wgoodf-Dec 19, 2022

So... a person is booted from mastodon.social.

The admin of, in this case scholar.social disagrees with that decision and blocks mastodon.social - the whole instance.

So.. and this is the bit i am struggling to understand- does that mean all mastodon.social accounts can no longer be seen by scholar.social accounts.. is that right?

To block the instance means that every account vanishes to every member from the blocking instance?

A collective punishment?

Show threadneil howard :verified_paw:Dec 19, 2022
@MM0INH I am pretty sure that it does NOT block you from searching for & following people on that Instance, but rather take all post from that instance out of teh "federated" timeline, so they are not "talking" to everyone on the instance that does not like them... ( I may be wrong though, but I am pretty sure if you already follow someone there you are no affected :)
Show threadneil howard :verified_paw:Dec 19, 2022

@MM0INH I was wrong -- from https://mastodon.help/

Blocking and silencing

If the admins of Instance1 block Instance2, then the users of Instance1 cannot interact with the users of Instance2.
.

To be more clear: blocking is used for Instances that permit horrible things and behaviours, while silencing is used for Instances that your Instance tolerate but doesn’t appreciate that much.

What I described is "silencing" the other Instance
.

Mastodon Help - Guide

A thorough introduction to Mastodon

Show threadwgoodf-Dec 19, 2022
@neilhoward point stands, it's an extreme are arbitrary power.
This is not better than twitter.
Show threadneil howard :verified_paw:
@MM0INH you can move instances if you don't like what your admins do, as remember it is ONLY between instances & not on the whole network ( like Twitter!)
Dec 19, 2022 at 6:40pmWeb
Show threadwgoodf-Dec 19, 2022
@neilhoward yay fiefdom and principalities... seriously, its shite, the federated system appears to be built on shite.
To say this is disappointing is a massive understatement.