The idea of preemptive banning of federating with other instances is extremely common in Mastodon-land. This means that unilateral actions by admins, invisible to their userbase, restrict what their users can read, or who can read their users.
It would be fine if the users opted into this, but it happens silently and arbitrarily by admins, oftentimes based on speculation or gossip, not even real abuse. It’s all of the worst of tribalism, polarization, guilt by association, and preemptive censorship (regardless of whether or not admins are “in the right” by censoring messages between x and y flowing through their own machines).
It’s also not easy or reliable to migrate your account between instances without losing your followers, and none of the server implementations yet support virtual hosting, so you can’t migrate hosts while keeping your own domain/handle.
There are real problems there, and casually dismissing the major censorship issues in the ecosystem doesn’t begin to solve any of them.
You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange.
Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason.
Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs.
Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.
It isn't contradictory or incompatible to say that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and also simultaneously believe that censorship, especially the silent or invisible kind, is bad.
Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...
Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here.
This is a categorically different problem than MITM.
> Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons
There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content).
You're right, my mistake. In some cases it is not transparent.
However, this is not a systematic censorship problem, unlike centralized services with opaque policy language and a complete boot out the door. People are free to run their own instances or have multiple accounts across different instances.
Whether you think they're correct is irrelevant to the question at hand. Freedom of speech and association means you're free to not federate/talk to those problematic instances, and maybe you'd be much happier for it. On the other hand, not being OK with it and trying to fight for transparency means you're trying to externally force these communities to be run in the way you want, which may be received well, but not always b/c forcing unwanted change is exactly the opposite point of Federation: communities will be built the way their members want to build it. Like the real world, some value transparency and some don't.
It's one thing to argue specific bans about specific instances and disagree on the other party's interpretation; it's a totally different claim to say that the entire system is corrupt with opaque censorship.
I'm sorry! Based on context, I understood your post to refute mine to support sneak. And sneak and I have had heated debates about the Fediverse before, and you've stumbled into the latest one. :)
In the future, it would definitely help me and others understand your motivation better if you could even include one more sentence in your communication like "Just here for a correction: some instances are transparent..."
>claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content
That can be a simple issue of jurisdiction. Mastodon.social is hosted in Germany (IIRC), so they have to adhere to German law. That means, for example, while hatespeech isn't strictly illegal in the US, it certainly is in Germany, it even has a fairly good legal definition. Or take the Japanese instances, which aren't well federated or have media-bans because of differences in media legality. And lastly it can also be simply the case that the instance is not moderating (ie, they write 'no illegal content' but do not care).
Both the statement that an instance shared illegal content and that the same instance was banned for illegal content can be true at the same time.
Why does anyone have a requirement to talk to your instance? What if, due to your ideological stance on issues, I don't trust that your server won't decide that mine is distasteful in some way, and that you'd cause your server to disrupt mine in some way by flooding it with messages, for instance? I have legitimately had this happen and it nearly brought down my instance. Some script-kiddie decided to fuck around and spam my account on an instance I run with about 2000 followers in the course of a few seconds. This almost killed my server entirely. Why should I have been forced to interact with their server on the grounds of free speech?
Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.
> Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
It prevents people on that instance who explicitly want to follow me from doing so.
It also prevents me from following people on that server from my primary account on my homeserver, even if those people explicitly want the whole world to be able to read their public messages.
Both of those are undesirable interference between mutually-desired communication by Alice and Bob, by Mallory.
Then they, and you, can find another instance where you can mutually talk with each other. You are, in fact, allowed to have multiple fediverse accounts for different purposes/groups of people.
This doesn't address my point at all that you cannot argue that my server is somehow obligated to process bytes from your server.
Tools that disobey their end users are unfit for purpose. They're bad tools, and should be replaced with useful ones.
Your peers' routers are allowed to drop your packets, but nobody is arguing that that's good or beneficial. There is a difference between "within rights" and "good".
While I don't agree with you, there is an interesting discussion to be had here about digital "commons" (something like the "public utility" concept in the US), I think.
