Mastodons main federation is one of the most strict leftist communities there is. They don't even fire warning shots, they unlink your entire server for one message overtreading their "inclusive" guidelines.
They're even stricter than Reddit, and that sets a point.
I really don't think you can say Reddit is a strict leftist community with a straight face. There are plenty of places on Reddit where hard right and alt right views are openly welcome and encouraged.
I think it's understood that the poster is referring to the main subs, and that's a fair assessment of them. You're right that not every sub is authleft, but the mods of the largest subs certainly fit that profile completely.
The “moderate politics” community has has to stop debating certain contentious topics because the Reddit rules don’t allow one side, held by the majority of Americans, to express their view.
There's a big difference between calling Reddit as a whole a strict leftist place, and a sub community of the site banning discourse on an incredibly divisive topic that attracts pure vitriol from both sides of the spectrum every time it comes up.
If you want to discuss the topic of transgender athletes there's plenty of places on Reddit for you to do so.
The topic is not too dissimilar to discussing crypto here on HN, it's definitely possible to do so but the topic so frequently erupts into name calling it forces heavy handed moderation that pleases nobody.
Please share an example of reddit doing what it did to that trump group a few years ago to a similarly moderate to medium leftist subreddit. That is kind of the defining moment for me that makes the whole place a leftie fart smelling commune (although it does have a bunch of decent technical communities still)
"that trump group" wasn't a group of people sharing moderate to medium rightist political discourse, it was a place that was banned for inciting violence, targeting harassment, doxxing, brigading the site, and vitriolic hate speech. If thats your idea of "moderate", then I'm not sure what you'd consider hard right.
Nevertheless, at exactly the same time as the_donald was banned, ChapoTrapHouse which was a left wing subreddit was banned for exactly the same reason.
> that makes the whole place a leftie fart smelling commune
Comments like this are why people don't take your arguments seriously. If you want to have an honest discussion about these topics, don't take it down to ad hominem attacks and cheap slurs.
Elaborate? What "inclusive" policies do you think are overbearing? Mastodon.social is plenty accommodating to your average "set no CWs, give unsolicited advice, be a bit mean to trans people" person. Other places are not. Joining any random server will not work as much as joining a random IRC network will not.
If someone wants to setup a mammoth federation (because mammoths are less hairy than leftists or something - I dunno) they are free to do so. They can use the same software, they can set their own policies on if they want to federate with Anime/Trans/Communist/Nazi/Antifa servers however they want.
And AFAIK no Mastadon server have removed the ability to link to competitors.
I'm pretty sure most people I know are happy they don't federate.
But also, Truth Social violated Mastodon's license. Gab eventually shared their code, but their CTO took the chance to call me a slur on his public feed for asking.
Is that supposed to be a quote by me? Because I never said that.
It doesn't even make sense in this context, unless you are implying people shouldn't be free to read what they want (since federation is mostly about the reading).
And even if it wasn't, then yes I do believe that freedom of choice is more important than freedom of speech.
For people who pretend "to be inclusive" and all that type of rhetoric it's really funny how they would go with such a misogynistic slur as absolutely acceptable and encouraged.
You see it in action too, how people substitute having arguments for simply calling people some label.
After a while you realize that most people online and offline tend to be very authoritarian and love witch hunting/piling on others. So any type of situation where they can other and freely attack someone they'll take it.
But yeah, don't like "karen" at all. Call them whatever they are, e.g.: "this woman went and was rude and entitled and did X". Also, demanding good service or a manager might be perfectly acceptable done in a polite manner. Consumer advocacy shouldn't be blanket attacked.
After reading that: I am not a fan of how wikipedia calls Karen ageist, sexist & racist but the wikipedia page for mansplaining says that it's "one of the most creative new words in the last decade".
To me these two terms are basically identical: Take a behaviour (Entitlement, Obnoxiousness) and genderise/racialise it.
It's stupid and divisive, but what I find is that right wing people are happy to use Karen and get mad about Mansplain, but left wing people are happy to use Mansplain but get mad at Karen.
If you like the idea of a decnrelized network but think mastodon has problems (ie attaching your identity and friend graph to a single server) Check out nostr:
Can somebody explain to me the sentiment of "Free speech really should be free."? I get why people should be allowed to say whatever they want, but why should twitter - a private company - be force to publish whatever people say?
If the policy is defined then I don't see a problem with that. The issue with Twitter is that Musk openly tweeted that he's a free speech absolutist and even said the things he now started to ban, were allowed.
