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This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't s

This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. There seems to be a general understanding that a server may be set up to focus on tabletop gamers, or STEM nerds, or journalists, that doesn't mean they can't also talk about politics, or movies, or whatever they want. But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. That is, in fact, a point in favor of the federation model. There are a number of dedicated mastodon hosts already[0] for those who don't want to roll their own from scratch, and more will probably come online with time. Just a really, really dumb assessment. 0. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want-to-run-your-own-mastodon-server https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I don't have a history of calling things dumb, but you wrote this: > admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance? You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I called it like I see it.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    I first started dabbling with Mastodon 5 years ago. In my country there only were 6 instances at the time. 3 were made up by anarcho-communists, 1 was dedicated to music, 1 was dedicated to video games and only 1 self-touted as a "generalist" instance. Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution. If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
    - ffssffss 4y ago
      Maybe a better title of this would have been, "Mastodon isn't a good social network for me". It sounds like you'd rather be on some kind of discussion forum with different areas for different topics all united under the same consistent moderation policies.
    - culturedsystems 4y ago
      "quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one" That's technically true, but who cares? The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. The communities of videogame and music enthusiasts are larger than any one instance, and can follow one another across instances, and see each others' tagged posts in searches across instances.
      - lmm 4y ago
        > The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. Defaults matter. Usability matters. If that particular filter is the one that the community uses to communicate with each other, then who's included or excluded from that filter becomes very relevant.
        kixiQu 4y ago
        While I agree with the principles of what you're saying, the facts are a bit off here: the instance timeline isn't the default, and the lead dev has tried to nerf it a lot in many ways – I think it doesn't even show up in the official iOS app? Also, anything posted "to the instance timeline" also shows up in federated timelines if you follow the poster, unless you're running a fork allowing "local-only" posting. One can always drop by https://mastovue.glitch.me https://mastovue.glitch.me every so often to tour the local TLs of instances in the neighborhood (https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/ https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/) to see if there's anyone worth following.
pwinnski 4y ago
To make my second point even stronger, I've noticed that the site I linked doesn't even include two popular newer mastodon hosts, iKnox[0] and Elestio[1]. 0. https://iknox.com/products/mastodon-hosting https://iknox.com/products/mastodon-hosting 1. https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon
chroma 4y ago
> I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. The peculiar rules aren't written down. Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] This can include DMs that both parties are fine with (but not the server admin, who can read them), or behavior off of the site.[2][3] The problem isn't solved if you go through the trouble of setting up your own server. De-federation is common[4] (often for absurd reasons[5]), and blacklists are shared across many instances.[6] 1. https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361 https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361 2. https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1605268536930213907 https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1605268536930213907 3. https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1593934653114785793 https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1593934653114785793 4. https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=50 https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=50 5. https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705 https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705 6. https://github.com/weirderearth/weirder-rules/blob/main/suggested-instance-blocks.md https://github.com/weirderearth/weirder-rules/blob/main/sugg...
- zzzeek 4y ago
  > Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] from the link you provided, the admins respond: "This post was removed by mistake and we apologize. We’ve recently hired more moderators and the post in question was falsely interpreted to be implying something it was not." for [5], the journa.host server had a lot of problems out of the gate, including some suspicion they were sharing ban-evasion tools, but is not currently defederated for the most part. I follow lots of people on that host and I'm on a different server. the thread there illustrates the reasons which IMO were not unreasonable for a brand new server attracting a lot of attention with odd moves. not that moderation isn't fraught with tons of problems, but I dont think large servers have admins that are capriciously banning people for made-up reasons the way Musk has been doing on Twitter.
  - glenstein 4y ago
    And to your point, in addition to those examples being unreliable, they're a small smattering of one-offs in a context of vast numbers of users on huge servers. By and large the typical server doesn't have idiosyncratic rules, and the scenario contemplated here is a fever dream. As Twitter has imploded, people have increasingly complained about unrepresentative strange examples that don't accurately reflect the day-to-day experience of being on Mastodon.
archagon 4y ago
> But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. I’ve been wondering how much this scales. Surely if a large number of people did this, it would create a massive NxN mesh that would force instances to only federate with larger instances?
romwell 4y ago
>This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. >Just a really, really dumb assessment. Your argument boils down to "run your own instance", which has specifically been addressed in the article. Perhaps instead of repeating the word "dumb", you could read it. Regarding "run your own instance": sure, just like we all are running are email servers, right? Shouldn't be that hard to set up, right? Not like there would be any issues with getting on one of the many blacklists[1] maintained by God knows who that you'd have no practical means to get removed from, right? Right. [1] https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sratner 4y ago
> I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. I have seen two just today, listed explicitly in the rules of distinct servers, without particularly looking: • No content that's illegal in UK or Germany. • No crypto.
- toofy 4y ago
  you think it’s peculiar to not allow illegal content? even twitter will remove content if it violates netzDG.
  - sratner 4y ago
    Not at all, but I do think it peculiar to be subject to what from my perspective is a random set of jurisdictions. Of course I understand why this is the case, but out of a handful of servers I looked at, only two specified where their data is hosted - for the rest, the same legal provisions obviously apply, but I have no way of knowing what they are. I also don't know the specifics of German law, so the fact that my account could get suspended for violating something I am not aware of is peculiar in itself. The point is that there is no single privacy policy and single jurisdiction to worry about - it is a guess, depending on where the instance is hosted, and may even move under you without notice. [edit: I am in the process of selecting an instance personally - I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught.]
    - toofy 4y ago
      fair enough. > I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught as someone who has been on mastodon for quite some time, i highly recommend one of the general servers and then not worrying about it from there. there’s an awful of lot of nonsense panic from people about “oh noes! which instance!” i just looked and these are a few of general servers that are open right now mstdn.plus mas.to geekdom.social mstdn.social mastodon.world mstdn.party also, after you join, one of the first things you may want to do is use one of the tools to find people who you followed on twitter. something like movetodon (super easy) or fedifinder (a little more difficult). good luck! if ya have any questions, lemme know.
stevebmark 4y ago
No one cares about Mastadon now. And in a month when it fizzles out, you should come back and re-read this article.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb

