When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge pil

When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge piles of VC investment) to do the moderation. They are likely to be more interested in a constantly-rising user count and ever-longer user sessions that give them opportunities to sneak in as many ads around the edges as possible; they are probably only going to kick people off for behavior that can get the company sued. When you use Mastodon, you are trusting a handful of people who are probably running it as a hobby to do the moderation. Their only goal may be to have a nice, chill place to chat with friends; they can kick people off for whatever kind of behavior they find undesirable, whether that be "repeatedly failing to post pictures of cats on Mandatory Cat Post Day", "talking about feet on No-Feets Friday", or "using the Banned Circular Letter six times" on an instance that demands you never use the letter O.* And if an admin finds that they are getting a lot of reports of a foreign instance for behavior they forbid, they can defederate from that instance, thus slicing out a large source of undesired behavior in one go. Users can vote on moderation policies with their feet (though perhaps not on No-Feets Friday if that's the issue that's polarizing huge portions of the overall community) and move to another instance - or maintain two accounts if they want to keep a foothold on both sides of the divide. I could probably spin this into a metaphor for representative democracy if I wanted. Pick an instance whose admin (and her moderation team, if it's big enough to have one) feels likely to agree with you on moderation, report violations, let her do the dirty work and maybe say "thanks" and give her a little something now and then. ---- * Of course, you could also kick people off your instance for things like "expressing political views opposed to the instance admin" or "acting like this is 4chan". But comedy examples are more fun, and less likely to make you snap into reflexive defense of whatever your position is.