It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section).
Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you.
I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
> scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section
Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”.
Everyone wants to return to the old internet. The old internet was run by self appointed gods who created little fiefdoms. Some form of censorship could happen similiar to reddit groups.
To come back to my NNTP example: Back in the day, servers were not banned by admins, individual users were killfiled (essentially a filter) by other individual users, meaning that if you really disliked someone, you would get rid of their output - without denying anyone else access to their musings, related to the topic at hand or anywhere else.
It was a more civilized time.
Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
There are plenty of instances who makes it a selling point that they don't block anything. If the have free speech in their name, you can assume that's the case.
The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
A few do. Mostly, though, those servers are blocked because of continued harassment from their users. https://xkcd.com/1357/ comes to mind.
Some of the "free speech", "low-moderation" instances have self-policing communities. Others are full of neo-nazis. Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol. They are not all the same.
That was the comic that made me lose respect for Mr. Munroe, because he is too intelligent to miss the point so badly: Free Speech is an age-of-enlightenment concept, not a legal construct from the US constitution. Worse, while it is true that no-one HAS to listen, actively preventing OTHERS from listening is obviously ethically wrong.
If you feel harassed by an user, filter that user. If you feel harassed by every single account on an instance, filter that instance for yourself (this option currently does not seem to exist in Mastodon). But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
This is creating filter bubbles, your users will at first love the friendlyness and fluff, but it also is exactly what led to the right-wing successes we've seen all over the world in the last few years. Filter bubbles destroy democratic societies.
> Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol.
You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control? Now you got an instance in which there are no more discussions, only self-assuring and groupthink, and which will slowly become more radicalised. If filtering was strictly an user's issue, other users may have seen the objection to hate and vitriol (which often starts underhanded), and have had another view.
By the way, that is true no matter which political fringe a server admin belongs to: I know a Mastodon instance on which some users become increasingly radicalised against car owners right now, to the point where mass executions are being normalised by joking about them. Guess what happens when you try to become a voice for reason... But are ALL of them just evil, unredeemable beings that need to be banned from talking? Should my Mastodon admin block that instance for spreading hate and vitriol, even though the majority still talks about other things? Obviously, that's a silly idea.
> But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
Here's another way to look at it: Our instance has moderation policies. You chose that instance in part because of those moderation policies, just as I did. Those moderation policies are there so we can interact with each other with the peace of mind that we're not going to have, say, child sexual abuse imagery DM'd to us.
Then an instance comes along with a few hundred follow bots that do that. So, after a few reports, our instance admin defederates from the instance.
If you don't like this, you're perfectly welcome to go to another instance, with different federation policies. Thanks to federation, you can do this and still stay in contact with me! It's a win-win!
> You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control?
No, not really. Those people are probably always going to exist. Honestly, much as I hate Nazis, if they're over there doing their thing, and not trying to harass or murder me and my friends, I'm happy just to let them do that. It's just a website; it's not like their kids won't have external influences and be able to figure out that, hey, Nazism is actually bad.
Turn on showdead on HN if you want to see the shadowbanning hell that most social media networks I know of can send their users to. In general, users have no idea that they're even banned. There's a few people on HN who have been posting nonsense here for years while shadowbanned.
Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
I believe (dang feel free to correct me) some of what you are seeing are bots. They might be OK with only those with showdead seeing the links or to your point might not have bothered to check what sites have blocked them unless they get a status 403.
For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art.
Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away.
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