Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like.
We really need to move beyond this mindset where we think anyone will use an exact replica of an incumbent with some silver bullet tweak nobody actually cares about. It’s like thinking “Twitter but built with Rust” is compelling and getting mad at the sheeple when they couldn’t care less.
> Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like.
The toxic part here isn't someone banning/defederating you, but someone who didn't ban/defederate you getting threatened by others that they'd better do that or else everyone else will defederate them.
How do you fix that, just force everyone to federate with each other? How do you stop people from forking their own clients to remove the forced federation?
What both 'tgsovlerkhgsel and I are trying to say is that there is this kind of realpolitik going on at Mastodon, of which you should be aware before considering to join. You start going against the "party line", you risk getting defederated or, if you're an user on someone else's instance, having your instance's admins pressured to ban you on the threat of the whole instance getting defederated by others. And it's a significant threat, because as much as Mastodon is distributed, people still want to stay connected to the major instances.
I myself moved from Twitter to Mastodon a while ago and very much enjoy it, but I also try to not say anything there that would attract interest of the defederationists.
100% more freedom right there. Freedom doesn't mean you can force me to listen to you. It means I can't force you to stop. What Mastodon enables people to do is a very direct way of stopping conversation with people that can't behave.
(I think that the client-based filtering, although with default settings provided by the server (which the user can choose to use, customize, or ignore), might be better, but server-based could be used if needed, e.g. to avoid flooding the bandwidth. If you are using NNTP, then you can filter by From header, References header, Injection-Info header, Newsgroups header, etc. The server probably could still ban users who misuse those headers for ban evasion, I suppose, but if those headers are not misused, and the connection does not waste too much memory/disk space/bandwidth, then a hard ban is not needed and the filtering can be used instead.)
