Yes, but the point being made is that you then choose a more welcoming instance and then it's defederated instead because it allowed your post, so then your Mastodon experience sucks anyway and you only gave yourself an illusion of freedom.
I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming people regardless alignment to Swedish government party (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor moderation resources of that kind and shut down the instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by its own even if supported.
From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess some drama has went down again while I was away. There's been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already.
People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20 major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.
And then I get defederated for having done so. Did you even read my post? It's an illusion freedom that does not exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking about.
My issue with this is that this kind of instance hopping can easily kill a network. Many who were on my instance that shut down didn't migrate away in time and now they lost all their posts, follows, and followers. Many of those won't bother to come back from that terrible experience. I still see those people in some users' friend lists over there (months later) and if I click on them, Mastodon just breaks with a cryptic error message.
So. With Mastodon instance admins and this kind of drama, making internal strife about politics, gender equality, whatever, between a few persons affect thousands of users and greatly inconvenience them, and running a personal Mastodon instance taking great technical know-how and basically being a bit of a geek, I still consider these major issues with Mastodon as it stands today.
So, yes, I want to "enforce" people to hear me. If they choose to follow me. Because this means all the above problems are solved. The only problem federation solves today seems to be the scaling problem. Everything else is about friction and this kind of trouble and persistent worry. "Which instance do I pick" where it feels like you want to have an interview over a beer with the admin first. This has thus far been the major demotivator from what I've seen as a Mastodon user. I think I'd like it more like a P2P-based social network.
Freedom doesn't mean everyone gets whatever they want.
Your freedom just doesn't override the freedom of others to avoid you. You can't force others to interact with you and there's nothing wrong with that.
> You can't force others to interact with you and there's nothing wrong with that.
On Mastodon, no one is forced to listen to anyone without a follow. You don't have to worry about that. This is not what I'm talking about, but the infrastructure problem.
I've repeated myself a lot already so I refer you to one of my replies to your sibling comments if you still want to discuss this.
You can, generally, say whatever you want via Activitypub. However, no individual Mastodon instance is obliged to facilitate this, nor is any particular Mastodon user obliged to listen to you.
Personally, I prefer not to listen to certain peoples’ Important Opinions about how people like me shouldn’t have rights (life is too bloody short), so I use a Mastodon instance which doesn’t tolerate that. People with such opinions are of course entitled to use a Mastodon instance which does (and there are plenty of them). I’m struggling to see an issue here. Person A is free to say whatever old nonsense they like, Person B is free not to listen to it.
I am, by the way, genuinely curious; I just don’t get the issue here. If a person with Important Opinions can’t hassle the rest of us with said opinions because we choose to opt out of them, well, so what?
> Personally, I prefer not to listen to certain peoples’ Important Opinions
Of course you can avoid hearing this!
You do so by not following said person. Mastodon works just like Twitter or Facebook in this regard.
This is not the problem that I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about the infrastructure problem. It's about instances shutting down, people not having had time to migrate, and thousands of users losing everything (their entire account and content) because some admin decided he didn't like furries enough or let any political party member join his instance, admin is defederated, admin says fuck this.
Sure, I can make my own instance to guarantee my place on the network if I buy a server and run it on that but how many do you guys expect are enough Mastodon enhtusiasts (of all things, haha) to even bother with learning and doing so. It's a stillborn workaround if this problem keeps resurfacing.
> if i don't like what someone is saying i have the freedom to disassociate from them
Yeah, on Mastodon we usually do so by not following that person?
This is not what I'm talking about but the infrastructure issue of internal strife between admins affecting tens of thousands of users for the most ridiculous of reasons, and this has not just been a hypothetical scenario, unfortunately.
And no, setting up your personal instance isn't a realistic solution for most people who just want to chat.
Note that this still (of course) requires following said person on said instance. So people won't be spammed by views they disagree with. Mastodon is no different than, say, Facebook there. You still need to explicitly follow people. Mastodon doesn't even have an "algorithm".
But I can't see any positives from being able to defederate like this. What is the main benefit to remove the freedom of your users to follow people?
I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming people regardless alignment to Swedish government party (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor moderation resources of that kind and shut down the instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by its own even if supported.
From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess some drama has went down again while I was away. There's been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already.
People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20 major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.