After reading the list of recommended instances to ban I am officially turned off of Mastodon. Some of the sites banned are for good reason but many/most(?) seem to be vague personal grievances from people overly concerned about how people say things. This language politicization will not make many English-second-language people comfortable as one mistake could potentially ruin them. Meanwhile, the "do gooder" moralists are the only ones who can truly say what they think and all they do is produce lists of people they hate. Sorry. Not getting on the Mastodon bandwagon!

I was really surprised when the original article said mastodon was blacklist by default (and that instance whitelisting was only possible via forking the code!)

I’m actually not certain this is true. I used Mastodon briefly and I remember there was one account out there that auto-followed every user it saw tooting. That way that bot’s instance would build connections to every instance it could see, which gives both (A) metrics - you can get a rough estimate of how many instances are alive at any time - and (B) a way for instances to discover smaller/newer instances if they choose to (I.e follow this bot, and now the global feed visible to your instance sees just about everything).

If Mastodon is blacklist by default, then it must have some other discovery mechanism? Or maybe the terminology just isn’t being applied in the way I understand it (e.g. perhaps it is whitelist-by-default, in that you explicitly connect to instances of your choice, but this implicitly whitelists every instance that whitelisted instance is connected to, recursively, and the blacklist is built atop this)?

I believe other instances get automatically subscribed (without admin's preapproval) when any user follows someone on the other instance.

I think there exist some zero-moderation instances:

https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-0... (this is a list of instances I found which some sensitive people recommend to block, so free speech/zero-moderation ones are included there)

But then other instances just blacklist them, right?

Edit: And damn, the quoted post from social.i2p.rocks actually makes some sense. The language is harsh, for sure, but the support for freedom is pretty clear.

Also, how hard is it to manage accounts on multiple instances? So I could see both mainstream and fully unmoderated.

Yes, we do. A number of instances have blacklisted bofa.lol, which is where this whole attack on Wheaton began.

I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile.

I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen.

> I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen.

In my internet experience, it will be the fun, influential one, and the "civil" one will wither and die. The problem in this case was the abuse of the reporting system, it seems, not name-calling.

HackerNews benefits strongly (imho) from strong moderation.

Strong, principled, consistent, and effective.

Metafilter is way better than Voat. I concur that the less fun one will wither but no guarantee that's the civil one.

> I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile.

Does that mean instances will enforce basic adult civility by preventing one from insulting, say, President Trump? He is by any reasonable standard an absolute stranger to the vast majority of users, who generally will have had absolutely no personal contact with him in any fashion. I don't care for the man's politics, but I also must admit I've never met him.

Have I missed something? Please, help me understand!

Yeah, this list is a blocklist which many "safe" instances use. But I thought it could be useful to find unmoderated instances too, author invested a lot of time into it.

I found a free speech instance but you have convinced me to stop using Mastodon. What a joke. This list has some reasonable things in it but a lot of attacking other users/instances on flimsy allegations.

I am actually not sure how widely this blocklist is used, I just randomly stumbled upon it (via https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances).