> Disclosure : my account was censored, I did not respect one of the "laws" specific to the instance.
In the early 2000s, hackers were staunch defenders of free speech. The internet was a safe space from an often conservative and religiously Puritanical "meat space".
Now that the pendulum has swung, a majority seemingly wants to shut down the things and the people that they disagree with. Moreover, the accepted social behavior encourages this kind of hate and range and spite. It's even been gamified.
In many ways, the future turned out a lot worse than I'd hoped for. This is certainly one of the things I loathe.
I run a Mastodon server and I'm quick to moderate things that I'd probably want a monolithic service like Twitter or Facebook to allow. We're a smallish community of like-minded people, and the people on my server repeatedly tell me they like my moderation policies. If they didn't, I'd change them to match the community's mores.
But here's the deal: while I can and do moderate what passes through my server, there's absolutely nothing I can do about how you run yours. I'm not telling anyone they can't say certain things. I'm telling them they need to say it somewhere else.
By analogy, it's probably closer to a message board. If I were running a board for physicists, I feel absolutely zero obligation to allow crackpots to post anti-science nonsense and yell at the scientists there. They can go make their own message board, or Mastodon instance, if they want to say those things.
There is always going to be some percentage of interest overlap between users that gets destroyed by federated moderation. It's too coarse grained and ruins the decentralized possibilities of the internet.
That isn't to say that users shouldn't be able to filter out whatever they dislike. Rather, it would be best if that was a user's choice [1].
I participate in LGBT spaces, but I'm not going to block people for playing Harry Potter. I don't appreciate people stepping in my way to censor things they think I shouldn't see or hear.
To make an analogy with Reddit, if I make a comment in r/conservative (without necessarily even subscribing to their ideology), I get banned from dozens of other subreddits via automated moderation tools. That's a lot like how Mastodon thinks the world should work. But that's not how people are or should be.
Mastodon (and subreddit mods) think everyone should wear a membership pin or be emblazoned with a Scarlet Letter. That's incredibly harmful to people and is leading to increasing polarization in society.
[1] I'm sure that could even be done at scale by subscribing to community block lists. It shouldn't be a hassle, it just shouldn't be centrally planned and executed with no recourse from the end users.
Here is another perspective: In the 2000s, many of us were children and teens. Now we’re not, and definitely don’t want our own kids to be exposed to the same Internet as we were back then…
People romanticize that time way more than it deserves.
I’m not a fan of censorship, but there’s a case to be made for reasonable adults deciding the ground rules. Case in point: Twitter.
In the early 2000s, hackers were staunch defenders of free speech. The internet was a safe space from an often conservative and religiously Puritanical "meat space".
Now that the pendulum has swung, a majority seemingly wants to shut down the things and the people that they disagree with. Moreover, the accepted social behavior encourages this kind of hate and range and spite. It's even been gamified.
In many ways, the future turned out a lot worse than I'd hoped for. This is certainly one of the things I loathe.