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I've been an instance admin myself for some months, and except for one instance populated with profiles with swastikas (which I promptly blocked) I found Mastod

I've been an instance admin myself for some months, and except for one instance populated with profiles with swastikas (which I promptly blocked) I found Mastodon to be the most inclusive social network I've seen in a while. I'm not sure if it's only my experience, but at least half of the profiles I bump into have an LGBTQ flag or belong to some minorities (sometimes I suspect that I'm the only white straight guy there), and so far I haven't witnessed any episodes of intolerance that got way too familiar on Facebook and Twitter. I think that the structure of the Fediverse in general facilitates inclusiveness and moderation and it prompts people to be "nicer". If you're an intolerant jerk or a fascist, expect yourself to be muted/blocked. If you run a whole instance of intolerant jerks, expect other instance admins to mute/block your instance. Eventually, they'll still be able to vomit their intolerance or conspiracies with their buddies on their own instance, and maybe find a couple of like-minded instances to buddy with. But they'll be basically isolated from the rest of the Fediverse, because most of the people don't like to read that shit, and most of the other admins will filter out their content. And that's the best of the two worlds: intolerants and bigots have the freedom of speech that they crave so much, but very few are willing to listen to what they say. However, it could also be that things are like this because the Fediverse is still relatively small compared to the major social media. 3-5 million people isn't exactly small, but it's still three orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. It's still a bit of a green field mostly populated by geeks, scientists, open-source enthusiasts and instances specifically dedicated to hobbies. Maybe we just need to make sure that it remains like this? Just in case, I won't share a sign up invite with my parents...

hd4 4y ago
Not sure if the siloization of thought is the correct direction. Do we really just want another internet hugbox/echochamber?
- blacklight 4y ago
  It's a bit different in this case. I mean, if an admin wants to run their own silos (maybe a private instance with family/colleagues, or an instance on invite), they're free to do it. But most of the people who run their instances have their interest in those instances being discoverable, and most of the people who sign up have their interest in following and be followed by people on other instances. So no matter if there are many instances, you won't have silos if content is well discoverable. Having an account on a Fediverse instance is like having an email address: no matter if it's Gmail, Hotmail or your own SMTP server, you can still communicate with other people as long as you have their addresses. However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-instance discoverability (relays and user directories) are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria, it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small scales, but it's promising. I believe that with better curated relays and user directories we can have the best of the two worlds: decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm considering running my own relay with instances dedicated to science and tech, but even the software for relays isn't that stable yet...

hd4 4y ago

Not sure if the siloization of thought is the correct direction. Do we really just want another internet hugbox/echochamber?

blacklight 4y ago
It's a bit different in this case. I mean, if an admin wants to run their own silos (maybe a private instance with family/colleagues, or an instance on invite), they're free to do it. But most of the people who run their instances have their interest in those instances being discoverable, and most of the people who sign up have their interest in following and be followed by people on other instances. So no matter if there are many instances, you won't have silos if content is well discoverable. Having an account on a Fediverse instance is like having an email address: no matter if it's Gmail, Hotmail or your own SMTP server, you can still communicate with other people as long as you have their addresses. However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-instance discoverability (relays and user directories) are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria, it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small scales, but it's promising. I believe that with better curated relays and user directories we can have the best of the two worlds: decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm considering running my own relay with instances dedicated to science and tech, but even the software for relays isn't that stable yet...