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> 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 includ

by 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.
- brabel 4y ago
  Mastodon servers can hire moderators?? How do they make money? I thought Mastodon was all about not-for-profit social media and there's no way for Mastodon server admins to make any money as there's no ads?? Not a Mastodon user, just trying to understand who is a Mastodon admin (given the large powers they seem to have) and what's in it for them.
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    there's an entire universe of not for profit organizations that hire staff and dont have ads....
    - brabel 4y ago
      Which ones run Mastodon servers? What's the purpose of such organizations?
  - pimeys 4y ago
    People donate money to the servers they're in.
smoldesu 4y ago
> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want. Apparently the same thing happens on Twitter now. If the "Twitter Files" are to be believed, it's happened for a long time before that. Frankly, I think all of this absurd rule-making is fine. If you disagree with it, nobody can stop you from creating your own instance and federating with all the great/terrible sites you want. The irony that these 'sky is falling' posts come from lifelong Twitter users feels like the icing on the cake. Nobody owes you anything on the internet; not Twitter, not Elon, and not the few-thousand instance admins who host servers out-of-pocket.
- chroma 4y ago
  The problem is that if you federate with the bad instances, you'll get de-federated from other instances. The people running the biggest instances think that anyone who reads anything on poa.st or gab or truth.social for any reason must be a nazi, and therefore worthy of banning.
  - thejohnconway 4y ago
    In practice this is not true. De-federating based on association is not common, and mostly used by very tight and usually small servers. The big ones don't do that. Truth social defederated itself.
    - romwell 4y ago
      >De-federating based on association is not common As long as it's possible, it will happen.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        And it should. The alternative (forcing everyone to ingest everything) makes the system rife for abuse in all sorts of ways.
        chroma 4y ago
tptacek 4y ago
That was true in the "blogosphere" too, and nobody freaked out about it. We only take it seriously now because we've spent over a decade hypnotized into believing that a "social network" presenting a single global unified namespace of participants is somehow so important that it's practically a public utility. In a single unified namespace, who's blocked and who isn't is very important. The fediverse implicitly asks the question: what if that assumption is wrong? What if we had as many of the affordances of (say) Twitter as we could get, but the global connectivity model of blogs? In the blogosphere, it hardly even makes sense to ask who's "blocked". I remember the height of the blogosphere as a pretty happening time for discourse on the Internet, so it's not a silly question.
- chroma 4y ago
  Blogs getting banned was much rarer back then because people were less censorious. But the proper model isn't blogs, it's e-mail. Imagine getting banned from your email provider because you sent a political opinion, or even a sarcastic comment. That would be absurd.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    People weren't less censorious. The early Internet was full of professionals. There wasn't that much to censor because people were mostly crafting pages connected to their professional work, or showcasing their cool hobbies. Once the normal people started flooding in, there was a lot of drama and a lot of censorship, it was just contained in silos. Forums had moderation, cliques and weird rules. A discussion about a game for kids could explode in drama, banning and rivalries, it just didn't spread very far like it does today, when you have whole sites and groups dedicated to cataloguing all the drama happening elsewhere.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    I think the separation of email provider (identity, very rarely bans) and listserver provider (community) is pretty neat.
  - acdha 4y ago
    People definitely got banned back then. There were three key differences: 1. Getting banned from Twitter means leaving a global namespace. Getting banned from the comments on someone’s blog was far less serious, and if someone on a group blog had a falling out it just meant that they setup another one (the Mastodon model). Earlier things like Usenet groups had moderation but people could easily move to another group. 2. The stakes were lower: the early internet was full of academics, professionals, etc. and still had this aura of not really mattering. That doesn’t mean that everyone was nice but the ratio was a lot better and it wasn’t anywhere near as coordinated – the creationists and Scientologists were both annoying but they certainly didn’t work together. The odds of some online flap even reaching the awareness of your friends, family, or coworkers were low and it probably would have seemed more like an amusing joke than something serious. 3. An American specialization of the previous point: the hardcore right-wing took over the Republican Party, successfully purged the moderates, and started recruiting young reactionaries. 9/11 changed what a lot of people felt was acceptable to say or do – I remember when Glenn Reynolds was a fairly normal-sounding law professor with a blog in that brief span before 9/11 & the war blogs broke him – and over the 2000s they felt fewer checks as their power & numbers grew. Obama getting elected brought a LOT of voices out which many of us had thought had disappeared in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and by the mid-2010s they were recruiting young people from anti-feminist communities in places like 4chan and Reddit (before GamerGate but that’s when it really ramped up). Nothing unprecedented in terms of message but the numbers and degree to which they were welcomed into the party and started setting the tone was dramatic. There’s a fair argument that some of those views were not uncommon before but had been more genteelly expressed, but I am reminded of how aggressively GOP leaders shut down David Duke in the 90s. I mention politics not just because I think that normalized a lot of bad behavior but also because it changed how people responded. “Internet drama” wasn’t taken seriously but when it started having real-world consequences and impacting national politics, a lot of people - even those who self-described as free speech advocates – started reconsidering how best to respond. Volume also enters into the picture: the first time you see something, you might try to engage. By the dozenth time, you’re a lot more inclined to get out the ban hammer.
madeofpalk 4y ago
Right, this is true with any website that you don’t run. dang can come in here and ban whoever he wants for whatever reason. At the end of the day, if you’re going to a platform (specific mastodon instance) ran by someone else, you’ve got to have an amount of trust in who’s running it. But Mastodon and ActivityPub do attempt to mitigate this - you can run your own instance (and of course, you’re not entitled for someone else to republish you) to seize back some of that control. Followers and follows are a lot more portable, so it’s easier to move instances (which is party automated)
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Yech. Sounds exactly like what you'd expect to happen if subreddits were federated like this. The "mod" role and wielding this kind of petty power over others attracts a certain kind of fragile egomaniac. Not that it's not a problem on a centralized site either mind you, as the Twitter Files have been revealing.
acjohnson55 4y ago
The defederation "wars" will end. People who want to be in walled garden instances, with their own sense of community, cut off from unpredictable sets of other users will have what they want. But I think most users will migrate to places where only the truly bad actor instances are cut off. I've already observed this from my old Tweeps. Defederation is way too blunt of a tool for most cases.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  It will likely end as culture warring weirdos in their spectrum's echo chamber while normal people leave for commercial sites or go back to Twitter. Mastodon needs a culture of openness and general tolerance that it does not have and has made no real effort to foster.
jmprspret 4y ago
> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want. That's another feature, not another bug. Don't like the admin's moderation style or rules, etc on a particular? Move to a different one. Simple.

