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Comment by BodyCulture | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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".

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