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On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you banned, and instances that don't ban those users get defederated. I prefer Twitter in the sense that

On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you banned, and instances that don't ban those users get defederated. I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.

golergka 3y ago
Can I read more about this? What topics are banned?
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  When they say "banned", they mean "if I say grotesquely offensive things, other people will chose not to listen". You know, just like in real life. There are plenty of instances that allow abhorrent content, if that's what you want, but you can't force others to receive it.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Some people confuse the freedom of speech with the right to be listened to.
  - golergka 3y ago
    In twitter, people can choose not to follow or mute you on individual basis, that's basically what “not listening” means. Banning somebody means preventing other people from listening to them, so it's not the same. Maybe it works different on Mastodon?
    - vidarh 3y ago
      On Mastodon, people can choose to pick an instance that will rarely defederate anyone and follow or mute on an individual basis, or they can choose an instance where moderators will take a firmer line.
      - tinus_hn 3y ago
        So the alternative to Twitter is Balkanized safe spaces where you only talk to like-minded people.
        LeoPanthera 3y ago
        This is a weird way of saying "a platform where you can't force other people to read your posts", yeah. That's vastly superior to Twitter, which routinely shoves stuff in your timeline from people you do not follow.
        tinus_hn 3y ago
        And that is how you end up in an echo chamber where it looks as if your ideas are the only ideas and everyone obviously agrees with you.
        morelisp 3y ago
        Well, and like, the entire rest of the world.
        vidarh 3y ago
        If you choose to only talk to like-minded people, that is your right, as it should be. And might well be one of the reasons most people aren't on Twitter, and many who are subscribe to extensive block lists.
      - erik_seaberg 3y ago
        The trouble is how to judge them. Automated censorship of others is invisible unless they announce it or you somehow know what you should have been able to see.
        wolfgang42 3y ago
        Mastodon instances have a section on the About page (under “Moderated servers”) which shows you exactly that. You can even get it programatically: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#domain_blocks https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#domain_block...
    - ploum 3y ago
      The fact is that Twitter makes you believe that you are listened to, even if you say shitty stuff. Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff, nobody wants to listen to you. People complaining being banned or being on defederated instances are people other don’t want to listen. They pretend to have a personal opinion while they are only assaulting others. LGBT is a good example: you cannot have an opinion about it. Those people exist. They have the right to exist. You have the right to not engage in any LGBT activity. But you don’t have the right to talk about a "debate". There’s none. If you do, I you maintain that using "cisgender" should be a banned word, you are simply an asshole and can’t complain that people don’t want to listen to your ramblings. And yes, this will get you banned.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        > Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff, nobody wants to listen to you. Mastodon isn't a person, you're talking about the guy who runs the instance. > nobody wants to listen to you. The person who runs your Mastodon instance is not everybody.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    What would be grotesquely offensive stuff to you? You realize that grotesquely offensive to very online Americans is an extremely niche thing? It makes sense to NOT want your online presence to be tied to whatever some Americans think makes perfect sense, right? I don't think you'd agree that it would be weird to not want your social media and what you see online to be tied to what some, for example, Saudi dudes think is acceptable at the moment.
    - LeoPanthera 3y ago
      I'm not sure what you're complaining about. Don't join the Saudi instances, then? That's kind of the whole point of Mastodon, and federated services in general. There will always be instances that match whatever worldview you may have. What you can't do, and should never expect other people to do, is to be forced to receive what you're posting, or to put it another way, you can't force people to listen to you.
ceejayoz 3y ago
“On Mastodon” is like saying “in restaurants”. There’s a wide variety of instances to various tastes.
- jug 3y ago
  Yes, but the point being made is that you then choose a more welcoming instance and then it's defederated instead because it allowed your post, so then your Mastodon experience sucks anyway and you only gave yourself an illusion of freedom. I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming people regardless alignment to Swedish government party (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor moderation resources of that kind and shut down the instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by its own even if supported. From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess some drama has went down again while I was away. There's been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already. People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20 major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.
  - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
    Maybe you can make you own instance and then you can have all the swedish government parties you want
    - jug 3y ago
      And then I get defederated for having done so. Did you even read my post? It's an illusion freedom that does not exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking about.
      - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
        that's because nobody wants to hear what the people on your instance has to say. you think they should be forced to?
Saris 3y ago
You can hang out on an instance with like minded people, everyone else might defederate you but you'll have your space.
mastodon_acc 3y ago
Which instance? Sounds like you joined a niche instance of a few hundred people. I find twitter to be extremely restrictive, you can’t have open discussions, you either get banned or get piled on by abusive blue check accounts.
hinkley 3y ago
When someone says, "certain topics will get you banned" that doesn't make me judge the platform, that makes me judge the person. People are going to assume it's something you don't want to name, if you won't name it.
