@digiphile @mathewi I have always liked the ACLU definition of Censorship:

`Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others.' See: https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

Blocking servers seems to me to be a clear example of censorship. Rather than normalizing censorship, the goal should be to develop tools and techniques that empower users to curate their own feeds.

@larsjohannes @digiphile @mathewi Changing servers to avoid censorship has very high switching costs -- if only because one's identity is tied to the server. Also, censorship by server operators is likely to cover many issues. I may agree with some content filtering, but not with other filtering.

Users, not intermediaries, should control content curation. We must develop methods to make crude censorship at the server level unnecessary and undesirable.

@bobwyman @digiphile @mathewi But that's available if you go to an instance that doesn't filter.

In any case, a better solution to the issue would be to make accounts more portable. Why would you want to forbid people joining ringfenced communities or filtering, e.g., Nazi or sexual content oriented instances? Seems to defeat the entire purpose of the architecture.

@larsjohannes @digiphile @mathewi Informed, effective consent converts censorship into curation. The issue isn't your one's right join communities, but rather the mechanisms used for content filtering.

Server-level blocking is too crude. If nothing else, it makes it hard to know what has been blocked or why. It also means that both over and under-filtering will occur.

The architecture should enable users to curate their feeds as they wish without a necessary subordination to others' values.