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What you're talking about seems quite different from what the blog post is talking about.

You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances.

The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.

I don't really see the issue?

The instance provides the resources you consume to access Mastodon. In exchange you follow their rules.

If you don't like their rules you can move to someone else's instance or even host your own. The process seems pretty simple: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable.

There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).

>I don't really see the issue?

The issue is that the instance you join dictates what "being a responsible member of the society" is, and if you don't fit into the restrictions of that one particular instance, you can lose your account which you use to interact with the entire federation.

Given that Mastodon admins can read direct messages of their users and ban them based on that, this is bound to have an effect on how users on Mastodon interact.

>There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances

Except for the fact that people use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to represent themselves. Which means one account. Having pseudonyms defeats the purpose.

In Mastodon, the model, in essence, makes you represent the instance you joined when you speak, with its values and restrictions — not yourself.

When deviance means loss of access, that's bound to result in increase in polarization and echo-chamberism.

Correspondingly, people who run instances block entire other instances based on how they perceive them.

This takes all the problems we have with email, and makes them worse.

"You can run your own instance" is an argument that works as well as "don't like Gmail? Host your own email server!".

I wouldn't have an issue if being banned from the instance you joined still allowed you to migrate to another instance after the ban without losing any data / identity / etc.

That's to say, if your identity wasn't tied to any particular instance.

Which is the point of the article.

your identity also isn't tied to your account, just make two of them. what a weird thing to get hung up on.

>your identity also isn't tied to your account

Right, because reputation isn't a thing, having people know that this account represents you isn't a thing, and so on.

There's a reason Elon Musk messing with verified accounts on Twitter was a bit of an issue.

In short, if you want people to know that an account represents you, then your account is tied to your identity, and your identity, conversely, is tied to your account.

As I said earlier, the problem with Mastodon is that your Mastodon account doesn't represent you. It represents the instance you signed up with. What you say must be filtered through that lens, and will be perceived through those lens by people who make blacklists, creating a positive feedback loop.

It's tribalism by design.

The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts. Most people have multiple accounts of their own volition because they don’t want their post and comment history in some communities to be browsable via posts and comments in other communities. I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t. However I could see a future where it’s the norm even for a non-anonymous account to have multiple non-anonymous personas on the fediverse.

>The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts.

This isn't a solution to "this" because this problem doesn't exist on reddit.

You don't get banned from reddit because any single subreddit didn't like what you wrote. Subreddit mods can't ban you from other communities. Admin of the instance you sign up with on Mastodon can.

Mastodon puts the banhammer of the network admins into hands of many, many people who run instances, aren't bound by any rules, and can read your direct messages.

>I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t.

Well that was one issue highlighted in the article linked.

Go figure, there's a place for having an online social network where people can authentically express themselves.

In Mastodon, you can only express yourself to the extent that it complies with the views of the admin of the instance you are with.

The only real workaround is to create separate accounts for each venue that aren't obviously connected. That way, you won't get banned in one place for stuff you do in another.

That's not the example that either I or the article are considering.

We are talking about getting banned from the instance you are federating with.

You can't get booted off of reddit for violating rules specific to a subreddit.

But with Mastodon, the initial choice of instance to join determines all future Mastodon behavior.