- sourcecodeplz 3y ago
  Why would you judge the person because some kid somewhere is a trigger happy moderator? What happened to thinking for yourself?
  - hinkley 3y ago
    > What happened to thinking for yourself? What do you think I'm doing, right now? Someone is invoking censorship as a reason not to adopt a new platform. No specifics, just rabble rousing. That's manipulation. Pushing back is thinking for yourself. Or, they are being imprecise and undermining their position, in which case what I said works as advice on further conversations. Either way is thinking.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Or they're assuming good faith in their opponents. To not know what has been censored on twitter, and that the recent interest in mastodon was a reaction to the lifting of some of that censorship, is either to be playing stupid or to actually not have the background to discuss the subject usefully.
      - hinkley 3y ago
        We weren't talking about twitter. We were talking about one Mastodon server defederating another for hate speech. That's not 'some topics'. That's hate speech. If they're talking about some other kind of speech that I might actually care about, they should have mentioned it. Because the next bad one I can think of is even worse than hate speech.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sleepycatgirl 3y ago
That is.. quite opposite from the experience I have had. I have discussed a fair amount of topics, it was civil, and things were fine. Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  >Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such “I mean, when all the wrong and bad people are kicked out everything is great!” No one is complaining about people with Ford vs Chevy comments being banned. It’s the controversial things that need to be refuted, not hidden. What makes you so absolutely certain you are on the “right side” of any opinion? Because the people in charge of these services are censoring the other side? How long before you find yourself with “the wrong thoughts”?
  - burtness 3y ago
    First they came for the Nazis...
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      That's what happened. People started demanding that Nazis be censored on Myspace. I knew people at the time who were under the impression that being a racist was already illegal in some way, and thought that Myspace not immediately banning all of them made the site an accessory to the crime. The worst part was they seemed to be centering it around me because I was the only black person they knew.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    I run a Mastodon instance. You don't have to see eye to eye with me or my users to talk to us. However, I have defederated from instances that host: * Loli porn * Extreme neo-Nazi content; I'm talking about swastikas, hardcore racial slurs, and the like * Targeted bullying and harassment You want to spark a conversation about the relative merits of Republican fiscal policy, let's chat! You want to say that we should still own slaves, Jews eat babies, or gay people shouldn't exist? Go away. I don't owe you a soapbox. Disconnecting from a server with despicable content doesn't take away that server's right to speak. It just preserves my -- and my users' -- right not to hear it.
bigbillheck 3y ago
What kind of topics would those be?
- kstrauser 3y ago
  "Oh, you know."
nkozyra 3y ago
> I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned. I really don't think it is. It's still largely political, and subject to the whim of the reader. The guy who tracked and reported on Twitter Blue subscriptions was suspended today. You always have to kiss someone's ring.
reaperman 3y ago
> On ~~Mastodon~~ Twitter simply discussing certain topics will get you banned. Also true.
- redox99 3y ago
  Yes, that's why I said its more permissive, not that Twitter is fully permissive.
echelon 3y ago
> On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you banned, and instances that don't ban those users get defederated. This is why P2P is superior. Federation nodes can be used to strong-arm collective behavior against the will of individual users. I don't mind being exposed to liberal and conservative thought. I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human discourse so that I can synthesize ideas for myself and understand more effectively. As long as the signal is reasonably high. Reddit and fediverse moderators wield absolute power over their fiefdoms. They're intellectual dictatorships. (Not to mention egotistical behaviors some of them have.) P2P allows the end user to consume what they want, weight discussions how they want, and participate in any number of emergent clusters. It's the real path forward.
- misnome 3y ago
  Then just make your own instance? Or is the complaint that you don’t have the power to force yourself on people who don’t want to read your shit?
  - kelvinjps 3y ago
    I think that with p2p you don't have to think of servers and still be decentralized like downloading a torrent file, peertube etc
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    You've figured it out entirely. Mastodon is run by the kind of people who are willing to put in a bunch of time, effort, and money into dictating the conversation of others. People who enjoy that kind of power.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  > I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human discourse ...said no one who's ever been a moderator. You find out quickly that there are some perfectly horrid people out there. You absolutely do not want to hear everything that people say. It seems like you would, but you really don't.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mejari 3y ago
>I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned. Musk literally just said that the term 'cis' is a slur that will get you banned.
pessimizer 3y ago
It's a shitty monoculture mostly filled with a particular demographic (like most new and obscure tech things), the people who program computers, and the people who they meet at parties. This would disappear with more widespread usage. The problem is the software, not the culture. If the software is improved, or the dead ends are pruned and something else is created that learns the lessons from previous tries, the new cultures will bury the old. If building software required experts on model trains or K-pop, the culture would suck, too. The goal is to make that a stage rather than an endpoint. edit: I enjoy model trains, but I do not get into political or social discussions with model train guys.
papito 3y ago
May I suggest 8chan? Almost no moderation at all, but make sure you have a gallon of Clorox by your desk because you will want to pour that into your eyes.

golergka 3y ago

Can I read more about this? What topics are banned?

