The Fosstodon Drama tells us a bigger problem about Mastodon

Off Topic
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If your instance of choice has “hard blacklisted”/defederated another instance, you can’t see or interact with said instance at all. And if you choose to join a instance that refuses to defederate from any other instance, chances are that said instance is heavily defederated from other popular instances unless it’s very small or you selfhost it yourself. I don’t really bother with mastodon precisely for these reasons, it’s very hard to have actual control, and it’s very easy to get arbitrarily locked out of the ecosystem.

Doesn’t matter if you want to call this censorship or not, fact is that there isn’t really a lot of freedom with mastodon, pleroma etc, due to how the fediverse has been structured. It’s better than traditional centralized social media but that’s not a very high bar.

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Without source material it’s he-said she-said from the point of view of anyone reading this. Having articles break down what happened without linking to what was actually said comes off as tabloidy, regardless of right or wrong.

As it pertains to this discussion, the maintenance of federation from a users perspective boils down to deciding what flavor of admin they need to trust and deal with, and “turf wars” on idealogy of admins between instances as to not get cut off from others. It’s social media, but hiring middle managers to play politics.

What freedom is lost? You’re free to hop instances if you don’t like the admins. You’re free to stop using it if you don’t like it. You’re free to join de-federated instances if you like. It’s basically sub reddits that are containerized, but you can hop containerizations. You are always subject to some admin, but you have the freedom to choose which admin you want, which is pretty good.

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This really isn’t the place to argue about the circumstances leading up to the Fosstodon Drama. Please remain civil and on-topic or this topic will be closed.

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I really cannot believe this conversation has gone on this long.

That is really all there is to it

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That’s really missing the point. When X censors post, it is censorship. Just because it wasn’t ordered by the government doesn’t it is less censorship.When Facebook bans whistleblower it is also censorship.

Now this doesn’t mean we should outlaw this, Facebook has the free-speech right to ban certain POVs or individuals (editorial discretion). But it is still a problem.

Now the context of Fosstodon is different, but I still believe that 1% effectively decided that standard rules&procedures weren’t to be followed and launched what can be at best described as an aggressive pressure campaign on an independent instance.

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Ok, if there’s a rule on a social media that says, don’t say cow.

And you go ahead and say cow. And you get banned. Would you call that censorship? Because it clearly isn’t.

Some people would yell out of their lungs free speech, first amendment and censorship screaming, but it clearly is none of those. The XKCD sums it up perfectly.

Even if you could make the semantic argument about what the word ‘censorship’ mean, doesn’t mean that that argument should be done.

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Yes. I assume you think that removal due to a rule violation is not censorship? Well, I think it is.

How would you define censorship?

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I feel like we are bike shedding the word censorship, and it’s not that productive.

Imagine you walk into someone’s home. They say they don’t want any kerfuffle, and you decide to act out. The owner kicks you out of their house. You could say you are being “censored” in “their house” and you weren’t causing a kerfuffle really, or as most people would say, their house their rules. Even if they are “wrong”, it’s still their home. If you think it’s outlandish, don’t go to their house. If you want to play by your own rules, host your own party at your own place, but don’t be surprised if not all the neighbors decide to not go if you invited their enemies, even if they did nothing wrong.

For Mastadon, you don’t own the server, you are a guest of the server. Owners of the server decide who stays and who goes by whatever rules they want. If you don’t like the rules, don’t join. If you want to play by your own rules, run your own server, and it’s federated so you can do that. You have more freedom on Mastadon than if a centralized server bans you.

There is likely a sliding scale to severity and impact of censorship, but I see Mastadon cases on the lower end. Getting banned on a centralized service with no alternative sucks, as it means you’ve permanently lost connections if you’ve remained pseudoanonymous.

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Ok, if there’s a rule on a social media that says, don’t say cow.

And you go ahead and say cow. And you get banned. Would you call that censorship? Because it clearly isn’t.

Ok, if there’s a law in society that says, don’t say cow.

And you go ahead and say cow. And you get fined by the government. Would you call that censorship?

