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Video played perfectly for me, though I did leave it at 1x because I didn't want to miss anything with his accent. My only mild disappointment is he seems to f

Video played perfectly for me, though I did leave it at 1x because I didn't want to miss anything with his accent. My only mild disappointment is he seems to feel that Mastodon is free of censorship. I've never installed or reviewed configuring Mastodon because my understanding is the someone, somewhere, can somehow interfere with what a user sees in a feed. Anyone familiar with this? Is it just default install configuration that leads to this behavior?

kccqzy 3y ago
Censorship policies are dependent on the specific instance where you signed up and they are almost always very clearly spelled out. The main instance for example clearly spells out five rules including four forbidden categories here: https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up Contravening these rules can absolutely get you deplatformed. I've also seen the signup page of other instances having dozens of categories of prohibited posts.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
If you host your own instance, you have full control. If you don't host your own instance, then whoever hosts it for you has control (as they are the admin for your instance). This means you tradeoff someone administrating the server and moderating content (shared instances often have a TOS) for full freedom. i.e. If you self host you have full, manual control for better or worse.
8organicbits 3y ago
> Mastodon is free of censorship It's like email. If you have a server and I have a server we can talk. If one of us uses someone else's server then that server can censor us.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  Yeah, but it's email without spam protections of any kind. I ran a homeserver for a little while and didn't want to store the kind of content that came flowing in through the federation endpoints from the moment I interacted with another server. I'm not sure exactly how Mastodon/Pleroma crawl remote homeservers once they're discovered, but I saw a lot of objectionable content on the "Known Network" view from users I did not follow and that I did not want on my machine, nor did I want to wade through and delete things. I uninstalled.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    That's not the default behavior. Mastodon has 3 built-in timelines: - Your "home" TL with people you follow, and the stuff they post/repost/etc. - The "local" TL with the users on your server. - The "federated" TL that's the union of all the people that users on your server follow. Like if you and I are the only 2 people on that instance, and you follow {A, B, C}, and I follow {B, C, D}, then the federated TL will have posts from {A, B, C, D}. That's it. There's no proactive reaching out and pulling in content from the rest of the fediverse. The one other possibility would be if you configured your instance to use a "relay" of content from other instances you wouldn't normally connect to, which is something optional you have to add.
    - jdofaz 3y ago
      One issue I've run into with unexpected NSFW in my federated TL on a single user instance is when people I follow reply to an unfollowed account's NSFW post, when the reply gets sent to my server it fetches the parent post
rsolva 3y ago
Nothing is censorship-free, but the social web (the fediverse) is just a bunch of websites. A website can be blocked at the DNS level, but that is exceedingly rare. Other websites may choose to block your site for their community. That is the way of the web. Each site has different rules and cultures. It's convenient to sign up at someone elses site, but you give up some control. Want to live by your own rules? Put up your own website and participate in the social web that way! I run my own GoToSocial website, which is a Go project that is much simpler to install and maintain than Mastodon. Hit the sweetspot for me, at least.
- mvanbaak 3y ago
  > A website can be blocked at the DNS level, but that is exceedingly rare. This is done more then you think. Probably the most known one is thepiratebay for example
  - timtom39 3y ago
    and archive.ph on cloudflare (nothing but CAPTCHAs)
    - detaro 3y ago
      that's archive.ph's doing because they don't like cloudflare (there is a DNS extension where a DNS resolver forwards the prefix of the users IP to the DNS server of the site. Cloudflare does not use that, and archive.ph/.is says that they break their ability to properly host their site by doing that)
    - rsolva 3y ago
      It happens, but with limited effect and restricted to certain jurisdictions. My point is that the social web is not owned or controlled by any one commercial entity, just like the rest of the web. The pirate bay is blocked by law in Norway by the ISPs DNS servers, but is trivial to get around. It is a very soft kind of censorship, which is the beauty of the Internet.
El_RIDO 3y ago
It's the same censorship-model as with mail servers: You can use a big shared hoster and the rules of that hosts country and their policies apply. You can run your own and you will have to deal with any local legal requirements and get to set (but also have to enforce) your own policies. In reality, (self-)censorship is the smallest of your problems, spam and abuse of your service is what you'll be mostly dealing with. For a small instance with only a handful of friend and family accounts that effort (spam, abuse, legal stuff) will take less than 1h per month. On a large instance that can become a full persons job. Source: I'm running my own fediverse instance since 2011 (using Friendica, predates Mastodon) - as well as my own mail server.
youcantcook 3y ago
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kccqzy 3y ago

Censorship policies are dependent on the specific instance where you signed up and they are almost always very clearly spelled out. The main instance for example clearly spells out five rules including four forbidden categories here: https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up Contravening these rules can absolutely get you deplatformed. I've also seen the signup page of other instances having dozens of categories of prohibited posts.

