That's not really answering my questions. I understand that different Mastodon instances have different moderation. I don't understand how that ties into the usage of the service as a Twitter clone.
Who decides how content is relayed? Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one?
Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.
That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.
Nothing stops you from running your own instance for people who want to share the same ideas or want less stringent moderation. Freedom goes both ways: It includes others right to not want to deal with you. Just like Gab and Truth Social who both runs Mastodon have either wholly or mostly defederated.
And as it happens the reason most Mastodon instances are moderated the way they are is that their users demand it.
Isn’t Mastodon moderation similar to subreddits? I.e. the owner of the server is the one who decides what’s allowed and what not? I find it very problematic
The key here is mastodon isn't a business, so moderation isn't entirely focused on being cheap. Mastodon, correctly in my opinion, identifies social networks as community resources not as entities to extraft profit from.
Just wait until people start realizing the privacy problems that Mastodon have unless you make your own instance.
You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers.
Created your account in a random instance? oh well maybe all your messages end in doxbin because the 14 year old who made the instance have access to all your messages.
Does Mastodon have less moderation than any other social media platform? Not looked into it deeply, so please let me know. From what I understand the instance/server owners are in charge of moderations, and a users network is a network of users from various servers.
Will Mastodon allow parody and scam accounts? Or is it on a server by server basis? Does each server have different published TOS? There used to be Christian counterstrike games servers, would there be the equivalent mastodon servers?
I guess its still in early adopters with wide eyes on best behaviour at the moment. Has it been built with the lessons learnt about moderation that Twitter has shown when celebrities like Opra bring in regular people into the system?
Mastodon doesn't necessarily have less moderation, it just has a different set of knobs to tweak to accomplish the act of moderation.
The decentralized/federated architecture makes it simple for admins of instances to ban whichever other instances they see fit. In practice, this means that it's effectively easier to ban unsavory users of certain undesirable types, since they tend to congregate on the same instances.
On top of that, there are traditional ban controls at both the user and admin level.
I've been a Mastodon user since 2017 and I've found it pretty good with respect to moderation and unwanted content. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the instances I've chosen, though.
I'm active with Mastodon and absolutely love its moderation model. In a nutshell:
- It's made up of a bunch of independent servers, or "instances". The common analogy here is to email systems.
- If you want to join the federation, stand up an instance and start using it. Voila! Now you're part of it.
- My instance has a lot of users, and I don't want to run them off, so it's in my own interest to moderate my own instance in a way that my community likes. Allow too much in without doing anything? They leave. Tighten it so that it starts losing its value? They leave. There's a feedback mechanism that guides me to the middle road.
- But my users can leave for greener pastures if they think I'm doing a bad job and think another instance is better. They're not stuck with me.
The end result is that there are thousands of instances with widely varied moderation policies. There are some "safe spaces" where people who've been sexually assaulted hang out and that have zero tolerance for harassment or trolling. There are others that are very laissez faire. There's a marketplace of styles to choose from, and no one server has to try to be a perfect fit for everyone.
I realize that this is not helpful information for someone who wants to run a single large service. I bring it up just to point out that there's more than one way to skin that cat.
(That final idiom would probably get me banned on some servers. And that's great! More power to that community for being willing and able to set policies, even if I wouldn't agree with them.)
You do have control here. You do select your moderator, and you do have the power to change that.
You select which server your account lives on. If you disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this is probably not the right server for you. You can simply select another server.
You also have the option to run your own server. It's not hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know several people running their own servers, and a few of them just have one account.
Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild ride with content moderation over the years, and this has led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost their accounts and their followers forever with no recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep all your followers.
The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full control if you really want to. However, most of us don't want to deal with running a server, so you just have to trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place to be
There's a big blue button on their homepage leading you to the general instance. You pick that. Instances don't matter for most people. If you aren't most people, you'll understand what that means by using the platform.
As for moderation, Mastodon does have plenty of moderation and federation allows for responsibility to be divided among server/instances owners. If anything, it scales better than a centralised alternative.
Can somebody please explain moderation on Mastodon to me. Suppose I were to start a Mastodon server in my (EU) basement, what do I have to do to stop it from filling with unsavory material? Why did (former) Twitter have 'hundreds' of people in moderation, while Mastodon manages with zero? I don't get it.
I'm curious where you get the idea that there are zero people involved with moderating Mastodon? Moderation is probably the main workload of people involved with running instances.
I'm not entirely sure if mastodon.social has published any policy clarifying how and under what circumstances they apply instance bans. There are two ways administrators can block other instances on Mastodon:
Silence: Posts from users of these instances are only visible to users following that user directly, but not in public timelines.
Suspend: All posts from users of these instances are always removed, even if you follow them directly.
I would suspect that most admins stick with the first option for almost all bans. That said, users who are concerned about this should stick to instances with a broad interpretation of free speech.
The instance is the property of its owner, and owners have the right to control their own property as they see fit. Many Mastodon clients allow users to manage multiple accounts, which can be on different instances with different server rules.
you are free not change your mind about social media but please stop throwing around inaccuracies
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