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That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even th

That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work). It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).

hosh 4y ago
We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  Lemmy does this: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
  - wmichelin 4y ago
    I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name
    - zwily 4y ago
      More awful than “toots”?
      - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
    - apetresc 4y ago
      What's so awful about it?
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name I just assumed it was a tribute to Lemmy Caution[0]. And Lemmy Caution is one cool dude. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_Caution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_Caution
    - ykonstant 4y ago
      Whoa; calling it awful is a bit Overkill! Overkill! Overkill!
yutijke 4y ago
Not really. Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit. If you end up participating in subreddits that discuss political topics the mods of subreddit A will ban you for even participating in subreddit B. Or the mods or some other user on the subreddit will report you after trawling through your post history. Now I am not fully against this. If you find a user in you subreddit who has a habit of posting opinions on some other subreddit that go on the lines of "Women should not be allowed to work and are only mean to make kids" they probably are functioning on a very different set of axioms and will probably make your space worse with their participation. But things can get petty pretty quickly. So you essentially end up maintaining different alts for different topics or subreddits.
- satellites 4y ago
  > Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit I’ve been on Reddit for 10 years and I’ve only experienced this… once? Twice at the most. It happened so long ago I can’t even remember the specifics. I’m not against it either, in theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s a defining feature of Reddit or even a common occurrence the way it is for Mastodon.
fzeroracer 4y ago
This sort of thing isn't particularly new though. It was the same for anyone that was around during the IRC days, your channel would be under a specific IRC server umbrella and you'd be expected to follow that servers rules. It's that but expanded to where servers can also communicate with other servers, so the general expectation is that you follow the server rules and other servers can assume the rules tell you how that server will behave in aggregate. It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.
- lmm 4y ago
  IRC doesn't have accounts, identity, or federation. It was normal and expected that you would use multiple servers at the same time for different topics. > It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers. That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    That's incorrect. Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv especially on the larger networks where dealing with certain individuals or impersonation required verification. And your second point is also incorrect as there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world. > That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network. This is exactly what IRC networks did. They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. Mastodon just makes that explicit.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't. > there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world. Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive. > They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.
shadowgovt 4y ago
If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance). But I agree with the model Mastodon is building out over the model of centralization that Twitter had. I think Twitter encouraged too much topic-free shouting into the void, which decreased the utility of discourse in general. It's also really unclear to me where the OP is getting the sense that Mastodon instances are so heavily topic-oriented. I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic; the flavor of sites seems to be more about shared interests in the sense of old IRC communities than in the sense of topicality like a subreddit.
- satellites 4y ago
  Good points, and honestly I’m more curious to try out Mastodon after this discussion than I was before.
- hrn_34 4y ago
  > I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic I myself was banned from a small instance over a misunderstanding without prior notice (since english isn't my native language). This was my only account on mastodon, so I lost all my contacts. The admin had contact info on the instance, but I didn't have the motivation to be in mastodon anymore. EDIT: I'd like to add. I don't really see mastodon as a social network.. if we're comparing it to something, it's more like a simple messaging group.
- brigandish 4y ago
  > If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance). If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors. The suggestion to then "host your own instance" looks a lot like "build your own X" that we had prior to Musk's take over of Twitter from people who didn't really care about the problem (or even see it as a problem). Do you really think people will start hosting their own instances for this?
ravenstine 4y ago
> It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. Maybe not by technical design, but subreddit moderators ban people for merely being subscribed to other subs all the time. I once got banned from participating in r/antiwork because I was subscribed to r/wallstreetsilver. That's not the only time, but that's probably the most stupid example. No, I didn't break any rules.
- romwell 4y ago
  Yeah, but that didn't prevent you from posting on r/wallstreetsilver, nor was your account tied to r/wallstreetsilver in any way.
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    Of course it is. For example: If you comment in r/conservative, even as someone who isn't subscribed and just happened to end up on the post due to r/all or a crosspost, odds are you'll get hit with a number of bans on other subreddits. This is for the same reason that mastodon's federation works the way it does: those other groups do not want to associate with or interact with accounts that talk on or interact with these certain communities. If you interact with a toxic subreddit that has a habit for harassing other communities, those other subreddits likely will ban you just to save themself the trouble of dealing with someone who might bring them more stress or hassle. Likewise if you federate with a toxic instance or are hosted by a toxic instance, other instances will block yours and you'll be cut off. The only extension to this is that your instance can do the same to others. But that's really not that massive of a concern as you can pretty easily just move to a new instance or better yet, host your own instance and not have to worry with it at all.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      What you're talking about seems quite different from what the blog post is talking about. You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances. The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.
ksniwmidjd 4y ago
>I’m one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. You know that you can follow who you want on Twitter, right? You made it political for yourself by following people that talk politics
- toofy 4y ago
  this ignores the algorithm pushing stuff to you and it entirely ignores comments from randoms.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    Does it though? Aside from trending sidebar, I’ve never had the algorithm show me a tweet that wasn’t tweeted or retweeted or liked by someone I’m following.
    - thwarted 4y ago
      Most people are in the "home view" which is algorithm based. I've heard reports of twitter switching people back to the "home view" randomly without them doing anything. This has never happened to me, it's never switched to "home" without me doing it explicitly, so who knows what actually happens. I'm always in the timeline view, which only shows tweets and retweets from people I follow.
      - zerocrates 4y ago
        The Android app at least used to be fairly aggressive about flipping you back to "Home," but at some point it seems to have stopped doing that.
    - hnews_account_1 4y ago
      1) this definitely happens if your timeline is on the algorithmic version and not the chronological one. 2) the problem is precisely that I do not want to know what my very topic oriented follow is doing in terms of political tweeting. I’m sure this is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t want someone to be non-political for the sake of their follows. In most instances, I 100% agree with their views without reservation even. I just don’t want to see it on twitter. I would like to see any non political, topic oriented content they like and retweet however.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Linked accounts: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7292 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7292 Right now you can emulate this by putting your other instance links in your bio. I do think there should be a dedicated "linked instances" section which is more coordinated (only lets you link when you can access both accounts, and updates every other instance when you add a new one). I hope they add this feature soon enough. The nice thing is that anyone can add this feature, and if the devs approve it, most active instances will likely update. I won't be the one to though :)

