I’m in the US and was specifically drawn toward European instance because my (admittedly very lightly informed) understanding is Europe just has better laws on internet freedoms. IIRC a US-based Mastodon instance (Mastodon maybe?) was seized by cops at one point for pretty questionable reasons. Our legal system gives far too much power to police and corporations to enact spurious searches and punishment.

I don’t trust it because there’s no believable plan to make it commercially viable, so it’s just going to end up defunct or enshittified. Mastodon is up front, it’s a volunteer service that you can either pay for or roll the dice on the instance staying up. And there’s a built-in way to move on when one goes down.

BlueSky is a B-corp, which theoretically means they can say their mission takes priority if sued by an investor in court, but doesn’t in any way require them to make it the primary goal, and the reality of funding and money and investors means that’s almost certainly not going to happen.

I think there’s gray areas where someone comes in hot to play devil’s advocate and if they have a history that looks like a normal contrarian person elsewhere they might just get a removal and/or a warning, but if they’re a 2 day old account with 5 one word comments, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Granted, you shouldn’t expect mods to try to figure out your personal history and state of mind to know you weren’t trying to troll in your very first post in their community, but it’s at least something to try to sort out those gray area comments. Or something to review if the user appeals their ban.

And yeah, taking your bans with you in migration would be the cost of maintaining that history. It’s a commitment to owning your own posts and history.

From experience moderating on Reddit, user histories were pretty useful in judging whether they just made a mistake or were ban evading or trolling. If a fresh account drops in with a trollish comment as their first interaction with the community, they might just catch a ban rather than being treated as a good faith poster who came in too hot and deserves a second chance.

So if you migrate accounts in Lemmy, you’ll have to pay that price over again and risk more strict moderation because you have no history, whereas a Mastodon-like link to their previous account would establish a baseline.

The context is they’re positively stating the “men in women’s sports” part of that exchange.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/10767763

deleted by creator

It’s interesting how the most open instances aren’t the biggest ones with no user restrictions, but the smaller instances that no one has issues with. I moved away from LW because of performance issues, but I’m happy to be able to see both LW posts and BH posts. Sopuli has defederated from some instances, but I’m happy with their choices so it’s as unrestricted as I want it to be. Others would choose an even less restrictive/restricted small instance, or like yourself just run your own to have complete freedom.

This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

“So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.

Nah, give those National Parks posters a Mastodon account. Way more desirable than POTUS. Also put all those other random gov Twitter accounts on it so they can link somewhere that anyone can read.

I mean, it’s not like he’s reading the Threads users’ comments either.

Just a totally straight blog about ice cream and cool cars, with no mention of politics.

Even better, that should be their primary social network site. It’s inherently restricted to valid government accounts and under their control so all the right data protection and preservation procedures can be followed. Then Threads users can follow potus@socia.whitehouse.gov or whatever.

This isn’t an existential problem. Just block threads.net.

If an instance defederates from another instance there’s nothing stopping a user who liked that instance that was defederated with from moving to, making an account on or just using (in the broadest sense) another instance which hasn’t defederated with the instance they like or that instance itself.

This functional consequence of defederation is telling their users they shouldn’t be allowed to interact with an instance. That they can just leave if they don’t like it doesn’t make the choice not coercive. Moving servers is certainly a viable option, but it’s a pain and doesn’t transfer content, so that’s still locked under the former server’s federation choice.

That’s one reason I moved to the fediverse: so I could get rid of all of the content I didn’t want to see before I saw it. More typical social media like Meta, Twitter and Reddit all have a long history of failing to moderate against anti-trans hate, as with other types of hate, so I moved to the fediverse.

On Mastodon, which is the place Threads is trying to federate with and which Katy was comparing it to, you can block instances. You no longer need your instance to make those decisions for you. Your desire to have Threads blocked at the instance level is at odds with Katy’s desire to follow trans people on it. You can do a simple thing to implement your desires without forcing anything on the other person.

What do you think the effect of “defederation” is?

Yeah, I’ve never even heard of them before now and would have no particular reason to trust that what they mean by “good” servers aligns with what I’d consider “good” servers. This isn’t like joinmastodon.org trying to strongarm instances to adopt their personal federation policy.

Well then I guess the pro-trans thing to do is tell Katy she shouldn’t be allowed to follow all those trans people.

If it helps bring perspective. I’ve never even heard of Fedi Garden before this post. I did a lot of puzzling over choosing instances for Lemmy and Mastodon when I first joined and never saw a link to them. I’m not sure why they’d even be seen as a trusted list for a new users, since at joining the user also doesn’t know anything about them or their values, reliability, or reputation.

Plus, once you’re in the Fediverse you then learn you can just change instances. Once someone points out that [other instance] can talk to Threads users the individual can just switch or stay depending on their preferences.

The best place to go is Z, which federates with both.

Who is this Mastodon CEO you think is controlling Mastodon’s culture? Rochko? He doesn’t have any influence on what posts anyone sees on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn’t have a central server or moderation team, and their algorithms are too dumb to instill a culture or even present a single unified culture. I see posts from people I follow, and people they boost, that’s it. It’s like a step removed from RSS feeds.