No one, and I do mean NO ONE, should ever, ever, EVER agree to a binding arbitration waiver.

These are the most grotesquely unfair contractual terms in routine use today. The potential for abuse is literally unlimited.

Remember when a Disney World visitor died of an allergic reaction after being assured that her food order was allergen-free? Disney argued that her family couldn't sue because her husband had clicked through an arbitration waiver when signing up for a free trial of Disney Plus.

I am very shocked to see this in the ToS for the flagship Mastodon instance, promulgated by the Mastodon nonprofit.

To be clear, I think this is *much* worse than, say, requiring users of mastodon.social to agree to have their posts used to train LLMs. The harms of having your work fed to an AI are mostly hypothetical and relate to moral qualms.

By contrast, a binding arbitration waiver would literally allow the management of mastodon.social to cause your DEATH and face no consequences.

I am trying not to be dramatic here, but this is a deal-breaker for me - literally. I changed dentists because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration. I changed solar installers because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration.

I could never, in good conscience, recommend that someone use a service that required binding arbitration as a condition of use - which means that as of July 1, I would no longer be able to recommend that people get an account on mastodon.social.