Acid test for any social network or fedi instance:

If you say "fuck you" to a Nazi, who gets banned?

@woozle On this instance, both 🙂

@sebastien

That also seems sus. What did the non-Nazi do wrong?

@woozle Using an offending third party as an excuse for verbal violence is not great. It's pretty clear that changing people's opinions (especially if they espouse extremist ideologies) is hard. Changing their opinions through insulting them is definitely not going to achieve anything.
You know what achieves something? Blocking them from the instance so the whole neighbourhood is safer.

@sebastien

That's kinda exactly what I'm talking about: does the admin recognize that the Nazi is the one who primarily needs removal or censure, or do they take a "both sides" / "I don't care who started it" false-equivalence approach, or (worst) do they look strictly at "civility" and decide that the person who used a bad word is clearly the offending party?

@woozle Well, I've found that when you're with your right kind of people, these questions don't really come up. So I have the privilege to never have to wonder about that issue you raised here (and I've run 40,000-people strong online communities)... The other poster in this thread (I'm using Tusky and can't easily find his handle) says he wouldn't care for a "benevolent dictature" like our instance.
That's what's so great about Mastodon. We crossed paths, had conversation, all good.
@sebastien You're kind of reinforcing my original point, in that fedi allows us to move between niches without losing all of the connections that make it valuable -- and observing how disputes are resolved within those spaces is an important part of finding one that works for each of us as individuals.