It’s the same kind of extortion racket that these powermods (they do it for free, lol) like to engage in in Reddit and Lemmy too: Play ball, or get banned/defederates for engaging with no-no communities.

And the worst part about it is they genuinely think they do it for a greater good instead of their petty power fantasies and power struggles (“we own this corner of the internet.”)

It works in both directions. I’ve been shadowbanned from mastodon.social because one user misinterpreted my comment about something political (related to Germany), reported me and apparently their (German) mod was either lazy or followed the same misinterpretation and shadowbanned me - for life.

And there’s no way to object this as their support only answers to members. Which I am not.

I feel like having to do moderation on the instance level is just not a good idea, because it just leads to scenarios like this. Unless an instance was just set up to send spam, in which case blocking it site-wide is obviously the best thing to do, you’re always going to cut off actual people who post from there.

At least on Lemmy, moderation can also be done on the community level, which actually have a topic they can enforce.

Yeah, I find that the point is rarely well made and it’s often because the whole argument is a bit confused. People want to present it as being easier than it is.

Open registrations on the fediverse is a problem in general. Trolls abuse it to make accounts specifically to harass specific users. Those not being harassed will not notice this - before the “fetch all replies” feature was introduced they wouldn’t even see the replies. And because it seems so much better than other platforms unless you’re actively being targeted, you’ll have minority women or whatever raising the problem and a bunch of white men will respond that they have no idea what they’re talking about and that there is no problem and that they should just block the trolls. Blocking the trolls is just not efficient if they keep popping up all over the place.

One way to avoid this as a server admin is to defederate instances with open registrations that are being used in this way. But Mastodon.social is too big for this strategy to really be viable.

Of course, open registrations is also key to people bothering signing up in the first place. People are not used to resistance, and they don’t want to write a letter of motivation to sign up for social media. So the issue is not easily solved. Mastodon is working on better moderation tools. Hopefully they’ll manage to address it that way.

I also do not like this kind of sentiment. Sure in a perfect world it would be slightly better if we all are distributed equally on different servers. But the biggest advantage of the Fediverse still stands, even if we all are on a central instance. If mastodon.social ever looses its shit for whatever reason, its still possible to move without loosing connections.

I think ridiculing new folks about “rules” like this make the Fediverse less inviting and counter productive. And to be honest the experience on .social is far better than on smaller instances IF you are coming from twitter and are looking for something similar. When I see new people on .social im happy that they even joined Fedi.