Gautam BhatiaI had quite forgotten what it was like to go three days without being trolled, abused, or piled on. It's a nice feeling. Thanks, Mastodon.
Vinay Aravind@gautambhatia There's a whole Mastodon instance populated with Sanghis called inditoot and they were starting to randomly troll the people here and it turns out the admin of mastodon.social just blocked the whole instance. The simple decentralised elegance of Mastodon.
Sai Krishna@vinayaravind @gautambhatia playing the devils advocate here while trying to understand better how mastodon works.How is one person blocking an instance on behalf of all people of one instance decentralized? Was there a vote of some kind?Where can I find out how all this works?
@Saivadla @gautambhatia it's decentralised because if you still want to interact with inditoot you can sign up on any other instance, whereas if you want it to be a fash-free place, you can actually have an admin that will block a whole instance. Like when gab moved to mastodon many many instances blocked the whole instance because it's fash central. Same logic with inditoot. I never claimed the admin did it 'democtatically'. don't think that would ever work in any sort of online forum.
@vinayaravind @gautambhatia so each instance or a cohort of people gets its own admin who determines which other instances are accessible.Better than the birdsite where the platform is the administrator.But what happens when there is disagreement within the instance on whether another instance should be blocked?
@Saivadla @gautambhatia you have a conversation with the admin(s), I guess and reason with them about why it should not be blocked. But end of the day the admin's decision will be final. Which of course is not a death sentence out here because of the decentralised nature, unlike in twitter, where one single bad decision can mean you're locked out of the platform entirely, for good. Here, if the admin does something high-handed you have the choice of other instances or even setting up your own.
@vinayaravind @gautambhatia aah get it now.