by chroma 4y ago

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.
brabel 4y ago
Mastodon servers can hire moderators?? How do they make money? I thought Mastodon was all about not-for-profit social media and there's no way for Mastodon server admins to make any money as there's no ads?? Not a Mastodon user, just trying to understand who is a Mastodon admin (given the large powers they seem to have) and what's in it for them.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  there's an entire universe of not for profit organizations that hire staff and dont have ads....
  - brabel 4y ago
    Which ones run Mastodon servers? What's the purpose of such organizations?
- pimeys 4y ago
  People donate money to the servers they're in.

smoldesu 4y ago

> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want. Apparently the same thing happens on Twitter now. If the "Twitter Files" are to be believed, it's happened for a long time before that. Frankly, I think all of this absurd rule-making is fine. If you disagree with it, nobody can stop you from creating your own instance and federating with all the great/terrible sites you want. The irony that these 'sky is falling' posts come from lifelong Twitter users feels like the icing on the cake. Nobody owes you anything on the internet; not Twitter, not Elon, and not the few-thousand instance admins who host servers out-of-pocket.

chroma 4y ago
The problem is that if you federate with the bad instances, you'll get de-federated from other instances. The people running the biggest instances think that anyone who reads anything on poa.st or gab or truth.social for any reason must be a nazi, and therefore worthy of banning.
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  In practice this is not true. De-federating based on association is not common, and mostly used by very tight and usually small servers. The big ones don't do that. Truth social defederated itself.
  - romwell 4y ago
    >De-federating based on association is not common As long as it's possible, it will happen.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      And it should. The alternative (forcing everyone to ingest everything) makes the system rife for abuse in all sorts of ways.
      - chroma 4y ago

tptacek 4y ago

That was true in the "blogosphere" too, and nobody freaked out about it. We only take it seriously now because we've spent over a decade hypnotized into believing that a "social network" presenting a single global unified namespace of participants is somehow so important that it's practically a public utility. In a single unified namespace, who's blocked and who isn't is very important. The fediverse implicitly asks the question: what if that assumption is wrong? What if we had as many of the affordances of (say) Twitter as we could get, but the global connectivity model of blogs? In the blogosphere, it hardly even makes sense to ask who's "blocked". I remember the height of the blogosphere as a pretty happening time for discourse on the Internet, so it's not a silly question.

