what world does "I disagree" count as gaslighting?
> It is extremely, extremely obvious what the person you are replying to is concerned about but you don't actually care, do you?
It is not so obvious to me, no. If I take what he's saying literally, then I struggle with inconsistencies. If I don't, then I'm assuming that he has a certain perspective, and I don't want to do that because I can't actually read his mind.
However, as I said in my comment, for the purposes of this conversation it doesn't really matter what he's concerned about. My stance and argument would be the same regardless of his sociopolitical viewpoint.
Yes, because saying that is so strongly associated with people that many instances want to actively avoid. Nobody owes you anything, they protect their own community interests and favor over-blocking rather than the alternative of risking people having to see posts that violate their community's values.
> Am I the asshole?
Probably not.
1. I endorse freedom of speech, even if I disagree with what you have to say. (This also means anyone can criticize what someone else (or themself) writes; if they cannot, then it is not real free speech.)
2. Even if an instance allows such a thing and some people support Trump or other stuff, this does not necessarily mean that everyone does; an entire instance is not a single person.
3. Blocking and downscoring at the user level may be possible, independently from instances.
4. You do not have to display all of the messages on the instance. You might view only those by a specific user account for a person or project, or only individual messages being linked to; not everything.
5. Nevertheless, excessive flooding may be a reason to block the federation (e.g. if they send too many millions of large data which is meaningless in less than a nanosecond, which would clearly overload the computer).
6. I don't know if there is possibility of federation but blocking certain types of messages, e.g. if you only want text and not video. Although this seems to be supported by the ActivityPub protocol (there is a Video object, so you can easily filter that), I don't know if the software supports it.
do you merely need to be able to say it, or do you insist that the person you are criticising, and/or their associates, need to hear what you have to say?
I view it much like a cocktail party being thrown in someone's house. The host has every right to decide who will be at the party. If they don't want someone to come because they know that the person will make the party unpleasant for the other guests, they exclude them.
It sucks, but it's not actually infringing on anyone's rights.
Or, to put it in totally nonpolitical terms: if an instance is all about awesome a particular movie is, they may want to defederate from others who are all about how that movie is terrible.
I genuinely don't see the problem with that, and while it is technically "censorship", it's not the sort that is actually problematic. Nobody is saying that the movie haters can't express their viewpoint, they're just saying that they can't do it in their particular clubhouse.
When many instances co-ordinate to block an instance based on activism (Fediblock), they are censoring everyone on the targeted instance, many of whom may be innocent.
People deciding "whether they want to follow someone" is completely different from what's happening here.
It's the equivalent of sending an e-mail to my neighborhood listserv saying "the guy who lives down the street is a bit of a dick, let's not invite him to the chili cook-off next time."
And censorship power is further concentrated by the existence of Fediblock
The one nice thing about Twitter was that people with very different viewpoints shared the same platform. C didn't get blocked by A just because C wanted to be able to see tweets by B, just because B blocked A for a different reason. Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
> Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
Define ‘should’. Instances have freedom of association. If an instance decides that it, say, doesn’t want to federate with the instance with all the Nazis, why should should it? Anyone using the instance who doesn’t agree can just go to an instance which suits their preferences better. Personally, if my instance decided “okay, we’re federating with the Nazis now because not doing that is censorship (? still baffled by the logic there)” I would simply move to an instance with a view more in line with mine on how much oxygen of publicity Nazis should be given.
If your problem is that there aren't enough instances for people who believe what you believe, congratulations! The Fediverse empowers you to solve that problem.
Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted.
For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway.
The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks.
The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together.
Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.
Indeed it would! It's also a terrible analogy for the behavior of the vast majority of admins. Given that, I think you are either very poorly informed or arguing in bad faith.