Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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Instead of "censorship", I'd say "moderation". To pick a random example, suppose you're on an instance run by, and dedicated to, right-wing politics. It may block connections from servers meant for and run by devout communists. The reverse would probably also be true. No one's saying fascists or communists can't run their own server. They're saying "I don't want to hear this stuff".

It's legal to be an anti-Semite, but a Jewish instance doesn't want any of that nonsense. It's legal to be a white supremacist, but a server for black people doesn't want to deal with that trash. On the fediverse, instead of having a one-size-fits-all policy like "all legal speech is allowed" or "no anti-trans content is allowed", each group of users can choose for themselves who they want to talk to.

That's the opposite of censorship. I own a Mastodon instance and I've disconnected quite a few despicable servers, because that's what my users ask me to do. Users who thing I'm too strict or too lenient can move to another server more aligned with their own desires. I'm not denying those other groups the right to publish whatever disagreeable content they wish to. I'm just saying we don't want it here on our server.

This is true, but it does reinforce and cement in- and out-group dynamics. You're more likely to be exposed to unfamiliar ideas on a place like Reddit, specifically because you don't _have_ to pick an explicit bubble. When picking a Lemmy instance, you kinda end up aligning yourself with some worldview, and letting some set of strangers curate your environment for you.

Incidentally, that's sort of the weirdest part of signing up for Lemmy. I can't be the only one who got to the "Pick an instance!" step and got kinda paralyzed. I'm a programmer, should I sign up to a programmer-centric instance? But I also have hobbies, political views, favorite forms & genres of media... Should those take priority? And by picking one of them, what curation or censorship am I going to be subject to?

I appreciate the fact that Lemmy isn't under the thumb of one monolith, and that I can bounce from once instance to another if the first isn't working out. But I also like the 'big-tent' feeling of Reddit, where I can sub to all kinds of subreddits, even if the two groups don't get along at all.

I see what you're saying. OTOH, you can belong to several Lemmy instances at once. In that sense, it's kind of like phpBB. Which forum do I want to join? The set that covers my interests today! Maybe you like to argue about Star Trek vs Star Wars on a Sci-Fi Lemmy/phpBB, and learn to make soufflés the French Cuisine board of a Cooking Lemmy/phpBB. You don't have to join the Cooking instance and then limit yourself to looking for fellow chefs who also like Firefly.

Yeah, that's true. Others have said it elsewhere in this thread, but I wish identity was more independent in the fediverse. If federated services just used OAuth or something, your identity could be portable between Mastodon, Lemmy, and PeerTube, and you could use several instances without having to manage a bunch of different accounts. Heck, you wouldn't necessary _need_ accounts, they could just be implicitly created for you when you posted on a server.

I'm with you there. I'd love if that were the case. Even if it were only for associated services, like having a domain-specific SSO for mastodon.example.com, pixelfed.example.com, and lemmy.example.com so that you didn't have to maintain 3 accounts for those 3 services owned and operated by the same people, it'd still be super useful.

I don't think that paints a complete picture.

There's a shared covenant and there's shared block lists, both of which heavily influence what the norm is on the larger Mastodon network. Perhaps an even larger dynamic are activist-type admins that have an extremely low tolerance for content countering their political beliefs and will blackmail other admins into enforcing a block of a user or entire instance.

None of this is a shocking revelation as a large portion of older Mastodon users are known for their excessive safety-ism. It's a perpetual conflict on the network versus those that want to be more forgiving and pragmatic.

Anyway, the bottom line is that mainstream Mastodon is a left to far-left network, and content is moderated as such. The idea "just pick another server" doesn't really apply.

I vehemently disagree. In practice, I don't use those blocklists and neither do the neighbor instances we most heavily interact with. I'll occasionally hear from a friend that "new instance XYZ is sharing loli porn" or "instance ABC's moderators quit and now it's flooded with swastikas", and then I (and my neighbors) will verify whether that's true, and then disconnect those specific instances.

I also think mainstream Mastodon is only left to far-left in the median, because far-right instances tend to be more of a pain in the ass to be around than far-left ones, and thus get themselves banned more often. If there were far-left instances running around posting memes "joking" that we should kill minorities, I'm confident they'd also get disconnected quickly.

Put another way, I don't recall ever disconnecting with an instance because of its users' opinions, unless those opinions were utterly vile to the point that I'm completely unwilling to hear "their side of the argument". Most blocks are due to bad behavior, not unsavory thought.

I didn't mean to suggest that you're somehow unreasonable in how you run your server, I was mostly commenting on the larger concept of mainstream Mastodon.

Indeed, right to far-right doesn't stand a chance there so they get blocked. They effectively move to a darkweb situation where you never see their content unless you're really trying hard to look for it.

What remains, mainstream Mastodon, is moderated to the left, if not far-left. Or perhaps it's a very vocal far-left minority silencing the rest. It's of course not universal across the entire network, but roughly the vibe of the network.

Nah, I didn't take it that way. I know you were talking about the network as a whole, not me in particular. I was just using myself as an example.

I still see the spectrum like:

(far left nuts) (left) (middle) (right) (far right nuts + poor behavior)

I far the far left opinions as annoying as the far right. I disagree with both of those extremes. However, in general, the far left tends to be annoying but reasonably well behaved and self-policing. We've had many more mod reports about far left individuals than far left servers. On the far right, it's more common to get a whole cluster of misbehaving idiots in one poorly moderated place, resulting in an entire instance getting blocked.

In my opinion, based on my experiences in the Fediverse, if the network as a whole is shifted to the left, it's because the far right is more likely to get itself kicked out because of their behavior. It's like taking a Gaussian curve and lopping off 2 stddevs above the mean; the new mean is farther to the left, but only because it lacks the pull from the extreme right.

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