mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

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Every private space is owned by someone. That someone makes and enforces the rules according to their own interests.

You have no right to free speech in private spaces. If the owner of a shopping mall doesn’t like what your t-shirt says, they can have security escort you out.

“Social media” (Silicon Valley and venture capitalists) sold you the lie that shopping malls are parks.

They are not.

If you care about human rights and democracy, build and support parks not shopping malls.

@aral Do you think that Mastodon is more like a public park, or many private places where people can see each other? Bans are more frequent here because owners of small instances are more opinionated. Large commercial platforms have wide principles and teams that are expected to enforce them sparingly — they wouldn’t reach the scale needed to be profitable otherwise. Same for a large mall: you rarely get told off, at least if you look like you are spending money.

@bertil_hatt It’s lots of small(er, for now) private places. Unfortunately, it also has incentives baked in from its Big Tech infrastructure/design that favour vertical scale and the enlargement of those places (see ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fedive).

It’s a great stop-gap and I’m hugely grateful that it exists. But, longer term, I believe we need a network of places of one… or, in other words, a network of people. That’s the idea behind the Small Web (ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-s).

Aral Balkan · Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”)Every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. What does this say about the design of Mastodon and ActivityPub and the future of the fediverse?
Bertil

@aral Ok, so you advocate for something aligned with, but distinct or rather more decentralised than the Fediverse.