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Comment by ChocolateGod | Hacker News Reader

If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse.

Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance.

On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of having their instances blocked, and admins are usually political activists.

I've avoided BlueSky because people are allowed to boast and defend being attracted to kids or spam death threats (including addresses attached), but not have differing political opinions, even when they're arguably mainstream.

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I think that is federation working as intended. These instance admins are exercising their right to free speech by not federating with instances that contain content they disagree with or disallow on their instance.

I think it's not at all comparable to a corporate entity like X being in full control and able to censor any content.

You may create your own instance and federate with the instances you want. If an instance chooses not to federate with yours you get to decide what's more important to you, your principles or their content.

The solution is to create your own instance. I understand your frustrations but I have a hard time being empathetic to these issues when you are using someone elses instance, probably administered by volunteers in their spare time.

Of course they have a right to free speech, but when I'm choosing a platform it's the user experience that matters to me and not the rights of the operators. Twitter lets me visit or follow any other account on the platform and see what they have to say, and the ability to do that across a wide range of interests and viewpoints is exactly why I use it. If Mastodon requires setting up a custom server to replicate that experience, it's not a good replacement for me.

Look at how many instances agreed to block Threads even before it added ActivityPub support because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't ban (legal) opinions and comments he doesn't agree with.

Some people are so insecure about their own opinions that the pure idea that someone exists that might not agree the same is a threat, never mind seeing their content.

Mastodon.social is the single largest instance and does not block Threads. Where did you get this information, and furthermore, how did you manage to draw a line from that to "Zuck supports free speech, Mastodon doesn't like that?"

> Twitter lets me [...] see what they have to say

* if their viewpoint agrees with Mr. Musk.

No, that's not accurate. I don't agree with all of Musk's moderation decisions, but there are still many large and influential accounts on Twitter who think he's wrong about everything and aren't shy about saying so. (I would not use Twitter anymore if that stopped being the case.)

>If Mastodon requires setting up a custom server to replicate that experience, it's not a good replacement for me.

It doesn't. It's the other way around; if you want something niche you'll be likely be searching and custom setup, but otherwise you're getting the default experience with the normal amount of discoverability.

> I think that is federation working as intended

My email provider doesn't prevent me from sending an email from someone at Gmail because someone at Gmail happens to have opposite views to the admin.

Yet email is still federated.

Plenty of email servers will throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with. It's just that most people have migrated to general purpose providers for their personal addresses.

> throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with

Right, you can get kicked off for your emails.

But nobody is going to ban you based on which domains you do or do not put on your block list.

Modern email most definitely does block domains and distrust unfamiliar ones (I extend my personal guarantee that getting around spam filters will be an issue if you host your own email), and there most definitey are such things as domain restricted email servers.

Moreover social media faces distinct issues that require specific tools, causing the email analogy to break down a bit. A lot of organized harassment campaigns leverage network effects of platforms in ways that wouldn't work over email. The per instance federating capability helps to mitigate that, and if mitigating harassment is not something that is a priority there are instances you can join that take the open-to-all approach.

I think you didn't understand what I meant.

Those domains are being blocked because of what they send.

They're not being blocked on the basis of what domains they block. There's no recursive blocking that wants you to take a stance and punishes you for being a neutral acceptor of emails. Those blocks are the behavior that can make federation suck.

I accept that I overlooked your distinction here. You are right that there's no recursive blocking with email.

But I also think that's an oversimplification, because the block list is a helpful proxy for content characteristic of an instance.

But this is a case where I think the analogy to email breaks down insofar as its instructive to social media generally, because some things about email don't cleanly map on to what federated instances are managing. It makes sense that you would want to block instances and their enablers, to connect to an ecosystem consistent with the intentions of a particular instance.

As parent commenter said you can use a general purpose provider (with email) or general purpose instance (with Mastodon), so you are accessing the fediverse. The only thing you are "missing out" on is the ability to make it compulsory for other users to listen to you against their consent.

> to listen to you against their consent.

Then stop trying to make a public discourse and instead make a private forum.

The idea of the fediverse as an agglomeration of private forums is a half-decent mental model. Each instance has its own rules and community, and some of them really hate each other.

I feel like "people that talk to them" is going a bit far as a definition of "enabler".

