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Comment by sureglymop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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