If a company with a near-monopolistic network effect (Google, FB, etc.) censors speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform, it seems that most folks agree that this is bad, whether or not they're willing to do anything about it.
So, instead, we have decentralized services (and semi-decentralized ones, like Mastodon). At what point does a Mastodon community operator's decision to censor speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform become problematic? When a community achieves a large size? If new community members aren't made aware of the censorship? Is the difference between these communities and an ultra-ubiquitous one like "having a Google account" or "being connected to friends on Facebook" a difference of degree, or a qualitative one?
It's simple to argue an extremist position of "all speech between any set of parties must not be suppressed for any reason, even by the parties themselves", but I don't think most people want to live in that world. Similarly, it's pretty hard to isolate a line past which an operator of a community-service should be held to a different standard of conduct because of how ubiquitous/depended-on their community is, but a lot of people seem to think that this line exists.
The federated Mastodon, the one people generally are talking about, is controlled, by a 'democracy' of sorts of the server owners.
The technology itself is of course open, but if your content is not approved by the main Mastodon federation, then users will have to be signed into multiple Mastodon federations (if that's what they wish), one to see the main Mastodon federation, and one to see the one that got banned. Because of this extra hurdle, a ban from the main Mastodon federation does shut out a large portion of the Mastodon users.
Mastodon is often presented as this 'free speech social network', in reality it's just a decentralized social network, with all the censorship that comes with being a modern social network.
The definition of "free speech" many people in this thread use puzzles me greatly. If you come to my house and starts yelling things that offend me and I kick you out, I'm not infringing on your freedom of speech.
Based on what principles should server owners be forced to federate with third party servers if they don't want to? How is not wanting to federate with anybody "censorship"?
I've just setup a mastodon instance on a VPS to give it a try. For less than $5 per month you can have your own instance where you can invite like minded people and find people to federate with.
And if you can't find anybody to join you server or federate with you... Maybe you should think about what that says about you instead of screaming that you're being censored?
Main-instance Mastodon (run by the main dev) has made moderation choices that people disagree with. It means conversations here always brings out this same group group of people that disagreed with all these decisions and somehow believe their speech (their bytes) must physically be shipped to everyone else in some network, and must be examined by everyone on the network so that others can decide for themselves whether to listen. I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it.
This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules.
I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet.
The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise).
the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations
Vehement agreement from a Masto admin who works to keep her instance a nice quiet chill place for people like her, with some connections to other nice quiet chill parts of the Fediverse, if you want to argue then go to Twitter or go to a "free speech" instance - and accept that you will probably be cut off from the chill places unless you make a second account and abide by the chill rules.
> I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it.
I honestly doubt that. Are you sure that you are not straw-manning them? In my experience they usually complain about how admins strip the ability to read their posts from the users registered in said instances.
I am 100% not straw manning them. I couldn't believe the conversation I was having. It's very few people that have this crazy of a hardline stance, but they're out there.
The main Mastodon federation has a list of servers you must ban on your end to join the federation. So even if you only disagree with a subsection of them, if you want your server to be in the popular federation, you have to ban the entire list.
>If you come to my house and starts yelling things that offend me and I kick you out, I'm not infringing on your freedom of speech.
It'd be more like be your neighbor being offended and therefore kicking out the person yelling things that offends him. If you don't want to be kicked out of the apartment complex, you are required to share the same views as everyone else.
If let's say Stormfront.org wanted to create their own Mastodon instance spreading their thoughts, they'd be free to do so. I'm sure the Mastodon creators wouldn't like it, but they'd have to ideologically support the very idea of allowing them this, as it comes down to free speech.
This is not what free speech is about. Freedom of speech means they are free to publish their opinions, but it doesn't mean that you, or anyone, have to let them publish their opinions on your platform/paper/channel.
