I don't even want to hear about free speech. You aren't entitled to someone else's attention. Trolling is not a Constitutional right. You want to do that, spin up your own instance.

And certainly, someone could start a free-speech-anarchist instance with all pest controls off. For mastodon.social, though, I think they have a real responsibility to crack down on this shit.

The right to abuse is not about freedom. It silences people. It restricts freedom and expression—it never enhances it.

@csilverman The problem is the lack of transparency. Gargron doesn't make it apparent to new users that he's blocking big chunks of the Fediverse.

@sonya @csilverman oh, m.s is blocking some instances? #til

@abackstrom @sonya Curious, how do you know this? On what grounds is he blocking them?

I couldn't find a Mastodon CoC anywhere. I found this (https://mastodon.social/terms) which, unfortunately, doesn't have anything close to a CoC at all.

I realize that they're still trying to get all their ducks in order and legal docs take time, but having a clear "no abuse" policy seems pretty important, especially given that rampant abuse is the reason why a lot of us are here.

@csilverman @abackstrom here's some background on this:

1) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/816385

2) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/807252

(partisan sources but still good for getting up to speed)

I didn't realize how much of the Fediverse was blocked from .social until I switched to Maly because .social was struggling with bear the traffic. Then I was pissed that this wasn't made clear up-front.

@abackstrom @csilverman IIRC the blocked and/or sandboxed instances are shitposter.club, freezepeach.xyz, gs.smuglo.li, and community.highlandarrow.com

but there may be more that are lower-volume so I'm not aware of them in general, or that I'm forgetting at the moment

@csilverman @abackstrom to be absolutely explicit, I think any instance admin should be able to block whatever other instances they want – but they should also be totally transparent about it with new users, so that people know what they're signing up for

@sonya @abackstrom Oy—sounds like a mess. I'll be honest, shitposter and freezepeach do not sound like sources of high-quality people, but blocking communities out of personal spite is not cool at all.

Obviously admins who want to play God will do whatever they like, and their communities will suffer for it. I think the benefit of a clearly stated CoC, though, would be that you can't just ban people you dislike—there's an expectation that you follow your own rules.

@csilverman it depends on your taste — I would be disappointed to miss out on posts like this :) https://shitposter.club/notice/2301547

@sonya ...hahaha what?

(Or maybe this is essentially performance art for the sake of art, and I shouldn't even be attempting to make sense of something on a site called "Shitposter Club".)