LeoPanthera 3y ago
When they say "banned", they mean "if I say grotesquely offensive things, other people will chose not to listen". You know, just like in real life. There are plenty of instances that allow abhorrent content, if that's what you want, but you can't force others to receive it.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Some people confuse the freedom of speech with the right to be listened to.
- golergka 3y ago
  In twitter, people can choose not to follow or mute you on individual basis, that's basically what “not listening” means. Banning somebody means preventing other people from listening to them, so it's not the same. Maybe it works different on Mastodon?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    On Mastodon, people can choose to pick an instance that will rarely defederate anyone and follow or mute on an individual basis, or they can choose an instance where moderators will take a firmer line.
    - tinus_hn 3y ago
      So the alternative to Twitter is Balkanized safe spaces where you only talk to like-minded people.
      - LeoPanthera 3y ago
        This is a weird way of saying "a platform where you can't force other people to read your posts", yeah. That's vastly superior to Twitter, which routinely shoves stuff in your timeline from people you do not follow.
        tinus_hn 3y ago
        And that is how you end up in an echo chamber where it looks as if your ideas are the only ideas and everyone obviously agrees with you.
      - morelisp 3y ago
        Well, and like, the entire rest of the world.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        If you choose to only talk to like-minded people, that is your right, as it should be. And might well be one of the reasons most people aren't on Twitter, and many who are subscribe to extensive block lists.
    - erik_seaberg 3y ago
      The trouble is how to judge them. Automated censorship of others is invisible unless they announce it or you somehow know what you should have been able to see.
      - wolfgang42 3y ago
        Mastodon instances have a section on the About page (under “Moderated servers”) which shows you exactly that. You can even get it programatically: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#domain_blocks https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/#domain_block...
  - ploum 3y ago
    The fact is that Twitter makes you believe that you are listened to, even if you say shitty stuff. Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff, nobody wants to listen to you. People complaining being banned or being on defederated instances are people other don’t want to listen. They pretend to have a personal opinion while they are only assaulting others. LGBT is a good example: you cannot have an opinion about it. Those people exist. They have the right to exist. You have the right to not engage in any LGBT activity. But you don’t have the right to talk about a "debate". There’s none. If you do, I you maintain that using "cisgender" should be a banned word, you are simply an asshole and can’t complain that people don’t want to listen to your ramblings. And yes, this will get you banned.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      > Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff, nobody wants to listen to you. Mastodon isn't a person, you're talking about the guy who runs the instance. > nobody wants to listen to you. The person who runs your Mastodon instance is not everybody.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  What would be grotesquely offensive stuff to you? You realize that grotesquely offensive to very online Americans is an extremely niche thing? It makes sense to NOT want your online presence to be tied to whatever some Americans think makes perfect sense, right? I don't think you'd agree that it would be weird to not want your social media and what you see online to be tied to what some, for example, Saudi dudes think is acceptable at the moment.
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    I'm not sure what you're complaining about. Don't join the Saudi instances, then? That's kind of the whole point of Mastodon, and federated services in general. There will always be instances that match whatever worldview you may have. What you can't do, and should never expect other people to do, is to be forced to receive what you're posting, or to put it another way, you can't force people to listen to you.

ceejayoz 3y ago

“On Mastodon” is like saying “in restaurants”. There’s a wide variety of instances to various tastes.

jug 3y ago
Yes, but the point being made is that you then choose a more welcoming instance and then it's defederated instead because it allowed your post, so then your Mastodon experience sucks anyway and you only gave yourself an illusion of freedom. I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming people regardless alignment to Swedish government party (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor moderation resources of that kind and shut down the instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by its own even if supported. From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess some drama has went down again while I was away. There's been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already. People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20 major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  Maybe you can make you own instance and then you can have all the swedish government parties you want
  - jug 3y ago
    And then I get defederated for having done so. Did you even read my post? It's an illusion freedom that does not exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking about.
    - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
      that's because nobody wants to hear what the people on your instance has to say. you think they should be forced to?