From the mastodon wikipage:
Gab, a controversial social network with a far-right user base, changed its software platform to a fork of Mastodon and became the largest Mastodon node in July 2019.[37] Gab's adoption of Mastodon allowed Gab to be accessed from third-party Mastodon applications, although four of them blocked Gab shortly after the change.[38] In response, Mastodon stated that it was "completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy", and criticized Gab for attempting "to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech" and for "paywalling basic features that are freely available on Mastodon".[39]
> This is not what free speech is about. Freedom of speech means they are free to publish their opinions, but it doesn't mean that you, or anyone, have to let them publish their opinions on your platform/paper/channel.
In the case of Mastodon, they've deliberately avoided putting themselves in the shoes of a platform/paper/platform owner in the interest of a system where no central authority fully controls its use.
That the creators of Mastodon are "completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy" is in no way a departure from that ideology. They're criticizing Gab's use of free speech using their own free speech but have deliberately relinquished their right to exert any more authority than that on an ideological basis. That they can't control it themselves it their unique selling point.
Yes, I think we largely see it the same way, but GP stated:
> I'm sure the Mastodon creators wouldn't like it, but they'd have to ideologically support the very idea of allowing them this, as it comes down to free speech.
And I argued that it does not come down to free speech, and that whether "Mastodon ideologically support the very idea of allowing them this" is unclear at best.
Twitter had some drama few years back, Japanese non-tech users rushed into Mastodon and completely obliterated the federation, something like 3/4 of global DAU and volume at peak? That forced quite a progress for Mastodon project and left substantial pain for two cultures so there's a bit of Cold War between people taking Western or Japanese sides
Yes, but I think the implementation of the block is what caused the schism (or simply isolation).
It was sad, to have witnessed such a bright future unfold, interesting discussions on language, on tech, on culture. And then to have half of the world just cut off.
If you know about this, you should consider that mastodon.social acts as an example instance. This effectively made blocking Pawoo and a few other instances the norm.
There was a block-list circulating around, and if you do not block every instance on the list, your instance is misogynist, pedophile and far-right.
That's simply untrue, speaking as the admin of a smaller instance. There are blocklists but they are entirely up to yourself to implement. I myself only implement rules to completely block far-right instances or "free speech" instances, those tend to cover almost 99% of content that would be frankly illegal for me to federate. The rest is a few japanese and sex-positive instances, which are only media-blocked, so they still federate but I don't allow their media on my server, which I think is an acceptable compromise completely blocking it. And from talking to other people running instances, this is pretty much the norm for the fediverse, regardless of what the far-right instances want you to believe.
It just feel very weird to me that the word "fediverse" is thrown around like a universe, except it is a balance of not getting thrown out by not being the norm. Perhaps it is just me that has this fantasy of everyone being in one place, at least on the Internet, but jerks are jerks.
The Fediverse is simply a term for all of the instances. It's not entirely fragmented, there is certainly shared hosts between bubbles in the fediverse. Though I don't think this is an issue really; our own universe functions on the bubble principle as well and it makes fediverse a place that you can find an instance to be on without having to worry that your instance moderator will allow nazis to vent their garbage into your feed.
> Are you blocking instances, and on what conditions?
I block instances when they either flood or I find I don't want to have anything to do with them (I do tolerate opinions I disagree with, of course; but not patent bigotry).
And only based on evidence I gather myself, I don't trust screenshots or copy-pastes (but I understand some mod teams do, and that's ok if that's what their users want).
> I wonder how often you get complaints about wanting an instance blocked, and how you manage them.
As I said, I never got complaints. I also never got instance requests personnally; although I do sometimes see other instance admins saying they blocked a given instance. When it happens, I take a look at that instance's public pages. Usually, that's enough to make my mind, eg. because their public timeline is overrun by literal nazis and/or lolicon.
(I was looking for examples as I was writing this, and it turns out most of the nazi instances I blocked don't exist anymore. Oh well.)
The hardest part is dealing with big instances with many "well-behaved" users, but also a very lax moderation policy that tolerates trolls. So far I only banned individual trolls in this case, but it requires work, and I understand not all moderators want to spend so much time.
