ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared (opens in new tab)

That's not entirely correct. Mastodon already implements a feature to migrate to a new instance. Also there is a draft for identities that are not bound to an instance.

You can't even post titties on Facebook/Insta. Big corps are intensely politically motivated, they succumb to American prudery through advertiser pressure.

Even the more centrist tend to block instances. Especially because the others are politically motivated. Who in the center of the political spectrum would want to federate with gab for example? The same goes for the other extreme, like some instances which are full of tankies. When you federate with them you can't have a single news topic without getting "NATO evil, Putin great" pile-ons. It derails every discussion.

One of the nicer centrist instances is Beehaw and they defederated a lot of stuff just to keep the atmosphere alright.

I used to think it was a bad thing when instances defederated each other but since I saw the above happening I agree with it.

It's real but temporary for now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471640

"This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network. The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open."

I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether alt text is “required” for images.

Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.

It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.

I think it's more of an arcitectural issue. If you were a node operator, would you peer with a dedicated racial hatred AP node? What if a small minority of your users complained that you blocked it.

With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users can just get that content from some other relay without having to create a new account and move their entire social graph over.

> I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and they're broken.

You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that if they choose. But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone. Nobody should have that power.

Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't change.

> If you're not welcome in a community

This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that? You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're seeking to shun me already.

We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing petty team sports.

In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want to spend time or energy advocating for.

They mean the freedom to impose their views on others, because if the ignorant can just be made to hear the 'truth' they will believe it too. Having the ability to remove such toxicity from the much larger community of people who genuinely want share ideas is a strength of the platform, not a weakness.

What you are describing -- a system where I have to maintain accounts on a number of separate networks that don't interoperate due to content control disagreements -- is an ecosystem of competing centralized systems, not a decentralized one, and that people who run their own servers are reportedly presumed evil and defederated either by default or at the drop of a hat is a visceral demonstration that this setup undermines most of the benefit you think you are getting by calling it "decentralized". The reality is that many of the people using Mastadon would be not just "happy enough" but "actively happier" (per all the clearly ridiculous controversy surrounding people doing the supposedly-evil work of building search engines or, heaven forbid, being able to quote-tweet without permission, lol... if you are going out of your way to prevent hyperlinks, something seriously wrong has happened) using a centralized competitor to Twitter that was merely run by someone they liked.

Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The impression I got is that the normie side instance admins apparently cooperate on blocking instances.

What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.

What if I want something that isn't an echo-chamber?

I wholeheartedly believe that those are anti-features. They're metrics that drive antisocial behavior and make the world a little worse.

Regarding whether it is "a good thing for social networks to provide such stats":

It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.

Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of information:

    Title, Domain, Points, Author, Time, Comments

2 of them = 33% are numeric indicators we trust because we trust HN.

Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.