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Comment by GaryBluto | Hacker News Reader

So your solution to people using a decentralized, federated protocol to say things you don't like is to stop various servers interacting with each other? At that point why not just use federated services with multiple accounts?

It seems far too risky to sign up on a service for the purpose of intercommunication that is able (or even likely) to burn bridges with another for any reason at any time. In the end people will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers and then you have pseudo-federation anyway.

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Servers stopping federation with each other is pretty normal IMO. If I had a mastodon server I would also not federate with something like gab.com.

However all the LGBT+ friendly servers federate with each other and that's good enough for me. I like not having to see toxicity, there's too much of it in the world already.

In the Mastodon ecosystem it seems to be often taken to the extreme. As in, there ar servers will not federate with anyone who doesn't share their blocklist, and servers will block anyone using Pleroma (because it's "fascist") etc.

I've only seen that with certain German instances. They have their own particular laws over there and they're very adamant that other countries follow them to the letter, yes. I've seen the discussion. When it comes to nazi imagery I agree that should be forbidden everywhere but I think there were some other stipulations that were more controversial.

But I have not seen that outside the scope of Germany.

I don't know pleroma though. I've always hated twitter for its short-form content (I feel like it stimulates stupid nonsense like "look at my run today" and "I just had dinner" and discourages actual interesting content. So I was never into twitter clones either. I do use lemmy more although it has its own specific attitude issues around its developers (tankies).

I've seen it mostly on far left servers in US.

Pleroma is Mastodon server software. For a bunch of essentially random reasons, it was popular among right-wingers setting up their Mastodon instances, and some servers responded by blocking any Mastodon server running it outright. A subset of those would also block any server not blocking Pleroma like they do.

My solution is for instances to stop being negligent. Mastodon still directs everyone to create an account on mastodon.social using dark patterns (see https://joinmastodon.org/), which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse and where defederation is too costly for many to consider.

"People will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers" is far from an inevitable circumstance, but there are conditions that make it more likely. That, too, is largely down to negligence or malice (but less so than the abusive communications problem).

> which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse

Is that still true? As the admin of a small instance, I find the abuse coming from mastodon.social has been really low for a few years. There is the occasional spammer, but they often deal with it as quickly as I do.

> So your solution to people using a decentralized, federated protocol to say things you don't like is to stop various servers interacting with each other?

Yeah. In practice, Fediverse servers have formed clusters based on shared values. And since the second-largest cluster is (iirc) a Japanese CSAM distribution network, everyone is very glad that this sort of de facto censorship is possible. Do you have a viable alternative?

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