Interesting piece by @mathewi about the culture clash between journalists accustomed to Twitter & existing Mastodon instances. He reports about 45 servers are blocking people on journa.host, which I was seriously considering joining or shifting towards: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalists-want-to-recreate-twitter-on-mastodon-mastodon-is-not-into-it.php What do you think? How should members of the media be approaching participating or reporting on the #fediverse?
@digiphile @mathewi I have always liked the ACLU definition of Censorship:
`Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others.' See: https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship
Blocking servers seems to me to be a clear example of censorship. Rather than normalizing censorship, the goal should be to develop tools and techniques that empower users to curate their own feeds.
@bobwyman @digiphile @mathewi Not sure who's imposing on whom in your example. If people don't like their instance, they can move. By joining an instance I agree to a certain level of curation - or not if I chose one that generally doesn't block.
@larsjohannes @digiphile @mathewi Changing servers to avoid censorship has very high switching costs -- if only because one's identity is tied to the server. Also, censorship by server operators is likely to cover many issues. I may agree with some content filtering, but not with other filtering.
Users, not intermediaries, should control content curation. We must develop methods to make crude censorship at the server level unnecessary and undesirable.
@bobwyman @larsjohannes @digiphile @mathewi
If you want users to have complete control, there are servers that do so (check out my instance, qoto.org). If you want the underlying algorithm to give all control to the user, then you need to abandon the instance/group-server all together. Some people are trying that, but it's not technically trivial (e.g. revolver from freespeechextremist.net)
