Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?
was around a year ago
Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".
I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks.
Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708
Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs:
Note - they partially block mastodon.social!
So don't join them if you don't want to be coddled. Anyone who does wants to engage with a different slice of the fediverse, and why do you care if they don't see you?
I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.
It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.
A bad user experience is just that: bad.
The only reason there was even an opinion about Twitter was mainstream news started reporting "what was on Twitter" and it's still centralized in that way - it "felt" non-optional.
That’s due to barriers to entry and lack of critical mass.
It will also shake out, in that most people will tend towards well-known, large instances that will survive and grow exactly because they refuse to engage with the more obnoxious part of the drama.
I think it's not at all comparable to a corporate entity like X being in full control and able to censor any content.
You may create your own instance and federate with the instances you want. If an instance chooses not to federate with yours you get to decide what's more important to you, your principles or their content.
The solution is to create your own instance. I understand your frustrations but I have a hard time being empathetic to these issues when you are using someone elses instance, probably administered by volunteers in their spare time.
My email provider doesn't prevent me from sending an email from someone at Gmail because someone at Gmail happens to have opposite views to the admin.
Yet email is still federated.
Right, you can get kicked off for your emails.
But nobody is going to ban you based on which domains you do or do not put on your block list.
Moreover social media faces distinct issues that require specific tools, causing the email analogy to break down a bit. A lot of organized harassment campaigns leverage network effects of platforms in ways that wouldn't work over email. The per instance federating capability helps to mitigate that, and if mitigating harassment is not something that is a priority there are instances you can join that take the open-to-all approach.
Those domains are being blocked because of what they send.
They're not being blocked on the basis of what domains they block. There's no recursive blocking that wants you to take a stance and punishes you for being a neutral acceptor of emails. Those blocks are the behavior that can make federation suck.
But I also think that's an oversimplification, because the block list is a helpful proxy for content characteristic of an instance.
But this is a case where I think the analogy to email breaks down insofar as its instructive to social media generally, because some things about email don't cleanly map on to what federated instances are managing. It makes sense that you would want to block instances and their enablers, to connect to an ecosystem consistent with the intentions of a particular instance.
As parent commenter said you can use a general purpose provider (with email) or general purpose instance (with Mastodon), so you are accessing the fediverse. The only thing you are "missing out" on is the ability to make it compulsory for other users to listen to you against their consent.
Then stop trying to make a public discourse and instead make a private forum.
And social media posts in this design are pull, not push, so nobody is ever forced to listen to anything. If you block an instance you won't see their posts, no need to block any intermediates.
Some people are so insecure about their own opinions that the pure idea that someone exists that might not agree the same is a threat, never mind seeing their content.
* if their viewpoint agrees with Mr. Musk.
It doesn't. It's the other way around; if you want something niche you'll be likely be searching and custom setup, but otherwise you're getting the default experience with the normal amount of discoverability.
The echo chamber argument itself is a politicized argument that I think fundamentally misunderstands why communities converging on common values can be beneficial rather than simply echoing.
If people are interested in astronomy, or tech security, or FOSS, or politics, weeding the garden leads to more dynamic, diverse and nuanced communication, not less, and the diagnosis of such things as "echo chambers" is a shallow misdiagnosis. Opening up your garden to weeds kills everything and leads to takeover of the one dominant kind of weed that already dominates everywhere else, which is more echoey.