4 ms·

It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping

It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.

nickthegreek 4y ago
Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
  - eduction 4y ago
    > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
    - emaro 4y ago
      There are plenty of instances who just block content that's illegal in their country. So you just could choose one of these.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Everyone wants to return to the old internet. The old internet was run by self appointed gods who created little fiefdoms. Some form of censorship could happen similiar to reddit groups.
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
        Who knew that we had it so good back when the appointed God-king of your favorite PhpBB forum was some 16 year old Livejournal user?
      - DocTomoe 4y ago
        To come back to my NNTP example: Back in the day, servers were not banned by admins, individual users were killfiled (essentially a filter) by other individual users, meaning that if you really disliked someone, you would get rid of their output - without denying anyone else access to their musings, related to the topic at hand or anywhere else. It was a more civilized time. Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
    - ltriant 4y ago
      Great! This server isn't for you then. Find another one.
      - lokedhs 4y ago
        There are plenty of instances who makes it a selling point that they don't block anything. If the have free speech in their name, you can assume that's the case. The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Turn on showdead on HN if you want to see the shadowbanning hell that most social media networks I know of can send their users to. In general, users have no idea that they're even banned. There's a few people on HN who have been posting nonsense here for years while shadowbanned. Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I believe (dang feel free to correct me) some of what you are seeing are bots. They might be OK with only those with showdead seeing the links or to your point might not have bothered to check what sites have blocked them unless they get a status 403. For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art. Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away. In NGinx: error_page 404 500 501 502 503 504 =200 /ram/e.txt; e.txt is just ASCII art in a tmpfs ram disk.

It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.

nickthegreek 4y ago

Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.

moron4hire 4y ago
But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
- eduction 4y ago
  > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
  - emaro 4y ago
    There are plenty of instances who just block content that's illegal in their country. So you just could choose one of these.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Everyone wants to return to the old internet. The old internet was run by self appointed gods who created little fiefdoms. Some form of censorship could happen similiar to reddit groups.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      Who knew that we had it so good back when the appointed God-king of your favorite PhpBB forum was some 16 year old Livejournal user?
    - DocTomoe 4y ago
      To come back to my NNTP example: Back in the day, servers were not banned by admins, individual users were killfiled (essentially a filter) by other individual users, meaning that if you really disliked someone, you would get rid of their output - without denying anyone else access to their musings, related to the topic at hand or anywhere else. It was a more civilized time. Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
  - ltriant 4y ago
    Great! This server isn't for you then. Find another one.
    - lokedhs 4y ago
      There are plenty of instances who makes it a selling point that they don't block anything. If the have free speech in their name, you can assume that's the case. The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Turn on showdead on HN if you want to see the shadowbanning hell that most social media networks I know of can send their users to. In general, users have no idea that they're even banned. There's a few people on HN who have been posting nonsense here for years while shadowbanned. Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I believe (dang feel free to correct me) some of what you are seeing are bots. They might be OK with only those with showdead seeing the links or to your point might not have bothered to check what sites have blocked them unless they get a status 403. For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art. Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away. In NGinx: error_page 404 500 501 502 503 504 =200 /ram/e.txt; e.txt is just ASCII art in a tmpfs ram disk.