hosh 4y ago

We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).

pietervdvn 4y ago
Lemmy does this: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
- wmichelin 4y ago
  I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name
  - zwily 4y ago
    More awful than “toots”?
    - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
  - apetresc 4y ago
    What's so awful about it?
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name I just assumed it was a tribute to Lemmy Caution[0]. And Lemmy Caution is one cool dude. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_Caution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_Caution
  - ykonstant 4y ago
    Whoa; calling it awful is a bit Overkill! Overkill! Overkill!

yutijke 4y ago

Not really. Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit. If you end up participating in subreddits that discuss political topics the mods of subreddit A will ban you for even participating in subreddit B. Or the mods or some other user on the subreddit will report you after trawling through your post history. Now I am not fully against this. If you find a user in you subreddit who has a habit of posting opinions on some other subreddit that go on the lines of "Women should not be allowed to work and are only mean to make kids" they probably are functioning on a very different set of axioms and will probably make your space worse with their participation. But things can get petty pretty quickly. So you essentially end up maintaining different alts for different topics or subreddits.

satellites 4y ago
> Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit I’ve been on Reddit for 10 years and I’ve only experienced this… once? Twice at the most. It happened so long ago I can’t even remember the specifics. I’m not against it either, in theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s a defining feature of Reddit or even a common occurrence the way it is for Mastodon.

fzeroracer 4y ago

This sort of thing isn't particularly new though. It was the same for anyone that was around during the IRC days, your channel would be under a specific IRC server umbrella and you'd be expected to follow that servers rules. It's that but expanded to where servers can also communicate with other servers, so the general expectation is that you follow the server rules and other servers can assume the rules tell you how that server will behave in aggregate. It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.

lmm 4y ago
IRC doesn't have accounts, identity, or federation. It was normal and expected that you would use multiple servers at the same time for different topics. > It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers. That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  That's incorrect. Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv especially on the larger networks where dealing with certain individuals or impersonation required verification. And your second point is also incorrect as there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world. > That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network. This is exactly what IRC networks did. They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. Mastodon just makes that explicit.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't. > there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world. Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive. > They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.

