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Comment by andinsky | Hacker News Reader

> If almost everybody thinks you're so insufferable that they don't want to interact with you, chances are, you are.

Or they disagree with your views so intensely that they want you silenced.

That's what happened with https://spinster.xyz defederation. A group of male administrators of other Fediverse instances took umbrage at the women-centered, feminist discussion there and between them defederated hundreds of servers away from Spinster.

This was on top of misogynistic attacks and attempts to deplatform. Some unfortunately successful, like the removal of the Spinster app from the Google Play Store and F-Droid.

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> Or they disagree with your views so intensely that they want you silenced. That's what happened with https://spinster.xyz defederation.

You're referring to an instance in which nobody was silenced, and all that happened was that some people chose not to interact with other people. That's totally okay! You don't have to interact with folks you think are insufferable.

> This was on top of misogynistic attacks

Unfortunately, most social networks are full of misogynists, racists, etc. As the size of the network grows, the probability of it including a jerk approaches 100%. In fact, this is one of the reasons someone might choose to run their own network in which they don't have to associate with said jerks. Based on a cursory search of your example, it looks like a lot of folks felt that spinster.xyz wasn't worth voluntarily associating with, perhaps because there was a high proportions of jerks.

the propensity for fediverse admins to act like tiny dictators is extremely worrying. i haven't seen a good solution to this sort of thing honestly. ultimately it also means that you have to walk on eggshells and force yourself into an impossible shape lest you offend someone's very special interest that you didn't even know you were lightly brushing up against (for example, you say "clanker" and therefore the owner of some instance immediately and without asking thinks you are against cyborgs, and they identify as a cyborg, therefore you are a bigot, and you get banned without warning and all your friendships are gone - didn't happen to me, but i've seen it happen to someone else). one of the worst things about this is that you can't have a really strong disagreement with people who are popular on some instance because social inner circles form very easily on tiny instances, and all of them are tiny, especially compared to non-federated, centralized networks where brushing up against inner circles that have connections to admins is much much less likely.

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