I, as a user, am still going to demand that I can join a community where of likeminded people and moderation so I don't have to deal with the overwhelming spam of the internet myself. That's the bit that a number of decentralisation projects don't get - I don't want to have messages by anyone on the whole internet forced into my view (because have you seen how much that sucks?). I want moderation if the day-to-day use of the tool involves coming across a largely random group of people - otherwise it's just a platform for harassment and spamming people with child porn, a la Matrix - and I don't want to perform that moderation 100% by myself.
"where it is up to the user whom they block" does not imply that you have to manually select who to block, rather it could as well mean that you are free to select block-lists (with the ability to fork them if you so wish) of your own choice rather than have the admin of your network force them on you.
This changes nothing, one blocklist will get a lot of users, end up as a "recommended" setting, then all those hurt that their bigoted views aren't more popular will moaning about "free speech" again.
I'm happy let those who want to run a community that has similar values to mine block obnoxious content for me. Far better that than Facebook or Google being the sole arbiters.
I can pick and choose who my community and moderation team is - that's why I am on the fediverse and not Twitter. I am strongly opposed to having extreme right-wing views (along the lines of "you should be dead for who you are") forced into my conversations? I can pick an instance/moderation team which proactively blocks other instances which refuse to moderate their users according to such basic social norms.
Fact of the matter is that I don't really want to talk to most people on the internet, and I don't want to see what they have to say about me every time I want to see what my friends are up to. I want to talk to my friends, maybe have our wider communities able to chime in, and occasionally discover new people through that. It's not my job to convince random assholes on the internet that I deserve to exist, and it's not useful in any way to see their messages. Blocking extremist free speech instances which promote harassment as a normal part of their operation is... a feature, not a bug.
That is a fair point, but what happens when the moderation team deviates from your beliefs? What happens if your instance is declared not-safe? You're effectively exiled from the fediverse, people you follow will never see your toots again.
Then I move instance (probably well before my instance is declared not safe, tbh). It's a feature in Mastodon, assuming my moderation team hasn't decided to disable it - basically, I send a protocol message to my followers saying "I'm over here" and they automatically follow me over there. In a future p2p protocol that's designed by people who actually realise that people exist who don't want everyone on the internet to have a direct line to their inbox (aka none of the current ones), I could simply move moderation team and keep my identity.
It's incredibly unlikely that tomorrow, my instance pushes the needle so far that everyone blocks it immediately. More likely a series of changes in the moderation team gradually pushes things that way and I can change instance before things get bad enough that anyone would block it - and I'd do that because it wouldn't be a community I want to be part of any more, rather than any particular fear about being blocked.
I had no idea account migration landed. Your description actually sounds quite reasonable. I guess I was too shocked and burnt by the instance blocking incident. Maybe I should give Mastodon another try.
Just need to find an instance that doesn't block...
Finding an instance that doesn't block other instances, but also actually moderates its users and thus doesn't get blocked, is going to be pretty hard - and also a rather harassment-filled experience unless you fit in with the Gab crowd, I imagine. You could always run your own instance.
Note that the majority of instances that are "blocked" are actually soft-blocked by most instances, meaning you can still talk to people on them if you follow them, you're just not going to find posts from their users otherwise.
The point is flexibility and no lock-in. If you buy into the Twitter platform and eventually you're not happy with the way it goes, moving away has a huge cost. If a federated architecture peers can come and go relatively easily.
See email for instance: if you're unhappy with your current provider you can move to a different one or even roll out a new server and you can still interact with the other users.
Simply interacting, yes, but email and messaging cannot replace Twitter. What makes Mastodon viable is the identity, multicast and backlog of toots(tweets?), which does not transfer as easily between instances.
