I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight:

https://pleroma.social

Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters.

Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...

It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.

For some cultural context:

If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters

If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters

There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.

Some communities are more right wing, and others are very left. You just need to look further. Most of the people on the fediverse chose to be there for many good reasons.

> Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...

we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables in this world. there will always be a 'stable diffusion' seeking equilibrium between the places that censor and the places that dont, and the people impacted by those rule parameters will move to the places that dont censor, which will bring non mainstream ideals. Non mainstream ideals are the essence of what solves hard problems.

> there are undesirables in this world.

Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

There's a big difference between:

> I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community.

and

> Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc.

Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion.

The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.

You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.

Yes. Normally, I do not think it has to be explicitly said, but this time it may be necessary. Speech that is not offensive does not require protection. If I say sun is shining, people will not try to deplatform me. Offensive ( and legal ) speech might cause that to happen. This is not acceptable and not part of the promise of this nation.

<< Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ).

Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.

If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.

If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded.

It's still an absolute dumpster fire regardless.

> If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.

I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point.

For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat.

>If one compels a Twitter...

What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem.

It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default.

And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.

I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.)

But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity.

Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.

They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.

When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if:

"they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"

Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence.

Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?

Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?

> and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols

That's a either a direct call to violence or it implies that violence has already been threatened or used via those weapons. Which means, as the preceding part of the the quote shows, that free speech has been eschewed in favour of violence:

> they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive,

Not to argue or listen is part of free speech i.e. freedom of conscience - I don't have to listen to you or anyone I don't wish to if I am free. But Popper uses the phrase meet us on the level, these intolerant people have chosen a different level where they will not allow certain argument to occur that is against their position.

So, when you say "utterance of intolerant philosophies" he is talking about violence or assault, and certain speech, actually threatening speech has been covered by the crime of assault for over a thousand years in English common law, which American common law has continued, and SCOTUS has provided particular exceptions to the US first amendment that line up with that (to be a threat a statement must be credible and imminent).

> Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?

No, I'm saying that there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given and it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad. If there are people writing credible and imminent threats of violence on social media because they don't like what's being said, that is what Popper was looking to suppress.

If a Nazi, for example, wishes to engage in argument without any such threat of violence, while arguing for National Socialism, that's fine by me, because it gives me the chance to destroy those arguments using my free speech. Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.

> there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given

The "utterance of intolerant philosophies" does not solely refer to calls for violence or assault. As you point out yourself, that sort of speech had long been covered by the "harm principle" in common law and would have been entirely superfluous for Popper to rehash in the 1940s. In this and other writings he was clearly outlining a new class of speech and proposing a restriction on it.

> it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad

That is also not what Popper described. There are clearly many things that give rise to something bad yet would not qualify as "intolerant philosophies" because their adherents are willing to conduct a rational argument and unlikely to resort to violence.

Of course people are free to reject Popper's argument and embrace the lesser constraint of the harm principle so that they can do things like debate Nazis on the internet. Personally I think there are some compelling arguments in favor of erring on the side of free speech. But we should be honest that this involves rejecting Popper's argument, not stretching it to mean whatever we want.

> Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.

I do not understand this. Are you saying Twitter moderating Nazis is a form of violence?

> Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat

For those of us who haven't been following Mastodon closely, can you list some of these features?

(My own point of view is that in communication products, like in programming languages, creeping featuritis can be a symptom of poor overall design.)

The newest features I know of are a built in language auto translator, more fine tuned administrative controls geared towards specific members of other instances (something that's already fairly robust for both platforms), default instance wide progressive scrolling of large threads, support for editing posts.

None of these are earth shattering, but all of them are very contentious aside from maybe the admin features. In general, Mastodon aims to maintain twitter feature parity, which is why things like the translator and are added. The ActivityPub protocol also doesn't really support the idea of an edit directly, and many see it as the latest in a long list of steps of mastodon trying to own the protocol.

The progressive scroll / pagination vs load the whole thread thing is a constant front end argument within various mastodon/pleroma frontends and has been for years now. The problem is that unless you use one of the real minimal, 1337, hackerish frontends, threads with 300+ comments will send your RAM straight to frown town unless you have like 12gb to spare just for what is mostly static text.