And social media posts in this design are pull, not push, so nobody is ever forced to listen to anything. If you block an instance you won't see their posts, no need to block any intermediates.

Flip things around and it's exactly as you describe. Gmail can and has banned small mail servers - even ones that are not in the least malicious.

Maybe. You'll frequently find many stores/communities/services saying "hotmail/yahoo/___ users, we haven't been getting your emails" because those services aren't quite as big as Gmail and are getting spam-holed or whatever. I'm sure spam filtering already gives a major hit to free email services. If a mail server started up that explicitly permits in its ToS propagation of hate speech and terrorist threats, it's probably going to get blocklisted by all major email services, no?

You may lose access to your Google account. I run my own mail server and honestly despite always hearing that people have problems when doing this I've had 0 trouble in years.

Your mindset certainly makes me never want to use Mastodon for anything.

Mastodon is worse if you pick servers that insist on being activist, and bother to care about the drama, sure. You don't need to do either.

But then you need to research the severs, shop around, and a bunch of other shit people don’t have time for.

A bad user experience is just that: bad.

I mean sure, but it's entirely an optional communal space? Like...who cares?

The only reason there was even an opinion about Twitter was mainstream news started reporting "what was on Twitter" and it's still centralized in that way - it "felt" non-optional.

Some people enjoy "socializing in the large". For one, I already have a robust personal friend group grounded in traditional social spaces (like my local physical community, former coworkers, friends from my college days, etc) that I don't need to find a communal space online to engage in "socializing in the small". There's nothing wrong with "socializing in the small" of course but for me that's just a group chat.

Mastodon/ActivityPub is not Twitter. It's not millions of people in one stadium. It's more like dozens of rooms in a big mansion. (sorry, the analogy isn't perfect) ... You don't just walk into the room with a bunch of nazis because that place is probably going to suck to have a conversation in. Look at what the conversations and social expectations are before you jump in, and things will work out a lot better for everyone. That's not a bad user experience, that's just "socializing with fellow humans".

But it’s not diverse enough group of humans to be interesting. I don’t want to hear Linux takes all day.

That’s due to barriers to entry and lack of critical mass.

It's more than big enough for lots of us. It doesn't need to be big enough for everyone.

Just like you need to do when picking a forum to register on or a social media site to sign up to. This isn't something new.

It will also shake out, in that most people will tend towards well-known, large instances that will survive and grow exactly because they refuse to engage with the more obnoxious part of the drama.

They should complete the circle and allow instances to invade and take over other instances/subjecate other instances’ users.

Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important.

Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?

Eh, I don't have any links to hand, but I vividly remember when I used Mastodon an instance of an admin being tagged and pressured to remove an individual off their server or be blocked.

was around a year ago

From what I've seen, some niche servers have very detailed and very strict rules intended to address the needs of certain marginalized groups. An example I've seen is requiring a content warning for any image where a person or animal is staring directly into the lens, appearing to make eye contact with the viewer.

Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".

Things like one instance banning another whole instance because that instance is not agreeing to the same moderation policies as the first.

I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks.

Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708

Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs:

https://mastodon.art/about

Note - they partially block mastodon.social!

>mastodon.art is a safe space instance

So don't join them if you don't want to be coddled. Anyone who does wants to engage with a different slice of the fediverse, and why do you care if they don't see you?

I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment or the one I was replying to.

fyi mastodon.social is by far the biggest (almost sole) source of spam, thus more and more servers are "limiting" it (as opposed to outright blocking/defederating) so people only see posts from users they explicitly follow from that server.

I was in a discussion with someone and the instance just booted me out. No explanation. No appeal. I still had a handful of windows open to various conversations (I’m a slob) and could not find a single reason.

I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.

It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.

>Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them

The echo chamber argument itself is a politicized argument that I think fundamentally misunderstands why communities converging on common values can be beneficial rather than simply echoing.

If people are interested in astronomy, or tech security, or FOSS, or politics, weeding the garden leads to more dynamic, diverse and nuanced communication, not less, and the diagnosis of such things as "echo chambers" is a shallow misdiagnosis. Opening up your garden to weeds kills everything and leads to takeover of the one dominant kind of weed that already dominates everywhere else, which is more echoey.

The problem is that many Mastodon servers go far beyond what you describe. Your server can blocked because it doesn't block somebody else, for example. Or because it doesn't have such and such in its rules.

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