this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2021
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You're putting personal ideology in front of functionalism. The function that demonstrably draws chill well-meaning people to mastodon and pushes queer people and minorities away from alternatives like pleroma is demonstrably the ability for administrators to perform full-instance blocks. This has already been heavily discussed within the mastodon community for years.
This is how it went down: a particularly toxic conservative or openly fascist community with nazi dogwhistles in their domain name or site description joins the fediverse (we'll use kiwifarms as an example). Historically they would do harassment campaigns against queer/minority mastodon users via their own users. But the majority of masto admins went through a giant struggle session over it trying to decide what to do, and the solution they came up with was to defederate from the whole instance and purge anyone who sympathized with them as a weak link in the moderation system. This is how witches.live died, their admin was a racist PoS who migrated to kiwifarms after being found out.
Toxic communities still managed to do harassment campaigns through their periphery. Since they couldn't infiltrate core mastodon communities anymore, they began to act through 'free speech instances'. Usually these instances run on pleroma and per the platform's ideology don't defederate from anyone. Free speech instances tend to have lax moderation, or in rare cases will go to bat for their users who harass others based on some self-righteous trash ideology.
This has been demonstrated repeatedly. The sample size got to be big enough that free speech instances are now defederated on-sight. We still have problems with them, they've become strategic and have started using bots and rapidly create accounts on instances that were previously unknown. But the majority of the time there is very little drama on the mastodon side of the fedi. And most people like it that way. They prefer to feel safe and it makes them a lot more talkative.
The former tend to be free-speech instance aligned even if they're not themselves. They have a tendency to federate with them. There is also a significant amount of ecchi content in the free-speech half of the fedi. Furries are tolerated on the "blue" side because they're nice to people and don't put up with racism, sexism, etc. When you've been around it long enough you start to recognize the patterns.
I'm not ever going to argue in favor of lolicon. Sorry. Finding it morally wrong is justified and anyone who doesn't want to see that shit has a right to avoid it and defederate. Changing the language to "shunning" and suggesting that defederating from pro-lolicon instances is somehow racist doesn't change that. I've seen plenty of chinese and japanese language instances in the TL that don't tolerate that stuff.
And frankly, I don't give a shit about furries because they're not attracted to literal children.
Holy shit, you're literally arguing for child porn. Blocked.
I don't think he is. I think he is admitting that what is considered child pornography varies from a community/culture to another. Does that mean that any of those position aren't inherently dangerous and should not be actively fought against ? Of course not !
The question about the moral interactions between culturally distant communities is at the heart of this debate, and I don't think there is a simple answer. And on that, I think I deeply agree with you when you argue that communities choosing who to federate (or not federate) with is a very good approach that mimics real life.
Let's just keep in mind that this method does not implies that anything that lies outside of a community moral standards should be blocked without a debate. But there are things that should clearly not be up to debate, I do not argue that.
This part threw me off. I agree with basically everything you said, but this sentence made it sound like you were saying the opposite. That is, to me it reads like "federating is bad because it pushes queer people and minorities away from Mastodon" even though that's the opposite of what you mean.
Maybe just me.
Anyway, I think this is 100% right. It's a good way of circumventing the free speech trolls, whose arguments were 100% in bad faith from day one. So you can pick and choose where you go!
I think one bad effect is that there are some confused people in the middle, who don't moderate, who will let their communities get poisoned, and I guess I just wish the effort didn't have to be on each individual mod, because there will be a lot of gaps that let trolls get through.
Federating with people who are ideologically opposed to your existence creates a horrific social atmosphere. It makes sense if held in the context of conservative violence against minorities. Federating in itself is an amazing technology that mimics actual real life community structures and I think it is capable of creating far healthier communities than mainstream walled gardens focused on engagement stats.
I think it's good that it's necessary. Reddit runs on teams of sociopathic mods. Masto mods are much more chill and actually understand their own communities because everyone in it matters to them. If you can't put in the work you shouldn't be responsible for the well being of others and deserve to be defederated.