So imagine you run a Mastodon instance. You try to keep it a chill place. You start getting lots of reports for not just one, but multiple users on boner.lol. T

So imagine you run a Mastodon instance. You try to keep it a chill place. You start getting lots of reports for not just one, but multiple users on boner.lol. There's just a lot of people there who like pissing people off, it seems. You look up who boner.lol's admin is and they are posting the exact same kind of stuff people are reporting their users for, and rabidly defending users who're being called out on other instances for doing this. So you shrug, and silence the whole instance. Now nobody on boner.lol can talk to anyone on your instance. But what about @niceguy@boner.lol? @niceguy has a lot of friends on your instance, and wasn't doing any of the stuff that got boner.lol silenced. They just thought 'boner.lol' sounded funny. They want to talk to their friends, so they make a new account elsewhere - maybe on your instance if registration is open, maybe elsewhere. Eventually they pretty much move operations to their new account because they just can't talk to anyone they want to with their boner.lol account. This continues for a while. Maybe you toot something about how you silenced boner.lol and some of the other instance admins you're friendly with decide to preemptively silence boner.lol as well. Other admins silence it after their own direct experience with it. Maybe it gets added to one of the lists of Instances You Might Wanna Silence If You Want Things To Be Chill. Eventually the only other instances that don't silence boner.lol are ones that allow the same kind of behavior that got them silenced on your instance. And the admin of boner.lol now has a userbase consisting of nothing but the kind of people who enjoy pissing each other off. Which sure doesn't sound like a very rewarding thing to run, financially or emotionally. There is at least one instance I could name which has run down this path, and is no more.