CuriousCosmic 3y ago

If you host your own instance, you have full control. If you don't host your own instance, then whoever hosts it for you has control (as they are the admin for your instance). This means you tradeoff someone administrating the server and moderating content (shared instances often have a TOS) for full freedom. i.e. If you self host you have full, manual control for better or worse.

8organicbits 3y ago

> Mastodon is free of censorship It's like email. If you have a server and I have a server we can talk. If one of us uses someone else's server then that server can censor us.

dingnuts 3y ago
Yeah, but it's email without spam protections of any kind. I ran a homeserver for a little while and didn't want to store the kind of content that came flowing in through the federation endpoints from the moment I interacted with another server. I'm not sure exactly how Mastodon/Pleroma crawl remote homeservers once they're discovered, but I saw a lot of objectionable content on the "Known Network" view from users I did not follow and that I did not want on my machine, nor did I want to wade through and delete things. I uninstalled.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  That's not the default behavior. Mastodon has 3 built-in timelines: - Your "home" TL with people you follow, and the stuff they post/repost/etc. - The "local" TL with the users on your server. - The "federated" TL that's the union of all the people that users on your server follow. Like if you and I are the only 2 people on that instance, and you follow {A, B, C}, and I follow {B, C, D}, then the federated TL will have posts from {A, B, C, D}. That's it. There's no proactive reaching out and pulling in content from the rest of the fediverse. The one other possibility would be if you configured your instance to use a "relay" of content from other instances you wouldn't normally connect to, which is something optional you have to add.
  - jdofaz 3y ago
    One issue I've run into with unexpected NSFW in my federated TL on a single user instance is when people I follow reply to an unfollowed account's NSFW post, when the reply gets sent to my server it fetches the parent post

rsolva 3y ago

Nothing is censorship-free, but the social web (the fediverse) is just a bunch of websites. A website can be blocked at the DNS level, but that is exceedingly rare. Other websites may choose to block your site for their community. That is the way of the web. Each site has different rules and cultures. It's convenient to sign up at someone elses site, but you give up some control. Want to live by your own rules? Put up your own website and participate in the social web that way! I run my own GoToSocial website, which is a Go project that is much simpler to install and maintain than Mastodon. Hit the sweetspot for me, at least.

mvanbaak 3y ago
> A website can be blocked at the DNS level, but that is exceedingly rare. This is done more then you think. Probably the most known one is thepiratebay for example
- timtom39 3y ago
  and archive.ph on cloudflare (nothing but CAPTCHAs)
  - detaro 3y ago
    that's archive.ph's doing because they don't like cloudflare (there is a DNS extension where a DNS resolver forwards the prefix of the users IP to the DNS server of the site. Cloudflare does not use that, and archive.ph/.is says that they break their ability to properly host their site by doing that)
  - rsolva 3y ago
    It happens, but with limited effect and restricted to certain jurisdictions. My point is that the social web is not owned or controlled by any one commercial entity, just like the rest of the web. The pirate bay is blocked by law in Norway by the ISPs DNS servers, but is trivial to get around. It is a very soft kind of censorship, which is the beauty of the Internet.

El_RIDO 3y ago

It's the same censorship-model as with mail servers: You can use a big shared hoster and the rules of that hosts country and their policies apply. You can run your own and you will have to deal with any local legal requirements and get to set (but also have to enforce) your own policies. In reality, (self-)censorship is the smallest of your problems, spam and abuse of your service is what you'll be mostly dealing with. For a small instance with only a handful of friend and family accounts that effort (spam, abuse, legal stuff) will take less than 1h per month. On a large instance that can become a full persons job. Source: I'm running my own fediverse instance since 2011 (using Friendica, predates Mastodon) - as well as my own mail server.

youcantcook 3y ago

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