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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon doesn't have policies. Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.

They can say whatever they want but they have no control over it. That's the benefit of a truly decentralised network and free open source software.

It's like Microsoft saying they want a distinct culture among the users of their software. They can want it but it's not gonna happen. Within the mastodon community there's also a lot of servers that won't federate, for example the Germans always have very strict rules that they try to impose on everyone else. So most of the world does not federate with them anymore. *)

I mean there's even stuff like gab and truth social that run on fediverse tech. Not sure if it's mastodon itself or another implementation but that doesn't really matter. They certainly don't meet those culture and values.

And there is no 'mainstream fediverse'. Nothing about fediverse is mainstream to begin with. Unfortunately.

*) Don't get me wrong, I'm very progessive myself but the way the German fediverse community goes about it is wrong. "Follow exactly our rules otherwise you are defederated". That doesn't fly even if I agree with most of those rules.

When I tried to get into it, all the biggest instances had policies you had to sign off to to make an account where you basically had to agree with them ideologically on everything, I made a serious effort to find a populated instance that didn't have those and didn't find anything

> Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

And its biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.

Just like HN and Reddit refuse to interoperate. But it's okay because you can just make a user account on HN, and one on Reddit.

It's fucking annoying however to stay in touch with people. It used to be that everyone was on Twitter and that's it. Now it's AT LEAST Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon and a ton of other stuff and everyone is somewhere else and no one interoperates with each other.

Speak for yourself. I never had friends on Twitter.

Meh I managed to get laid multiple times on there.

Times used to be better, before the stonerhead took over...

Twitter was the best website by far, very high quality posts, per day I would only scroll through 3 or 4 tweets because each would be a rabbit hole (as an example, and he's long left the platform, crypto cuttlefish)

Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.

And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.

But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.

> And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed.

Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post

> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.

Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.

> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.

yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.

They're just scared of getting fastroped and tear gassed and shot on the spot in their workplace to be then posthumously humiliated on TV as a hostile religious radicalist sympathizer engaging in trafficking of encrypted blasphemous drawings.

So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.

Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.

Gargron, Apple, Google, all has/had policies for Mastodon, which were incompatible with more than 2/3 of its users(at peak).

I don't know how to understand this. Google owns Mastodon?

App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.

Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.

They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).

I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.

You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.

What's the ""main Mastodon network""?

Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted.

Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority.

I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.

This is the first time I've ever read a commentator tell me to just ask an LLM to write their comment for them. But for "just send me the prompt" to work, I still have to know the prompt you planned to use?

Just paste the whole tree and hit enter?

There's several apps for the fediverse though? I always use Voyager for Lemmy (I don't really like the short-form Twitter style socials so I use Lemmy not Mastodon).

This is in the google play store too: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager Though I get it from F-Droid obviously.

I don't know about Apple, its ecosystem is way too closed for me. But Google offers fediverse apps.

That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."

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