I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
People are going to assume it's something you don't want to name, if you won't name it.
Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such.
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.
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.
Also true.
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.
“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”?
What happened to thinking for yourself?
Mastodon instances are largely moderated by people from the other 30%. You are free to judge if you want. But don't pretend this is a violation of publicly accepted morals in the 1st world.
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.
Maybe it works different on Mastodon?
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.
But generally speaking, anything that the US/"San Francisco" left wing ideology deems "bad" is generally unwelcome.
The ability for /r/conservative to ban my counter arguments is just as harmful as Mastodon shutting down the anti-trans positions.
Conversation is what moves us forward and is how we find commonality.
I grew up religious and conservative. I changed a lot of my viewpoints through friendly conversations in the internet of 2000-2010, before tumblrism, cancel culture, and censorship took hold.
If I grew up in today's world or internet, I might never have been exposed to different opinions in a non-hostile, no-judgment environment. By trying to segregate, censor, and ban we're only leading to intractable polarization. Never giving folks an opportunity to change. Never accepting that people are capable of growth.
Please let's talk with each other. Even if we disagree. You'd be surprised how effective that can be.
We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh away our differences and find the ways and the things that we share. We all hold more in common than you might think.
Love your enemy, even if they don't love you (yet).
If I could have one lasting impact on this world, it would be this message.
Or is the complaint that you don’t have the power to force yourself on people who don’t want to read your shit?
Musk literally just said that the term 'cis' is a slur that will get you banned.
If you have the energy to politely engage people who think of you as a child molester who should be shot on sight, great! Go for it! But I have done that, and I am tired, and I do not want to do it any more. I run a Mastodon and I just want it to be a space to talk to my friends and maybe make some new ones, and thus, I block the fuck out of places I do not expect to get anything but hate from.
I realize it's a complicated issue, and I'm never a fan of banning speech. But not all speech deserves a response.
Users on those instances who want to listen to you are free to go to instances that don't defederate you.
Ooh, ooh, ooh? Like what kind of "vanilla opinion?"
Not everyone is cut out to be an educator, and I think you should have the option not to be voluntold for the job. Not just because it should be your right, but because insisting that everyone in a group can speak for that group is itself stereotyping. I think once you see that it's really hard to be patient with people who don't.
And you're free to engage the people who want to put you and your spouse on a train car in conversation all you like. Maybe you'll deprogram one or two, but you'll just help spread their propaganda to exponentially more people than you could ever help.
I have no commonality with such people and don't want to find any. I don't want to share a society with them, and I know they don't want to share one with me. I certainly don't want to debate the Jewish Question or "groomers" or race science with them on my gamedev instance.
>We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh away our differences and find the ways and the things that we share.
You know these people want you dead, right? They don't believe you have a right to exist. You and your spouse. Especially your spouse. We're not talking about a difference in belief about tax laws or support for opposing soccer teams here. "Laugh away our differences?" I'm sorry but with all due respect fuck that.
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.
Your freedom just doesn't override the freedom of others to avoid you. You can't force others to interact with you and there's nothing wrong with that.
80% of Americans think that the southern border should have increased security: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/08/republica...
50% of Americans oppose affirmative action (with 33% approving, 16% not sure): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/08/more-america...
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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/americans-oppose-in...
Not American or white or whatever, just stating the obviously less widely supported stuff that may sound uncontroversial to the more terminally online.
What does this mean? Drag queens shouldn't be allowed to read? Like what concrete policy are you saying they can't propose which isn't obviously overreach?
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.
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.
* 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.
...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.
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.
Personally, I prefer not to listen to certain peoples’ Important Opinions about how people like me shouldn’t have rights (life is too bloody short), so I use a Mastodon instance which doesn’t tolerate that. People with such opinions are of course entitled to use a Mastodon instance which does (and there are plenty of them). I’m struggling to see an issue here. Person A is free to say whatever old nonsense they like, Person B is free not to listen to it.
I am, by the way, genuinely curious; I just don’t get the issue here. If a person with Important Opinions can’t hassle the rest of us with said opinions because we choose to opt out of them, well, so what?
> And then I get defederated for having done so.
> It's an illusion freedom that does not exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking about.
That's vastly superior to Twitter, which routinely shoves stuff in your timeline from people you do not follow.
And no, there is no such thing as eradicating "transgenderism" without eradicating transgender people anymore than you could eradicate "blackism" without eradicating black people. It is a meaningless distinction invented to provide a paper-thin veneer over what is simply a call for mass murder.
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.
For example, the fairness and safety issues with regards to males competing in women's sports, or the issues of safety and dignity in women's prisons when males are incarcerated there.
So. With Mastodon instance admins and this kind of drama, making internal strife about politics, gender equality, whatever, between a few persons affect thousands of users and greatly inconvenience them, and running a personal Mastodon instance taking great technical know-how and basically being a bit of a geek, I still consider these major issues with Mastodon as it stands today.
So, yes, I want to "enforce" people to hear me. If they choose to follow me. Because this means all the above problems are solved. The only problem federation solves today seems to be the scaling problem. Everything else is about friction and this kind of trouble and persistent worry. "Which instance do I pick" where it feels like you want to have an interview over a beer with the admin first. This has thus far been the major demotivator from what I've seen as a Mastodon user. I think I'd like it more like a P2P-based social network.
Of course you can avoid hearing this!
You do so by not following said person. Mastodon works just like Twitter or Facebook in this regard.
This is not the problem that I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about the infrastructure problem. It's about instances shutting down, people not having had time to migrate, and thousands of users losing everything (their entire account and content) because some admin decided he didn't like furries enough or let any political party member join his instance, admin is defederated, admin says fuck this.
Sure, I can make my own instance to guarantee my place on the network if I buy a server and run it on that but how many do you guys expect are enough Mastodon enhtusiasts (of all things, haha) to even bother with learning and doing so. It's a stillborn workaround if this problem keeps resurfacing.
Note that this still (of course) requires following said person on said instance. So people won't be spammed by views they disagree with. Mastodon is no different than, say, Facebook there. You still need to explicitly follow people. Mastodon doesn't even have an "algorithm".
But I can't see any positives from being able to defederate like this. What is the main benefit to remove the freedom of your users to follow people?
Yeah, on Mastodon we usually do so by not following that person?
This is not what I'm talking about but the infrastructure issue of internal strife between admins affecting tens of thousands of users for the most ridiculous of reasons, and this has not just been a hypothetical scenario, unfortunately.
And no, setting up your personal instance isn't a realistic solution for most people who just want to chat.
On Mastodon, no one is forced to listen to anyone without a follow. You don't have to worry about that. This is not what I'm talking about, but the infrastructure problem.
I've repeated myself a lot already so I refer you to one of my replies to your sibling comments if you still want to discuss this.