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Comment by xigoi | Hacker News Reader

No, it’s when you decline to federate content that some users don’t want (and many do).

If the users wanted the content it's accessible, I'm not sure what your issue is. Do you use mastadon or is this a feelings issue?

I am talking about when instance X defederates with instance Y, so the users on X cannot see content from Y, even if they took no part in the decision.

“and many do”

Yeah, that’s definitely citation needed.

If many people did not want to read other people’s controversial opinions, we wouldn"t be having this whole debate.

It seems like most of the people complaining about this aren't actually on Mastodon.

Well, obviously you’re not going to be on a platform you dislike. I have signed up for Mastodon several times, but always ended up finding the instance dependency off-putting. I wish for a protocol where the instance mostly doesn’t matter and you can trivially switch to a different one, like with e-mail.

How is ActivityPub instance migration worse than switching email providers?

E-mail providers allow you to use a custom domain, so if the one you’re using suddenly goes away, you can just point your DNS records at the new one and that’s it. If the ActivityPub instance you’re using suddenly goes away, you can say goodbye to your account.

Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same.

If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.

Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).

The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.

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