No one controls Mastodon -- setup an instance and you're off to the races!
It would be fine if the users opted into this, but it happens silently and arbitrarily by admins, oftentimes based on speculation or gossip, not even real abuse. It’s all of the worst of tribalism, polarization, guilt by association, and preemptive censorship (regardless of whether or not admins are “in the right” by censoring messages between x and y flowing through their own machines).
It’s also not easy or reliable to migrate your account between instances without losing your followers, and none of the server implementations yet support virtual hosting, so you can’t migrate hosts while keeping your own domain/handle.
There are real problems there, and casually dismissing the major censorship issues in the ecosystem doesn’t begin to solve any of them.
Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.
It prevents people on that instance who explicitly want to follow me from doing so.
It also prevents me from following people on that server from my primary account on my homeserver, even if those people explicitly want the whole world to be able to read their public messages.
Both of those are undesirable interference between mutually-desired communication by Alice and Bob, by Mallory.
This doesn't address my point at all that you cannot argue that my server is somehow obligated to process bytes from your server.
Your peers' routers are allowed to drop your packets, but nobody is arguing that that's good or beneficial. There is a difference between "within rights" and "good".
Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason.
Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs.
Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.
Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...
This is a categorically different problem than MITM.
There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content).
In addition most mastodon instances do not disclose their policies via AP. See for example https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation
However, this is not a systematic censorship problem, unlike centralized services with opaque policy language and a complete boot out the door. People are free to run their own instances or have multiple accounts across different instances.
Whether you think they're correct is irrelevant to the question at hand. Freedom of speech and association means you're free to not federate/talk to those problematic instances, and maybe you'd be much happier for it. On the other hand, not being OK with it and trying to fight for transparency means you're trying to externally force these communities to be run in the way you want, which may be received well, but not always b/c forcing unwanted change is exactly the opposite point of Federation: communities will be built the way their members want to build it. Like the real world, some value transparency and some don't.
It's one thing to argue specific bans about specific instances and disagree on the other party's interpretation; it's a totally different claim to say that the entire system is corrupt with opaque censorship.
Mastodon != Fediverse
In the future, it would definitely help me and others understand your motivation better if you could even include one more sentence in your communication like "Just here for a correction: some instances are transparent..."
I will strive to be more charitable.
That can be a simple issue of jurisdiction. Mastodon.social is hosted in Germany (IIRC), so they have to adhere to German law. That means, for example, while hatespeech isn't strictly illegal in the US, it certainly is in Germany, it even has a fairly good legal definition. Or take the Japanese instances, which aren't well federated or have media-bans because of differences in media legality. And lastly it can also be simply the case that the instance is not moderating (ie, they write 'no illegal content' but do not care).
Both the statement that an instance shared illegal content and that the same instance was banned for illegal content can be true at the same time.
If a company with a near-monopolistic network effect (Google, FB, etc.) censors speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform, it seems that most folks agree that this is bad, whether or not they're willing to do anything about it.
So, instead, we have decentralized services (and semi-decentralized ones, like Mastodon). At what point does a Mastodon community operator's decision to censor speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform become problematic? When a community achieves a large size? If new community members aren't made aware of the censorship? Is the difference between these communities and an ultra-ubiquitous one like "having a Google account" or "being connected to friends on Facebook" a difference of degree, or a qualitative one?
It's simple to argue an extremist position of "all speech between any set of parties must not be suppressed for any reason, even by the parties themselves", but I don't think most people want to live in that world. Similarly, it's pretty hard to isolate a line past which an operator of a community-service should be held to a different standard of conduct because of how ubiquitous/depended-on their community is, but a lot of people seem to think that this line exists.
The technology itself is of course open, but if your content is not approved by the main Mastodon federation, then users will have to be signed into multiple Mastodon federations (if that's what they wish), one to see the main Mastodon federation, and one to see the one that got banned. Because of this extra hurdle, a ban from the main Mastodon federation does shut out a large portion of the Mastodon users.
Mastodon is often presented as this 'free speech social network', in reality it's just a decentralized social network, with all the censorship that comes with being a modern social network.
Based on what principles should server owners be forced to federate with third party servers if they don't want to? How is not wanting to federate with anybody "censorship"?
I've just setup a mastodon instance on a VPS to give it a try. For less than $5 per month you can have your own instance where you can invite like minded people and find people to federate with.
And if you can't find anybody to join you server or federate with you... Maybe you should think about what that says about you instead of screaming that you're being censored?
This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules.
I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet.
The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise).
Vehement agreement from a Masto admin who works to keep her instance a nice quiet chill place for people like her, with some connections to other nice quiet chill parts of the Fediverse, if you want to argue then go to Twitter or go to a "free speech" instance - and accept that you will probably be cut off from the chill places unless you make a second account and abide by the chill rules.
I honestly doubt that. Are you sure that you are not straw-manning them? In my experience they usually complain about how admins strip the ability to read their posts from the users registered in said instances.
>If you come to my house and starts yelling things that offend me and I kick you out, I'm not infringing on your freedom of speech.
It'd be more like be your neighbor being offended and therefore kicking out the person yelling things that offends him. If you don't want to be kicked out of the apartment complex, you are required to share the same views as everyone else.