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 @digiphile @mathewi But that's available if you go to an instance that doesn't filter.
In any case, a better solution to the issue would be to make accounts more portable. Why would you want to forbid people joining ringfenced communities or filtering, e.g., Nazi or sexual content oriented instances? Seems to defeat the entire purpose of the architecture.
@larsjohannes @digiphile @mathewi Informed, effective consent converts censorship into curation. The issue isn't your one's right join communities, but rather the mechanisms used for content filtering.
Server-level blocking is too crude. If nothing else, it makes it hard to know what has been blocked or why. It also means that both over and under-filtering will occur.
The architecture should enable users to curate their feeds as they wish without a necessary subordination to others' values.
@bobwyman (I've pointed this out before on most social networks.) A server you do not own is not yours. We cannot force our ideas of acceptable content on the people who pay the bills and do the work. As long as the blocking criteria are explicit (check "About this server" usually) there's no problem, AFAIC.
I chose a mostly wide open server (that gets blocked by some some servers because is it considered too wide open to potentially unacceptable content). Other people may want something else. Don't like your server? alias and move.
It also allows long posts.
I understand the desire to enforce a "you must distribute my posts using your time and money" policy. It's not workable on Mastodon.
@SETIEric I understand that no writer has a right to be distributed by others, however, it seems to me that a writer's followers should have a right to receive the writer's posts if that is what they wish.
How are the users of a server harmed if one of them follows someone not followed by others on the same server?
@bobwyman The people who provide the resources (for free, generally) get to decide how they are used. If you try to change that, fewer people are going to provide those resources for free.
@SETIEric
So, Money Talks. On Mastodon, just like on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
@bobwyman Have you ever been anywhere where money doesn't talk? I want to live in Star Trek's pansexual multicultural communist utopia, but I don't. I live in late stage capitalist dystopia. If someone is giving you something for free and not making you pay through advertising, you generally don't try to get them to make major changes unless you're going to help pay the bills.
One difference from twitter and facebook is if you can't find a server with rules you like, you can set up a mastodon server at home or rent a mastodon server cloud instance for $6 a month. Of course, even then you can't force every other server to carry your content.
Then again, I wouldn't want child porn to show up on any machine in my home. So I would have a block list.
@bobwyman @SETIEric
I can answer that one! First, the followed posts show up on the server's 'federated' timeline, so blocking is a way of curating that timeline. Second, it exposes the users to abusive interactions from the would-be blocked server. This is social media -- not a RSS feed. Users don't just get messages about what they follow, they get messages from anybody in the network who wants to send them one.
@DecaturNature
The concept of Federated and even Local timelines seems to me something that only makes sense for small instances which do, in fact, host homogeneous user populations. But, if the Fediverse is to grow to support the vast number of people hosted today by Twitter, Facebook, etc., then there will inevitably need to be large instances whose users don't share much commonality of interests.
On large instances, even Local timelines will become overpowering, chaotic fire-hoses...
@bobwyman Have you looked at the mastodon.social blocked server list? https://mastodon.social/about