Your anecdote is valid but so is wil Wheaton's http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

Wil is inside a reality distortion field. Someone got him with a low blow joke and he started reporting everyone from that instance (which was named after another joke of the type, bofa.lol)

Of course it doesn't show up: most if not all Mastodon servers ban you for having the wrong political ideology, it's in the server rules of most of them.

I skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more

It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?

As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated.

The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoided by having (and enforcing) rules and banning ideologies. The catch here is that this would never scale; this only works because there are only a few users.

However each instance has its own self contained moderation, allowing moderation to scale horizontally.

If an instance is unable to moderate all its users, they can shut down signups temporarily.

Can you give me some examples of a server with extreme right-wingers? That way I can find out whether my server allows me to follow them or not.

There are public blocklists that Mastodon instances associated with the left (most of them) use. They are one Google search away.

I tried following https://pl.smuglo.li/users/roka (an anti-Semite who posts porn) and got a nondescript error. How can I tell if this is due to a blacklist, and if so, if it's on my instance or theirs?

Hmm... I don't see any antisemitism in there?

In any case, you should contact the admins of your instance, but most probably they have blocked that instance, as it appears on blocklists for being a free speech zone.

https://pl.smuglo.li/notice/5986711 is pretty vicious antisemitism. Apparently I have succeeded in following this person now though. I'll see if I end up seeing their posts.

Update: I'm seeing them fave my posts.