Re:Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?
by dielan on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @01:00PM
(#16746687)
Calm down. You're free to block whatever you want for your instance. That's not my concern. If you want to ban certain politocal alignments or specific opinions then your free to do that as well. I disagree with painting such broad strokes like the early mastodon servers did because it leads to quiet/dead instances. It happened to the one I was on and I switched.
There is a market for closed instances, as some people don't want their opinions challenged or to see things they don't like and it's awesome that there's a way to get that. It just shouldn't be the norm because it discourages federation.
Edit: FWIW judging by your blog post and block list you arent an example of what I was talking about so don't take it that way. There are plenty of reasonable Mastodon servers now that repect dialogue it just had a rough start.
Stop there; this is where your comment goes off the rails. I'm an admin (disclosure - my blocklist: https://github.com/kstrauser/freeradical/blob/master/content...) and see almost none of the far-left censorship you describe, particularly on content. You want to be pro-Trump? Go for it, as long as you're polite and respectful. Sure, people will argue with you, but that's their right to be expressive, too.
GNU Social is an interesting experiment and was quickly adopted by a lot of people who wanted to have literally zero limits on free speech. I initially switched from running a GS node to running a Mastodon instance because the software was orders of magnitude better, but quickly decided that adding a couple of rules (be polite. Don't harass. Respect others.) made for a much better user experience than the wild west "say anything you want" environment of GS. I guess you could argue that those rules are imposing censorship, but much in the same way that outlawing physical assault is a restriction of our freedom to beat people up.
As an admin, here's my take on the matter: https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/ . You don't have to agree with everything I say, but you don't get to punch my other guests and then whine when I throw you out. In practice, this is hypothetical because I've never had to ban anyone. Turns out adults are perfectly capable of treating each other decently when they know that's expected of them.
- @[email protected] (https://freeradical.zone/@tek)