@mngrif I was kind of surprised by this, but visited and can confirm -- their About-More page has their blocking list and it's pretty extensive.
They list Qoto, and the justification seems to be the same as mastodon.technology -- for federating with instances they disapprove of.
Looks like it might not be due to this latest complaints thread about the subscribing to public posts discussed in other thread yesterday.
🇳🇱
I actually have very good relations with the admin over at mastodon.art. She gave me the courtesy of contacting and telling me about the block half a day before they made the announcement.
They were very clear the account subscription had **nothing** to do with their decision. They were simply making an exception for us for a long time due to our good relations but eventually caved to pressure.
It is 100% because of our federation policy though.
@freemo @design_RG @mngrif Pressure from their users? Huh.
They werent clear about that point, I'm not sure what the source of the pressure was actually. May have been other mods for all I know.
@Kovaelin
I think for many non-technical people, having a server that has these blocks might feel like a security blanket maybe. They might not know who the people or the instances banned are, but if their instance staff decides they do not deserve to share communications, users might accept that without discussion.
Perhaps but I think its more primal than that.. Its just a collective white-knighting syndrom. They feel if they are part of a community that bans others readily that means the community is "doing something" to enact change.. they feel like they are contributing to a good cause and dont bother to dig too deep to see if its justified or not because if they do they might realize THEY are the bad actors and the ones causing harm, that would destroy their entire world view.
@freemo It's a bit disheartening, because I initially thought that decentralization would get us away from the bird site problems, but it seems that some people just want their own bird site instead. @design_RG @mngrif
Well its still an improvement. On the birdsite you might be banned from an entire network. Here you just wind up no longer seeing the people who start drama and are rude at every turn, they isolate themselves and ban everyone who isnt rude like them.
In a way it is perfect, no need to ban anyone again. Anyone you'd want to ban will do it for you.
@freemo True, but on the bird site, you don't start off banned. Defederation impacts more than the individual. Neither case is perfect, and admins making decisions on behalf of all their users is just the same parenting problem as before. The whole point of having the local timeline is so people that want to shelter themselves from the global one can do so, and still follow individuals from other instances themselves. Defederation and handing that control over just defeats the purpose. @design_RG @mngrif
The irony of this whole fiasco is if we had forked from any software other than mastodon it would have been a non issue. Protected accounts are uniquely mastodon and not parto f the ActivityPub standard. That means on other servers (like misskey) the feature I added is the default. So no one would have batted an eye.
Yes, and technically, analyzing it down to the fundamentals -- all this is doing is showing posts made to the whole network with a privacy set to "Public'.
As in, not the slightest restriction on who can see it or when. Public means Public, but people think that they are safer and more private by controlling who can "follow"their Public posts?
On the other hand, most people would like to have a wider circle to reach with their posts, so they use the Public mode, instead of Followers-Only for example. Which would be respected and not show here or anywhere else, unless the interested reader was a "follower" of the poster.
Yea exactly.. to me it isnt a violation of THEIR privacy, but rather not having a subscription is a violation of OUR privacy. A person has a right to privacy regarding who's post they want to read. If i want to read some racist hate-mongerers posts, perhaps to be aware of any potential danger, i should not be forced to have to notify them that I am reading their posts (essentially what forcing people to follow does).
@admin Personally I find it to our advantage when people throw a tantrum over non-issues... its free advertising combined with bad actors preemptively blocking us. It is win-win.
We had a nice spike in new users yesterday among all the drama :)
@design_RG @mngrif recently I've read someone bluntly stating qoto is associated with gab. Guess that's your main stigmata.
Recently thought about migrating to a more generally focused tech instance instead of a linux one, but exactly these kind of biased bans convinced me to stay.
@design_RG @mngrif The list seems extensive and arbitrary. Users will eventually notice the disadvantages of being there and leave.
I'm actually kind of comforted by this, and there's no reason to leave QOTO for another instance, since they'll probably eventually make the list anyway.
It's just people crotchety about not being able to admin instances that don't belong to them. It's indeed petty, as people have said.