I think Musk and his followers must realize that free speech is a marketing campaign, and Elon's hypocrisy on going back on free speech is embracing the reality of things.
Musk said the ElonJet account was allowed even though he thought it was a "direct personal safety risk".
He went completely against that and journalists that reported on it when he banned the account and the journalists.
Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying. He just woke up on the wrong side of bed and decided to ban, perhaps to see how far he could push things and whether his "fans" would support him.
He then starts a Twitter poll to democratise the decision to unban the journalists. The result is to unban them now. He didn't like that result and did another poll, except with the news that he was doing it again, the poll was even more in favour of unbanning them now.
He's a hypocrite deciding what to do based on what some brown nosing fan tweets him or what he dreamt of that night.
>Keep in mind that none of this was "doxxing". It's publicly available information what Elon's plane is and where it's flying
99% of a dox is taking public information from obscure sources and making it easily accessible in one place. Doxxing can be sharing public information about someone without their permission. Being public doesn't make it not doxxing.
So if I used publicly available information (property tax records, court records, vehicle registration records, whatever) to post Brian K. White's home address, it "wouldn't be doxxing"?
(For the bystanders: There is no other included letter or note, just this unsolicited package containing a bare, although apparently new and unused, surgical mask with no explaination and no known-to-me sender. The string was cut unwittingly while cutting open the envelope.)
So you have uncovered some never-was-covered public data from my full-real-name-middle-initial-and-all handle, and proved that some people out there are willing to mis-use public data, and that you are one of them, and I am not.
Strange point to want to make.
I wonder if HN has any sort of official stance on that sort of action @dang ?
Do you really agree that making the public location of Elon's plane more public and easily accessible is doxxing though? I get it if it was the real time location of Elon within 100 meters, or his personal house in a forum with the intention to do harm or something, but the location of a plane that narrows your location down to a city and requires government grade anti air missiles to realistically expect to take down while in flight? The increased security risk of the latter seems like a rounding error to me, which makes the justification for removal very suspect because the thing it does dramatically increase is the public knowledge of how much of a climate hypocrite the guy is flying as much as he does.
Yes, I definitely consider it doxxing. Whether doxxing someone should be allowed is another question and twitter for years has decided that doxxing is against the rules and doxxers typically get shadow banned.
The information shared was not from an obscure source nor was it from a site that wasn’t easily accessible. It was the mirroring of 1 piece of information from 1 location to another location.
I think the fundamental problem, if we ignore Musk's hypocrisy is that Musk appears to be using his newfound moderator abilities capriciously to silence people he dislikes, without any sort of standard for behavior. With the plane thing it seems like he invented a rule to justify his behavior, and it gives the impression he will continue inventing rules whenever it suits him, not because these rules are good, but because he needs a rule to justify banning someone who annoyed him. And eventually he'll be in the classic corrupt regulator situation where he has a rule to ban pretty much anyone who annoys him, and they will be selectively applied only to people who annoys him.
He needs to show he's a trustworthy moderator who won't behave like this, and his behavior makes it pretty hard to believe he will be.
People did in fact have a problem with Twitter too.
It's just more obvious for Musk since 1) he prioritized himself over doing a more general sweep including more than what affects him alone and 2) he has been obnoxiously vocal for multiple years now, painting a massive target and begging the public to troll him.
At this point, this formulation of "free speech" complaint is nothing but a dog-whistle, "they're not interested in platforming my racist trolling, wah! So much for the tolerant left."
Which is true, but also, I don't care, and I'm happy with it, because we're better off and other speech flourishes.
Realistically, each Mastodon instance sets its own policies. Most publish lists of the instances they've banned. When I looked at those lists a month ago, it seemed like the median instance banned 6-10 other instances. Typically, the banned instances included a particular instance which publishes a lot of Nazi symbols, which are illegal in many European countries. Other frequently-banned instances included ones with lots of NSFW content, including a now-extinct instance used by sex workers. Also, spammy instances got banned a lot.
However, a handful of Mastodon instances, mostly ones used by frequently harassed groups, banned dozens of other instances. This was one of their major selling points to their users: "Join here, and we'll provide a curated experience with fewer harassers."
No instance that I saw banned linking to Twitter, and I can't think of any instance that banned journalists from major mainstream papers.
But the thing about Mastodon is that if you really want to talk to Nazi wannabes, you can always set up your own instance. However, many people may choose not to talk with you, because many people dislike wannabe Nazis and their buddies and don't invite them to the cool parties. Almost every worthwhile social space has always had rules about who's not invited.
Elon Musk has every right to shout loudly about freedom of speech, and then ban journalists and links to competitors. And his critics have every right to mock him for this.
