Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
We have keybase, all your base belong to keybase
maybe all the lemmyverse instances share an identity chain, and all the mastadon instances share an identity chain, and they are both cross compatible with any other instance variant that supports the standard.
Judging by your comment though, I think we prefer very different levels of moderation, and I'd agree that culturally Masto trends towards heavier moderation.
I'm talking about the fediverse in general (activity pub protocol) and the paradigm of "basically following a block list" which, after seeing how mono narrative and US centric some online spaces tend to be, I don't find appealing.
In particular my qualms were comparing it to the likes of reddit, which is usually heavily moderated.
I appreciate the suggestion of co-op. Don't think it will solve the "as an individual I don't want to be bound by the majority's Blocklist when people are so prone to behave like mobs" but I do understand the appeal. It works as a small wrbbof trust. För very small communities, it can work. But not much chance to grow and be an interesting compendium of ideas and shared content.
Large instance sizes are definitely a challenge re: accountability and much ink has been spilled on what the optimal instance size should be. There is definitely a sweet spot where one has strong representation but also belongs to a larger community that is capable, among other things, to maintain operations.
I have accounts on 5 separate Mastodon instances, and on none of them is the experience as you describe it. You also seem to believe that if you get on an instance run by a reactionary martinet that you are somehow forced to stay there or stop using the Fediverse. Of course, a lot of people seem to believe this about Twitter.
You're comfortable with whatever you're doing and that's fine but for someone who is looking for my usecase ,which is more akin to Reddit and being able to pick the subs I see for myself, it's absolutely limiting.
I don't care about mastodon or twitter but that's beside the point.
My points stand. If you want to address them make sure you read them again.
Interestingly, it turns out, free speech by far benefits the poor more than the rich.
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-economics-free-speech-benefits...
So I'm willing to accept a few mean comments.
I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendous or not
> and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical.
What a disingenuous comment. You went from "have surveyed the 200k instances" to "it's hypothetical then".
No. It has already happened in a few of the instances recommended on Reddit. It happened in the first 2 I created accounts for.
> Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you?
I was following one that I thought was more open than the initial one I found myself in and suddenly it wasn't and the argument of some users was "of course the admin can defederate at any point for vague reasons"
> Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself.
I'm also capable of hosting my own email and plenty other things but it's unnecessary effort for the value. It really is amazing how after disingenuous takes I get a ridiculous appeal to geekdom or something.
> I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
You're puzzled because you're unwilling to read them for what they are and instead produce strawmen in order to deny they are a reality.
Mastodon works for you. Great. But my points stand and are in no way rebuked by your "it's hypothetical", "wait, it's easy", wait, it's not easy but a HN type should do it.
Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.
You can always run your own instance for yourself. Also in practice I’ve not found it hard to find instances who’s block lists I agree with.
The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down (having already fragmented the communities unless they self host their instance, again, creating burden on the user for more Accounts)
I think you forgot this is HN where the standards are a bit higher and you get exposed to arguments that you may dislike. Account of 17 days too, so ironic.
You went with an ad hominem and double down on having no arguments.
This isn’t saying anything other than your not a fan. Which as I said is fine.
> My point is that the model of Blocklist from others is not enticing for any individualistisc user who values diversification of ideas and the fact that the default makes it a bad burden for the user who wants to try that, means that communities won't be formed that don't have that blocklist mindset, one way or another. The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down.
This was unspecific/vague and not an accurate description of the fediverse. It’s a very diverse (unfortunately so in some cases) group of communities that interact with each other. Or don’t if they choose.
The value in allowing each instance to handle their own block list is that it scales and allows you to choose a server that shares your perspective. And basically if you disagree that this is the case, you’re free to change that and that’s the point. You have all of the choice.
The choice I have is it to love or leave each instance and pay the price of fragmentation and user registration per instance, plus having to switch.
In any case, you've unwillingly agreed with me by explaining my "choice" after calling me uninformed and now vague.
It's funny how you also see diversity as an unfortunate. Says a lot.
Fundamentally, it's not putting the true power of granularity and easy choice on the user but forming small very narrow minded communities at the whim of an admin, with a high cost of transfer (unlike a sub where you might disagre with a mod decisiom).
Funnily enough, feels less free choice than Reddit in some aspects.
Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.
The problems with centralization were mostly theoretical for twitter and reddit ....
Obviously it’s not turned out that way and hopefully federation saves us all, but I don’t know if protocols will ever win over marketing.
Is it to much to expect the average user to continue dialing in their scopes? Maybe not.
How about the below average user?
This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!