Blocking mastodon.social sure is a choice. Yikes.
@aredridel oh shit what have you seen??
@notspookypip Just seeing instances not federating with it — which means most people can't see you — and very little accountability process around moderation decisions, especially big and vastly affecting ones like that.
@notspookypip Like, blocking nazi instances? Duh, yes, do that. But that doesn't mean defederating an instance is something to do lightly. The relationship matters, and, well, like it or not, most people are going to expect a relationship with mastodon.social unless the instance is very carefully closed off.
I'm somewhat sad that a significant part of the reason for this being considered bad (unless I'm misreading) is that it's popular enough that most people would expect to have a relationship with it. Using such reasons invites centralization by means of incentivizing the use of large entities, because they are "too large to fail^Hbe blocked".
@robryk @notspookypip I find the idea of blocking 1:1 relationships at the group level somewhat abhorrent, without that group being involved. Like none of the relationships impacted were implicated in the problem.
@aredridel
Ah, I see: it's not about the number of users so much as the "typical user" finding this negatively surprising and not bearing any fault. I agree completely and am very sad that instance-level blocks (aka suspensions) are so widely used instead of silences (which do not prevent communication by individuals who explicitly wish to communicate).
@robryk @notspookypip Indeed. And it needs to be stated publicly!
But more clear handling of federated feed moderation would be great; make it obvious that there _is_ curation. (and this ties into my wishing that local-only posting was in Mastodon mainline—that's curating the local timeline)
Aside: do you know what's the reason people use defederation so very often instead of silences? I haven't really asked directly, mostly because the cases I noticed and I was most puzzled by were the ones where my instance was blocked in that way and I didn't want to appear argumentative.
> But more clear handling of federated feed moderation would be great
Do you mean "admins providing more clarity on what they're doing" or something else?
> that's curating the local timeline
You mean curating by causing more content that wouldn't be there otherwise to appear (because people wouldn't want to post it nonlocally)? Otherwise I don't see what curation you refer to.
@robryk @notspookypip Yeah, admins providing more clarity (and just in general I wish there were UI affordances for it. Show what's blocked, from where, in a sensibly integrated manner)
Mastodon still has an 'admin control' model of moderation (because those are easy to make).
One thing that I'm missing in terms of transparency is knowing whether an instance of a user I'm responding to is blocking my instance (I can still see their posts if they are boosted by someone not blocked by their instance, but then I respond into the void).
