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A part of me is a bit pleased to see scholar.social slowly dying.They block a huge portion of the fediverse without justification while simultaneously accusing other instances of wrong doing without bothering to back up those claims with evidence or even links to posts, they certainly dont give moderators a chance to address issues, if issues even really existed.
At first a long time ago they silenced us along with half the known Fediverse. I very politely approached the owner and asked if there had been an issue and if there was anything I could to to remedy the situation (I had asked from an alt account). He was furious I dared contact him at all, immediately blocked the account and went on ranting about us being fascists or some nonsense without a single example.
Anyway at the time and over the following months a huge portion of scholar.social users started following us and circumventing the silence and hundreds of accounts started migrating over to #QOTO. Of course this enraged the owner even more and again with no real reason he changed the silence on QOTO to an outright suspension.
To this day we still see new users all the time closing out their accounts at scholar.social entirely and moving here even though they cant migrate accounts the mastodon way, and active user count on scholar.social has plummeted and their local feeds quality has seriously taken a hit. QOTO has a much larger active users count and a much healthier community I can be proud of. No regrets.
#censorship over what your users are permitted to view should be a nonstarter, and is obviously why people are leaving. This is how free markets work. Give people a choice and they will decide in their best interest.
"they believe that any position of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes and they believe truly for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - #ThomasJefferson
@AtlasFreeman Im not sure people are quite so devoted to absolute freedom as you suggest. Some are, and I'd be one of them, but I think most want a balance.
The problem is scholar.social doesnt reach that balance, they go far beyond it and even those on the server who want reasonable censorship are jumping ship at that point.
I don't disagree with your point, but my experience tells me that trying to strike that balance is where the solution becomes worse than the problem
This is why the founders instituted negative rights in the bill of rights. It wasn't because they thought all speech was perfect. These are men who literally dueled with pistols over words they didn't like. It was because they knew a government left to decide would be worse than the problem
@AtlasFreeman Even the founders recognized that the rights of freedom of speech had a limit and needed balance. Int he early days of the constitution they have remarked multiple times and court cases have upheld that freedom of speech only extends so far. They too had to decide what the "balance" was like anyone else trying to implement the rules around censorship.
But I do agree, the problems arise in how that balance is determined.
