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You don't get to tell other people what they should and should not put in what may as well be an iptables entry. If your problem is that there aren't enough in

You don't get to tell other people what they should and should not put in what may as well be an iptables entry. If your problem is that there aren't enough instances for people who believe what you believe, congratulations! The Fediverse empowers you to solve that problem.

memefrog 3y ago
You've rather misunderstood the issue. The issue is not that "there aren't enough instances for people who believe what [I] believe". The problem is that people defederate in order to block A not because A has any "wrong" opinions but merely because A is is tolerant of B's very existence. Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted. For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway. The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks. The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together. Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  > Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous. Indeed it would! It's also a terrible analogy for the behavior of the vast majority of admins. Given that, I think you are either very poorly informed or arguing in bad faith.

memefrog 3y ago

You've rather misunderstood the issue. The issue is not that "there aren't enough instances for people who believe what [I] believe". The problem is that people defederate in order to block A not because A has any "wrong" opinions but merely because A is is tolerant of B's very existence. Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted. For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway. The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks. The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together. Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.

NoraCodes 3y ago
> Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous. Indeed it would! It's also a terrible analogy for the behavior of the vast majority of admins. Given that, I think you are either very poorly informed or arguing in bad faith.