Fediverse

I mean, you can say it's similar to anything, depending on what analogy you are trying to make. Then it's just a question of whether your analogy is constructive or confusing.

I'm reading a book about Lyndon B. Johnson right now, so a convenient analogy for me would be North and South cultural differences in how they reacted to the vicious mutiliation and murder of Emmitt Till. In the South, it was considered unsurprising, not worthy of outrage, not a big deal, and some people even made jokes about it and thought it was funny, or even actively cheered it on. In the North it was a moral horror.

Imagine going into that subject, and insisting that we should be respectful of the cultural differences between the respective sides. That would be small minded shallowness masquerading as an insight on moral tolerance.

But what about [insert analogy] where it's different? Oh, well with [insert analogy] it's a question what you are trying to illustrate, and how relevant that is to anything. (A lot of people can coherently make an analogy that is nevertheless not pertinent, which chews up time and sidetracks everybody, and can be an excuse for not engaging with criticisms).

But the point is, there really are cases where it's perfectly appropriate, even morally necessary, to conclude that certain things shouldn't be normalized in the name of respecting cultural differences, because that whitewashes away harms. And insisting we shouldn't engage in judgment is an exercise in shallow, vague and confused invocation of high minded principles in circumstances where they don't apply.

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.