I think it's too early to complain about censorship. Moda are still probably adjusting to what is acceptable, and there are several instances where policies differ. Same as turning down whole of Reddit because one subreddit has strict moderation.

Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are no ads at least not yet.

> there are several instances where policies differ

For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?

The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.

Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."

If there are issues, you just migrate. It sounds bad, but if you expect one web site to forever serve you, you are subjecting yourself to their enshittification in the long run. Better to know these things have limited life times and plan accordingly. Early adopters are usually the most interesting crowd anyway.

I don't mind if something is slighlty difficult to use, as it serves as a filter to participants and limits growth (subreddits with over 100,000 participants tend to be kind of guerrella marketing, meme-infested shitholes).

The obvious drawback of course is that you lose the non-tech savy interesting people and experts. I don't know how to mitigate that, but still very interested in seeing where this all goes.

I think they should be able to govern their instance as they wish, but it's odd that they don't understand that putting (for example) criticism of the Chinese communist party under a general anti-racism rule — without explicitly mentioning this — is rather confusing. It's certainly not what the average new user would understand as racism.

This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.

[0]https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Yes you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s made out to be relatively censorship light, but in reality it isn’t. Things just need to be clear and up front so users know whether they want to use that instance.