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Comment by frithsun | Hacker News Reader

The mastodon team literally hard codes political censorship into its codebase.

I recommend an alternative to mastodon with greater openness that you may wish to check out: twitter.com.

Mastodon does no such thing. In fact, Mastodon has been used to host communities of all political persuasions. Where are you getting this from?

Good thing it's open source so that they can just cite the line where the hard coding is.

I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from.

Or is it still in their hard coding too?

Eesh. I think this person must be talking about manual blocking by moderators that happened so fast it seemed automatic? Seems like they just joined the wrong server.

> I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from.

Pleroma isn't a fork of Mastodon and I can't find Truth Social claiming anything like this about Mastodon's code, so I don't think this is it. Perhaps Mastodon is being confused with a different social network that used to have a hard-coded "slur filter": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058

Ah, so I made two mistakes that I guess ended up being right.

Pleroma is a fork of Mastodon, it's not the site I was thinking of though. I was thinking of Parler, which has nothing to do with Mastodon.

Truth Social, on the other hand, definitely tried to use Mastodon code. It was pretty funny drama when they had to release some of their code under the GPL.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-...

I'm not sure how Pleroma (written in Elixir) could be a fork of Mastodon (written in Ruby). Both Pleroma and Mastodon implement ActivityPub, but that alone doesn't make either one a fork.

Truth Social does use Mastodon's code with the federation features stripped out like Gab, but what I meant was that I couldn't find any reports of Truth Social claiming to have evidence of hard-coded political censorship in Mastodon (other than the generic blocking features found in most social networks).

Mastodon itself doesn't, but maybe he's referring to Tusky, a popular FOSS Mastodon client, preventing its users from logging in with an account tied to an alt-right instance (gab and a few others I think). They used to also filter any content coming from these accounts but I can't it in the code so they must have removed that part.

As for the login block itself it's there: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/blob/01b3cb3a53b1e08ed26e7...

For a while F-Droid considered forcing all clients to implement such a ban but in the end they decided against it, see https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

Gab is not a Mastodon instance because its code base has been altered to the point that it no longer federates with any Mastodon instance or fediverse service, so that line of criticism is outdated at best. While Tusky has a great user interface, it is just one of many Mastodon clients and it is not developed by the Mastodon team.

Also, Gab has a lot of content that is prohibited on Twitter, but allowed on a self-hosted instance of Mastodon. Mastodon would actually be of "greater openness" than Twitter in the case of Gab's content.

Link to where the censorship occurs, please?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com