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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
This is done more then you think. Probably the most known one is thepiratebay for example
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.
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.
I've also seen the signup page of other instances having dozens of categories of prohibited posts.