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Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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