Saris 3y ago

You can hang out on an instance with like minded people, everyone else might defederate you but you'll have your space.

mastodon_acc 3y ago

Which instance? Sounds like you joined a niche instance of a few hundred people. I find twitter to be extremely restrictive, you can’t have open discussions, you either get banned or get piled on by abusive blue check accounts.

hinkley 3y ago

When someone says, "certain topics will get you banned" that doesn't make me judge the platform, that makes me judge the person. People are going to assume it's something you don't want to name, if you won't name it.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago
Why would you judge the person because some kid somewhere is a trigger happy moderator? What happened to thinking for yourself?
- hinkley 3y ago
  > What happened to thinking for yourself? What do you think I'm doing, right now? Someone is invoking censorship as a reason not to adopt a new platform. No specifics, just rabble rousing. That's manipulation. Pushing back is thinking for yourself. Or, they are being imprecise and undermining their position, in which case what I said works as advice on further conversations. Either way is thinking.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Or they're assuming good faith in their opponents. To not know what has been censored on twitter, and that the recent interest in mastodon was a reaction to the lifting of some of that censorship, is either to be playing stupid or to actually not have the background to discuss the subject usefully.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      We weren't talking about twitter. We were talking about one Mastodon server defederating another for hate speech. That's not 'some topics'. That's hate speech. If they're talking about some other kind of speech that I might actually care about, they should have mentioned it. Because the next bad one I can think of is even worse than hate speech.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sleepycatgirl 3y ago

That is.. quite opposite from the experience I have had. I have discussed a fair amount of topics, it was civil, and things were fine. Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
>Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such “I mean, when all the wrong and bad people are kicked out everything is great!” No one is complaining about people with Ford vs Chevy comments being banned. It’s the controversial things that need to be refuted, not hidden. What makes you so absolutely certain you are on the “right side” of any opinion? Because the people in charge of these services are censoring the other side? How long before you find yourself with “the wrong thoughts”?
- burtness 3y ago
  First they came for the Nazis...
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    That's what happened. People started demanding that Nazis be censored on Myspace. I knew people at the time who were under the impression that being a racist was already illegal in some way, and thought that Myspace not immediately banning all of them made the site an accessory to the crime. The worst part was they seemed to be centering it around me because I was the only black person they knew.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I run a Mastodon instance. You don't have to see eye to eye with me or my users to talk to us. However, I have defederated from instances that host: * Loli porn * Extreme neo-Nazi content; I'm talking about swastikas, hardcore racial slurs, and the like * Targeted bullying and harassment You want to spark a conversation about the relative merits of Republican fiscal policy, let's chat! You want to say that we should still own slaves, Jews eat babies, or gay people shouldn't exist? Go away. I don't owe you a soapbox. Disconnecting from a server with despicable content doesn't take away that server's right to speak. It just preserves my -- and my users' -- right not to hear it.

bigbillheck 3y ago

What kind of topics would those be?

kstrauser 3y ago
"Oh, you know."

nkozyra 3y ago

> I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned. I really don't think it is. It's still largely political, and subject to the whim of the reader. The guy who tracked and reported on Twitter Blue subscriptions was suspended today. You always have to kiss someone's ring.

reaperman 3y ago

> On ~~Mastodon~~ Twitter simply discussing certain topics will get you banned. Also true.

redox99 3y ago
Yes, that's why I said its more permissive, not that Twitter is fully permissive.

echelon 3y ago

> On Mastodon simply discussing certain topics will get you banned, and instances that don't ban those users get defederated. This is why P2P is superior. Federation nodes can be used to strong-arm collective behavior against the will of individual users. I don't mind being exposed to liberal and conservative thought. I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human discourse so that I can synthesize ideas for myself and understand more effectively. As long as the signal is reasonably high. Reddit and fediverse moderators wield absolute power over their fiefdoms. They're intellectual dictatorships. (Not to mention egotistical behaviors some of them have.) P2P allows the end user to consume what they want, weight discussions how they want, and participate in any number of emergent clusters. It's the real path forward.

misnome 3y ago
Then just make your own instance? Or is the complaint that you don’t have the power to force yourself on people who don’t want to read your shit?
- kelvinjps 3y ago
  I think that with p2p you don't have to think of servers and still be decentralized like downloading a torrent file, peertube etc
- pessimizer 3y ago
  You've figured it out entirely. Mastodon is run by the kind of people who are willing to put in a bunch of time, effort, and money into dictating the conversation of others. People who enjoy that kind of power.
kstrauser 3y ago
> I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human discourse ...said no one who's ever been a moderator. You find out quickly that there are some perfectly horrid people out there. You absolutely do not want to hear everything that people say. It seems like you would, but you really don't.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mejari 3y ago

>I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned. Musk literally just said that the term 'cis' is a slur that will get you banned.

pessimizer 3y ago

It's a shitty monoculture mostly filled with a particular demographic (like most new and obscure tech things), the people who program computers, and the people who they meet at parties. This would disappear with more widespread usage. The problem is the software, not the culture. If the software is improved, or the dead ends are pruned and something else is created that learns the lessons from previous tries, the new cultures will bury the old. If building software required experts on model trains or K-pop, the culture would suck, too. The goal is to make that a stage rather than an endpoint. edit: I enjoy model trains, but I do not get into political or social discussions with model train guys.

papito 3y ago

May I suggest 8chan? Almost no moderation at all, but make sure you have a gallon of Clorox by your desk because you will want to pour that into your eyes.