chroma 4y ago
Blogs getting banned was much rarer back then because people were less censorious. But the proper model isn't blogs, it's e-mail. Imagine getting banned from your email provider because you sent a political opinion, or even a sarcastic comment. That would be absurd.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  People weren't less censorious. The early Internet was full of professionals. There wasn't that much to censor because people were mostly crafting pages connected to their professional work, or showcasing their cool hobbies. Once the normal people started flooding in, there was a lot of drama and a lot of censorship, it was just contained in silos. Forums had moderation, cliques and weird rules. A discussion about a game for kids could explode in drama, banning and rivalries, it just didn't spread very far like it does today, when you have whole sites and groups dedicated to cataloguing all the drama happening elsewhere.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  I think the separation of email provider (identity, very rarely bans) and listserver provider (community) is pretty neat.
- acdha 4y ago
  People definitely got banned back then. There were three key differences: 1. Getting banned from Twitter means leaving a global namespace. Getting banned from the comments on someone’s blog was far less serious, and if someone on a group blog had a falling out it just meant that they setup another one (the Mastodon model). Earlier things like Usenet groups had moderation but people could easily move to another group. 2. The stakes were lower: the early internet was full of academics, professionals, etc. and still had this aura of not really mattering. That doesn’t mean that everyone was nice but the ratio was a lot better and it wasn’t anywhere near as coordinated – the creationists and Scientologists were both annoying but they certainly didn’t work together. The odds of some online flap even reaching the awareness of your friends, family, or coworkers were low and it probably would have seemed more like an amusing joke than something serious. 3. An American specialization of the previous point: the hardcore right-wing took over the Republican Party, successfully purged the moderates, and started recruiting young reactionaries. 9/11 changed what a lot of people felt was acceptable to say or do – I remember when Glenn Reynolds was a fairly normal-sounding law professor with a blog in that brief span before 9/11 & the war blogs broke him – and over the 2000s they felt fewer checks as their power & numbers grew. Obama getting elected brought a LOT of voices out which many of us had thought had disappeared in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and by the mid-2010s they were recruiting young people from anti-feminist communities in places like 4chan and Reddit (before GamerGate but that’s when it really ramped up). Nothing unprecedented in terms of message but the numbers and degree to which they were welcomed into the party and started setting the tone was dramatic. There’s a fair argument that some of those views were not uncommon before but had been more genteelly expressed, but I am reminded of how aggressively GOP leaders shut down David Duke in the 90s. I mention politics not just because I think that normalized a lot of bad behavior but also because it changed how people responded. “Internet drama” wasn’t taken seriously but when it started having real-world consequences and impacting national politics, a lot of people - even those who self-described as free speech advocates – started reconsidering how best to respond. Volume also enters into the picture: the first time you see something, you might try to engage. By the dozenth time, you’re a lot more inclined to get out the ban hammer.

madeofpalk 4y ago

Right, this is true with any website that you don’t run. dang can come in here and ban whoever he wants for whatever reason. At the end of the day, if you’re going to a platform (specific mastodon instance) ran by someone else, you’ve got to have an amount of trust in who’s running it. But Mastodon and ActivityPub do attempt to mitigate this - you can run your own instance (and of course, you’re not entitled for someone else to republish you) to seize back some of that control. Followers and follows are a lot more portable, so it’s easier to move instances (which is party automated)

throwawaylinux 4y ago

Yech. Sounds exactly like what you'd expect to happen if subreddits were federated like this. The "mod" role and wielding this kind of petty power over others attracts a certain kind of fragile egomaniac. Not that it's not a problem on a centralized site either mind you, as the Twitter Files have been revealing.

acjohnson55 4y ago

The defederation "wars" will end. People who want to be in walled garden instances, with their own sense of community, cut off from unpredictable sets of other users will have what they want. But I think most users will migrate to places where only the truly bad actor instances are cut off. I've already observed this from my old Tweeps. Defederation is way too blunt of a tool for most cases.

DoItToMe81 4y ago
It will likely end as culture warring weirdos in their spectrum's echo chamber while normal people leave for commercial sites or go back to Twitter. Mastodon needs a culture of openness and general tolerance that it does not have and has made no real effort to foster.

jmprspret 4y ago

> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want. That's another feature, not another bug. Don't like the admin's moderation style or rules, etc on a particular? Move to a different one. Simple.