Piers Beckley is a user on mastodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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Some interesting (and wrong imho) pushback on here at the moment, mostly from Gnusocialists saying "It's just flat out WRONG for one instance to ban another instance because of the bad behaviour of a few people on that instance!"
Well, no. Actually that's part of the excitingness of this place. Users will start self-sorting into instances which have the federation policies they want. Me, I don't want federation with instances which have assholes.
Birdsite can't give me that. Mastodon can.
@piersb right. Instance blocking is a feature not a bug.
@bob @piersb There are both destructive and constructive ways in which that tool can be used. The current friction centers around the destructive use of blocklists being used as a form of coercive control, where some instances are trying to dictate to others that they must accept that instance's code of conduct or be blacklisted on a shared blocklist. However, I share Bob's previously-stated position that this really isn't a huge problem in the grand scheme of things. As long as blocking policies and who is blocked is made public, people will gravitate towards instances which have policies ameneable to them. The fediverse isn't going to have a one-size-fits-all solution and nor should it - the federation of small interconnected communities is its strength.
@piersb this is the most exciting part of Mastodon, and one I am going to start bringing up instances to start enabling.
@piersb this is why things like voat fail - the problem for dreadful people is that they want to be dreadful to other people. So for dreadful people a so-called "free speech" policy is worthless in and of itself - they want to force their antics on others.