pwinnski 4y ago
I don't have a history of calling things dumb, but you wrote this: > admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance? You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I called it like I see it.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  I first started dabbling with Mastodon 5 years ago. In my country there only were 6 instances at the time. 3 were made up by anarcho-communists, 1 was dedicated to music, 1 was dedicated to video games and only 1 self-touted as a "generalist" instance. Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution. If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
  - ffssffss 4y ago
    Maybe a better title of this would have been, "Mastodon isn't a good social network for me". It sounds like you'd rather be on some kind of discussion forum with different areas for different topics all united under the same consistent moderation policies.
  - culturedsystems 4y ago
    "quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one" That's technically true, but who cares? The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. The communities of videogame and music enthusiasts are larger than any one instance, and can follow one another across instances, and see each others' tagged posts in searches across instances.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. Defaults matter. Usability matters. If that particular filter is the one that the community uses to communicate with each other, then who's included or excluded from that filter becomes very relevant.
      - kixiQu 4y ago
        While I agree with the principles of what you're saying, the facts are a bit off here: the instance timeline isn't the default, and the lead dev has tried to nerf it a lot in many ways – I think it doesn't even show up in the official iOS app? Also, anything posted "to the instance timeline" also shows up in federated timelines if you follow the poster, unless you're running a fork allowing "local-only" posting. One can always drop by https://mastovue.glitch.me https://mastovue.glitch.me every so often to tour the local TLs of instances in the neighborhood (https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/ https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/) to see if there's anyone worth following.

