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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

This is a strawman argument. The biggest advocateds of federated social media are not promising a fully decentralized and censorship-proof network. Federation is built on trust, and blocking untrustworthy instances is a critical function of any open federated system.

There is another side of the Fediverse that operates on the principles you are talking about (eg. Poast, Baest, Spinster, Gleasonator, NoAgendaSocial, NicecrewDigital, et al). That part of the Fediverse, like Nostr, is covered in Lolicon, gore, and Nazi memes because that's the userbase you get when you promise that nobody can stop you from posting whatever you want.

More and more I am learning that the people who desire censorship-free social spaces are the kind of people that others rightfully exclude from polite social spaces, because these are people who lack respect and want to say and do horrible things without opposition.

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If you think only untrustworthy instances are being blocked then I really don’t want to debate about Lemmy with you.

By definition, an instance will only block instances it doesn't trust, so yes, only untrustworthy instances are blocked by an instance that doesn't trust them

The mistake is believing that all instances behave the same and block the same. The whole point of federation is that every instance chooses who it wants to block.

That's not how it works at all. Admins pressure other admins in apply the same blocks, or risk getting defederated. The entire thing is ran by power hungry bullies.

Sure, but at least this time it's more than one power-hungry moderator. In the forums of the 90s, if a forum moderator banned you from the server in the middle of a flamewar, that was it.

Now at least there could be (in theory) regional blocs of federated servers that share content. I heard some people are proposing a common account interchange format, so you could migrate accounts? (not being in the fediverse yet, I don't really know...)

That's not how it works at all (see, I can do exactly the same).

1) I, as an admin, have never been pressured by anyone to do anything and can federate with whoever I want. Thousands of instances are the same. The only ones who are pressured are the biggest ones, who also happen to host the worst content (xenophobic, racist, gore, pedo content).

2) You are not owed an audience. Not everyone wants to ear what you have to say. Moderation at scale needs to happen if we want marginalized communities to thrive, and unfortunately since the internet is mostly hostile to those the most efficient way to do this is to block. But if you're not ok with the blocking policy of your instance, change it. That's the whole point of federation. You'd do the same with Nostr: you disconnect from a relay if you don't like what comes from them, connect to another one, except with Nostr you can't totally be sure the bad content will be filtered out.

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