It seems reasonable to define the "main Fediverse" as the set of servers that most other servers federate with. There are distributed blacklists of servers like https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock, and I would not consider the servers listed there to be on the "main Fediverse" since they cannot communicate with many of the larger Fediverse servers.
The fediverse to which the most popular instances, such as mastodon.social, belong.
All the instances in the main fediverse have practically the same moderation rules and if you don't apply them to your instance they ban you and stop federating with you.
I think those ideas are not as contradictory as you assert.
small private forums also had some draconian moderation (well, some of them did for sure), but the key point was that they were small, targeted and competitive with each other.
Too draconian, and people leave; too loose and people abuse.
The thing is, you kinda know what you're in for with small forums (or in this case mastadon instances), the servers themselves do more to say what they're targeting and what niche they have; they do not pretend to be an apolitical platform or to not have opinions.
That's the major difference, you can go to other Mastadon instances and find people you enjoy being around. With Twitter there are some hidden "rules" (which used to align with the US west coast ideals, and now seem to align more with the trumpy right-wing thing), with Mastadon it's more likely that you know what the rules are.
Yes, but the main difference is that twitter (and all the centralised social media players) are trying to have their cake and eat it.
> You can't prosecute us for things that are published as we are a platform for communication, we're not responsible for what's communicated!
> We can moderate and ban you for saying things we disagree with based on what we interpret our "rules" to be (in social media's case: whatever the West-Coast likes and Copyright violations)
With Mastodon (or phpbb forums of yore) the former is false, so it's at least internally consistent, and of course you have the choice to move away, it's not 1 moderation style for the whole planet across all cultures.
Completely agree! A world with lots of private property that people can enter and exit freely is one compatible with liberalism. A giant privately owned public square is a terrible idea.
Mastodon used to appeal mostly to the fringes that Twitter never served properly. That means queer people, but it also means Nazis, including the self-described ones. So having good moderation is quite essential to a good experience.
The Karen meme is about white women leaning very hard on their white privilege. And every time you say the words "white privilege" someone somewhere will play a reverse racism card.
Privilege plus power. If we can't agree on a definition, substitute my word for another that more closely fits the meaning. I don't care to bicker about definitions, but I hope we can both know what is meant.
This is one of the uppermost citations on the Wikipedia page for the term.
"Marginal immunity" is also looking at it the wrong way. One should instead consider how a nonwhite person would be treated in the same situation. Let alone any incident involving the police in the US.
Yeah, it's also misogynist, but it's not the bad sort of racially coded misogyist slur, so it's low-status to complain about it or even acknowledge it. Hence the comments pretending not to know what you mean or implying your racial politics are suspect.
> I'd be genuinely happy if this were a transformative moment: where liberals who've spent years demanding online censorship now see its evils since it's directed at them and their friends. But of course it's not that: they're complaining because they think they should be exempt
There's some people who want their righteous tribe to not be banned but ban everyone else they disagree with and can't conceive they might, one day, not have the power to do so (after all, every alternative to the narrative setters is bought or squashed early).
Those of us who really defend free speech. Don't want any of these tribes to be banned but we find it funny how they're suddenly talking about free speecha and pretending the point is "hypocrisy" when the biggest inconsistency is wanting to ban everyone and using the "private company can do whatever they want" argument and then pretending that it's some sort of unthinkable travesty when they're at the end of the ideology they push.
Hopefully this chaotic "battle" all leads to more descentralization and actual freedom of thought instead of some authoritarian group gaining power and trying to destroy, block, deplatform, intimidate, defund anyone who doesn't subscribe.
In most forums nowadays we get a very pro censorship mainstream view that is very sad for those of us who valued the internet for the power of citizens to have an independent voice.
I'm very sad about Glenn going off the deep end a few years ago when he dropped in on Tucker Carlson. I thought he was genuinely interested in speaking truth to power, but he seems more interested in the aesthetics of the same.
Your comment is a vague personal attack by association.
Glenn goes to CNN, Fox News and anyone who will have him. But most media stops inviting you when they don't like what you're saying.
Please detail where his arguments are wrong and be specific instead of this tired ad Hominem.
Glenn has been consistent throughout all of this. Most people who criticize him like you do are the ones who have "changed their views based on political convenience"
Funny how hackernews is suppose to "not downvote" for dislikes and you shouldn't complain about downvotes but it's pretty much like Reddit. Don't go against the narrative. Just "shut up" and "vote blue no matter who".
They're even stricter than Reddit, and that sets a point.