pwinnski 4y ago

To make my second point even stronger, I've noticed that the site I linked doesn't even include two popular newer mastodon hosts, iKnox[0] and Elestio[1]. 0. https://iknox.com/products/mastodon-hosting https://iknox.com/products/mastodon-hosting 1. https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon

chroma 4y ago

> I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. The peculiar rules aren't written down. Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] This can include DMs that both parties are fine with (but not the server admin, who can read them), or behavior off of the site.[2][3] The problem isn't solved if you go through the trouble of setting up your own server. De-federation is common[4] (often for absurd reasons[5]), and blacklists are shared across many instances.[6] 1. https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361 https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361 2. https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1605268536930213907 https://twitter.com/WashburneAlex/status/1605268536930213907 3. https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1593934653114785793 https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1593934653114785793 4. https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=50 https://fba.ryona.agency/scoreboard?blockers=50 5. https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705 https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705 6. https://github.com/weirderearth/weirder-rules/blob/main/suggested-instance-blocks.md https://github.com/weirderearth/weirder-rules/blob/main/sugg...

zzzeek 4y ago
> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] from the link you provided, the admins respond: "This post was removed by mistake and we apologize. We’ve recently hired more moderators and the post in question was falsely interpreted to be implying something it was not." for [5], the journa.host server had a lot of problems out of the gate, including some suspicion they were sharing ban-evasion tools, but is not currently defederated for the most part. I follow lots of people on that host and I'm on a different server. the thread there illustrates the reasons which IMO were not unreasonable for a brand new server attracting a lot of attention with odd moves. not that moderation isn't fraught with tons of problems, but I dont think large servers have admins that are capriciously banning people for made-up reasons the way Musk has been doing on Twitter.
- glenstein 4y ago
  And to your point, in addition to those examples being unreliable, they're a small smattering of one-offs in a context of vast numbers of users on huge servers. By and large the typical server doesn't have idiosyncratic rules, and the scenario contemplated here is a fever dream. As Twitter has imploded, people have increasingly complained about unrepresentative strange examples that don't accurately reflect the day-to-day experience of being on Mastodon.

archagon 4y ago

> But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. I’ve been wondering how much this scales. Surely if a large number of people did this, it would create a massive NxN mesh that would force instances to only federate with larger instances?

romwell 4y ago

>This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. >Just a really, really dumb assessment. Your argument boils down to "run your own instance", which has specifically been addressed in the article. Perhaps instead of repeating the word "dumb", you could read it. Regarding "run your own instance": sure, just like we all are running are email servers, right? Shouldn't be that hard to set up, right? Not like there would be any issues with getting on one of the many blacklists[1] maintained by God knows who that you'd have no practical means to get removed from, right? Right. [1] https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sratner 4y ago

> I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. I have seen two just today, listed explicitly in the rules of distinct servers, without particularly looking: • No content that's illegal in UK or Germany. • No crypto.

toofy 4y ago
you think it’s peculiar to not allow illegal content? even twitter will remove content if it violates netzDG.
- sratner 4y ago
  Not at all, but I do think it peculiar to be subject to what from my perspective is a random set of jurisdictions. Of course I understand why this is the case, but out of a handful of servers I looked at, only two specified where their data is hosted - for the rest, the same legal provisions obviously apply, but I have no way of knowing what they are. I also don't know the specifics of German law, so the fact that my account could get suspended for violating something I am not aware of is peculiar in itself. The point is that there is no single privacy policy and single jurisdiction to worry about - it is a guess, depending on where the instance is hosted, and may even move under you without notice. [edit: I am in the process of selecting an instance personally - I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught.]
  - toofy 4y ago
    fair enough. > I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught as someone who has been on mastodon for quite some time, i highly recommend one of the general servers and then not worrying about it from there. there’s an awful of lot of nonsense panic from people about “oh noes! which instance!” i just looked and these are a few of general servers that are open right now mstdn.plus mas.to geekdom.social mstdn.social mastodon.world mstdn.party also, after you join, one of the first things you may want to do is use one of the tools to find people who you followed on twitter. something like movetodon (super easy) or fedifinder (a little more difficult). good luck! if ya have any questions, lemme know.

stevebmark 4y ago

No one cares about Mastadon now. And in a month when it fizzles out, you should come back and re-read this article.