> distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview"
People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.
Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?
I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.
Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.
1. Spam is filtered, not censored. I can still see spam in my "Spam" folder if I want to. Mastodon doesn't merely filter "bad" content; it prevents you from seeing it even if you want to. It would be the equivalent of email actively deleting spam, and "spam" includes an email that suggests vaccines have side effects.
2. It's easy to see that it's not for the benefit of users. They could easily mark things as toxic (perhaps by category, or by who marked it as toxic), and let users filter out what they want. It's not about helping users. It's about controlling users.
3. "Spam" does not include contrary political viewpoints. There's a difference between a viagra ad. I don't want my uncle sending me political rants, but I certainly don't want google deciding I can't read them.
Spam is censored, the vast majority can't even be sent because of SPF etc
You can pick a different server if you don't like the censorship on the one you're on, that's the whole point
To the spammers it's all great content you should be getting. No one's deleting your messages on your own Mastodon server, they're just not copying it to their server, what's the problem?
People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.
Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?
I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.
Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.