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This is true to an extent, but the problem with Mastodon is that you have to be really careful about who you federate with. Hosting your own Mastodon is like ho

This is true to an extent, but the problem with Mastodon is that you have to be really careful about who you federate with. Hosting your own Mastodon is like hosting your own email in that unless you set up your anti-spam capabilities perfectly, you will get permanently blackholed by the wider community. Except it's not just spam. Most of the wider fediverse will block your instance if you federate with instances that host nazis, child porn, etc. Which means the first thing you need to do when setting up your instance is gather a list of all those types and block them. Sure, you can say you're committed to "free speech" or whatever, but if all the large servers slam the door in your face your users will have nobody to talk to. Also, with the way Mastodon works, if your instance federates with another, your instance hosts a cached copy of all of their stuff that appears on your users' timelines. Which means you might run afoul of your host's TOS or even local laws. If you're in Germany and some American nazi's post saying "kill the Jews" gets federated onto your instance, you might be looking at serious legal trouble. Or even if you're not in one of those countries, you might get booted off AWS or Azure for hosting content against their TOS. So sure, it's as easy enough as any other webapp to launch into your infra, but maintaining a functioning Mastodon instance that doesn't get blocked by the wider fediverse or brings down the wrath of your hosting company or law enforcement on you is hard.

saurik 4y ago
I don't understand the "why" behind the second paragraph. (In contrast, you explain the tech more for the third paragraph.) To do a callback to the first paragraph, this is very unlike email: my email server barely has a working spam filter and explicitly will never actively reject email (or just organizes and tags it differently), and yet I am able to send and receive email from large hosts (or at least could until I lost my ancient IP address due to my colo provider moving to a different state, for which I weep; but that is an entirely unrelated issue, afaik ;P), as who else I email is none of their business. What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like?
- boyter 4y ago
  What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like? Nothing. The blocking situation on the fediverse is arcane at best.
- amyjess 4y ago
  No technical reasons, just the social mores of the wider community. Go to any large instance, hit up their about section and look at their list of banned servers: a good chunk of them have ban reasons like "'free speech' server that federates with gab and other nazis", etc.
  - mflslsoam 4y ago
    And the ones that ban Nazis are generally fine with leftists that hate Jews Basically if you block both left and right wing hatred and CP you're alone in the Fedi lmao The Fedi is like 4chan but worse, and normies think it's going to be better than Twitter even though it's worse in literally every aspect that they're upset about Twitter: petty censorship by server admins, horrible content, and identity verification are all -worse- on federated networks
  - saurik 4y ago
    Sure, but your comment is the first time I have heard anyone in these discussions describe a transitive ban... how do they even know who else I federate with, and why do they care?
    - rolenthedeep 4y ago
      Its mostly a culture thing. Mastodon has built a culture of aggressively protecting users because a lot of people are there because they received abuse through other platforms which refused to ban serial abusers. Whether that's good or bad is a different discussion, but the fact is that it's resulted in some fairly aggressive federation policies. In general, people on mastodon are pretty okay with this because they value their personal safety and comfort over "free speech" ideals. The thinking is that your instance has the right to moderate and federate however you want. Having posts from your server federated into mine is a privilege and totally at my discretion. If your server federates with hate speech servers and you don't intend to change that, I'm going to block you to prevent anything from the hate speech server from reaching mine. The overall goal is to protect users first and allow free speech second. Mastodon users want a safe and friendly place to have fun and hang out. It's meant to be a place to escape from free speech hellholes like Twitter. So servers defederate quickly and aggressively. Whether or not defederating from your server causes you problems is very strictly a "you" problem. The safety and comfort of users is paramount.

saurik 4y ago

I don't understand the "why" behind the second paragraph. (In contrast, you explain the tech more for the third paragraph.) To do a callback to the first paragraph, this is very unlike email: my email server barely has a working spam filter and explicitly will never actively reject email (or just organizes and tags it differently), and yet I am able to send and receive email from large hosts (or at least could until I lost my ancient IP address due to my colo provider moving to a different state, for which I weep; but that is an entirely unrelated issue, afaik ;P), as who else I email is none of their business. What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like?

boyter 4y ago
What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they don't like? Nothing. The blocking situation on the fediverse is arcane at best.
amyjess 4y ago
No technical reasons, just the social mores of the wider community. Go to any large instance, hit up their about section and look at their list of banned servers: a good chunk of them have ban reasons like "'free speech' server that federates with gab and other nazis", etc.
- mflslsoam 4y ago
  And the ones that ban Nazis are generally fine with leftists that hate Jews Basically if you block both left and right wing hatred and CP you're alone in the Fedi lmao The Fedi is like 4chan but worse, and normies think it's going to be better than Twitter even though it's worse in literally every aspect that they're upset about Twitter: petty censorship by server admins, horrible content, and identity verification are all -worse- on federated networks
- saurik 4y ago
  Sure, but your comment is the first time I have heard anyone in these discussions describe a transitive ban... how do they even know who else I federate with, and why do they care?
  - rolenthedeep 4y ago
    Its mostly a culture thing. Mastodon has built a culture of aggressively protecting users because a lot of people are there because they received abuse through other platforms which refused to ban serial abusers. Whether that's good or bad is a different discussion, but the fact is that it's resulted in some fairly aggressive federation policies. In general, people on mastodon are pretty okay with this because they value their personal safety and comfort over "free speech" ideals. The thinking is that your instance has the right to moderate and federate however you want. Having posts from your server federated into mine is a privilege and totally at my discretion. If your server federates with hate speech servers and you don't intend to change that, I'm going to block you to prevent anything from the hate speech server from reaching mine. The overall goal is to protect users first and allow free speech second. Mastodon users want a safe and friendly place to have fun and hang out. It's meant to be a place to escape from free speech hellholes like Twitter. So servers defederate quickly and aggressively. Whether or not defederating from your server causes you problems is very strictly a "you" problem. The safety and comfort of users is paramount.