shadowgovt 4y ago

If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance). But I agree with the model Mastodon is building out over the model of centralization that Twitter had. I think Twitter encouraged too much topic-free shouting into the void, which decreased the utility of discourse in general. It's also really unclear to me where the OP is getting the sense that Mastodon instances are so heavily topic-oriented. I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic; the flavor of sites seems to be more about shared interests in the sense of old IRC communities than in the sense of topicality like a subreddit.

satellites 4y ago
Good points, and honestly I’m more curious to try out Mastodon after this discussion than I was before.
hrn_34 4y ago
> I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic I myself was banned from a small instance over a misunderstanding without prior notice (since english isn't my native language). This was my only account on mastodon, so I lost all my contacts. The admin had contact info on the instance, but I didn't have the motivation to be in mastodon anymore. EDIT: I'd like to add. I don't really see mastodon as a social network.. if we're comparing it to something, it's more like a simple messaging group.
brigandish 4y ago
> If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance). If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors. The suggestion to then "host your own instance" looks a lot like "build your own X" that we had prior to Musk's take over of Twitter from people who didn't really care about the problem (or even see it as a problem). Do you really think people will start hosting their own instances for this?

ravenstine 4y ago

> It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. Maybe not by technical design, but subreddit moderators ban people for merely being subscribed to other subs all the time. I once got banned from participating in r/antiwork because I was subscribed to r/wallstreetsilver. That's not the only time, but that's probably the most stupid example. No, I didn't break any rules.

romwell 4y ago
Yeah, but that didn't prevent you from posting on r/wallstreetsilver, nor was your account tied to r/wallstreetsilver in any way.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  Of course it is. For example: If you comment in r/conservative, even as someone who isn't subscribed and just happened to end up on the post due to r/all or a crosspost, odds are you'll get hit with a number of bans on other subreddits. This is for the same reason that mastodon's federation works the way it does: those other groups do not want to associate with or interact with accounts that talk on or interact with these certain communities. If you interact with a toxic subreddit that has a habit for harassing other communities, those other subreddits likely will ban you just to save themself the trouble of dealing with someone who might bring them more stress or hassle. Likewise if you federate with a toxic instance or are hosted by a toxic instance, other instances will block yours and you'll be cut off. The only extension to this is that your instance can do the same to others. But that's really not that massive of a concern as you can pretty easily just move to a new instance or better yet, host your own instance and not have to worry with it at all.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    What you're talking about seems quite different from what the blog post is talking about. You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances. The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.

ksniwmidjd 4y ago

>I’m one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. You know that you can follow who you want on Twitter, right? You made it political for yourself by following people that talk politics

toofy 4y ago
this ignores the algorithm pushing stuff to you and it entirely ignores comments from randoms.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Does it though? Aside from trending sidebar, I’ve never had the algorithm show me a tweet that wasn’t tweeted or retweeted or liked by someone I’m following.
  - thwarted 4y ago
    Most people are in the "home view" which is algorithm based. I've heard reports of twitter switching people back to the "home view" randomly without them doing anything. This has never happened to me, it's never switched to "home" without me doing it explicitly, so who knows what actually happens. I'm always in the timeline view, which only shows tweets and retweets from people I follow.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      The Android app at least used to be fairly aggressive about flipping you back to "Home," but at some point it seems to have stopped doing that.
  - hnews_account_1 4y ago
    1) this definitely happens if your timeline is on the algorithmic version and not the chronological one. 2) the problem is precisely that I do not want to know what my very topic oriented follow is doing in terms of political tweeting. I’m sure this is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t want someone to be non-political for the sake of their follows. In most instances, I 100% agree with their views without reservation even. I just don’t want to see it on twitter. I would like to see any non political, topic oriented content they like and retweet however.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Linked accounts: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7292 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7292 Right now you can emulate this by putting your other instance links in your bio. I do think there should be a dedicated "linked instances" section which is more coordinated (only lets you link when you can access both accounts, and updates every other instance when you add a new one). I hope they add this feature soon enough. The nice thing is that anyone can add this feature, and if the devs approve it, most active instances will likely update. I won't be the one to though :)