It clearly is censorship whether it’s done by the government or private parties, as the act of censorship does not depend on the government being the one doing it. Censorship is not inherently bad, you can even self-censor in ways. The important question is whether it violates your rights. You should have a right to not be censored by the government. I don’t know that you should necessarily have a right to not be censored by private parties on their platforms, but that is where the argument lies. Debating the nature of an act like this being censorship is a red herring, it obviously is, and only distracts from getting to the core of the issue.

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Yes, but I still don’t understand how you guys define censorship.

It is their home, they are not wrong.

Yes? Of course, being censored by a site where you can create infinite accounts is not the same as made “disappeared” by a dictatorship.

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So much has been written about this specific xkcd comic. Here’s one article about it:

Some additions:

TL;DR: everyone who quotes or posts this xkcd does not understand freedom of speech.

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We are all individuals, and probably have different interpretations. My interpretation of censorship is that it is suppressed expression with respect to an entity. Some may be defining low impactful censorship as not censorship at all. Some may define negligible censorship just as severe, a sort of binary approach. I take the sliding scale approach. To be specific, I consider the discussion of Mastadon drama low-impactful censorship. Not to say it isn’t worth talking about, but at this point it’s bike shedding definitions or a strange philosophical debate on freedom of speech.

I do not speak on behalf of the PG team nor other community members.

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Again, I have repeated over and over again that this mod violated no rule. That’s the issue, if he had then I would have had no problem.

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He violated the implicit hidden rule:

“Admins have the right to ban anyone they see fit for any reason at all without exception”

That rule exists even on this forum. Hell even Jonah could wake up and think “this user? Yeah let’s kick him out for funsies” (PS I don’t think he would do that). However, it’s seldom ever used as it heavily violates trust in the admin by the community. In this case, you don’t trust the admin, so it checks out. Those who don’t disagree or don’t care will stick around. And this cycle has been repeated since the IRC days.

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My perspective is perfectly worded in Overdrawn98901’s last 3 posts, especially the house analogy.

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Lack of enforcement of rules against executives due to their position does not mean anything executive wants/does is the rule. Otherwise the American president would not need Congress and Attorney general.

The administrator “can” do whatever they want, but it does not mean they are not violating their own rules or somehow setting up new ones based on their whims and fancies. Like Facebook can technically keep my account active and impersonate me, but it does not mean Facebook has an implicit rule created by mere action of the executive about being allowed to impersonate me.

Rules imply active consensus of the governed, are necessarily opt in, and are required to be explicit. Anything else is power drunk dictatorship, irrespective of if it benevolent or not.

An easy example to check if you are suddenly supporting censorship is to replace organization/individual in the case with alternatives you support/oppose based on the case.

For example, if cloudflare suddenly decided to block all internet traffic to any privacy advocacy organization, because:

  1. Their act of blocking somehow made it an implicit rule, and now their rules say so, so it is valid.
  2. And Privacy organizations can always ask users to route their traffic through different servers

Would that not be censorship? I mean CDNs are effectively like large mastodon servers that interoperate. People are free to choose their own, right?

Or even better, is Gmail suddenly allowed to ban accounts of the fundraising privacy communities in the inboxes of their users without any explanation because their “rules say so” without it being considered censorship? The user can always choose to reach their patrons on other platforms, can’t they? And their patrons can always switch providers with no friction, amirite?

Very weird hill to die on. Any user being prevented from seeing any content is by definition censorship. It can be used for good, it can be used for bad, but stop painting it as “not censorship”. Is the motto “Small mom and pop software is allowed to violate my deeply held principles, because only big tech angers me” or something?

Then whoever Jonah is would be violating community rules and their peers would do the necessary policing to stop them. Admin can do things, but it does not grant validity to their actions. See what WordPress drama is for an example.

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I think you’ve made a straw man of what I was saying.

Mastadon server admins aren’t the government lol. This is clearly philosophical discussion about censorship now and not just about a Mastadon server admin, so I’ll switch gears to explain myself at where you are thinking.

Peers couldn’t do jack shit by themselves alone technically. Given it’s a non profit, the board could see to him as unfit and boot him, and if the community complained loud enough to the board it could, so the “government” is the board.

Google is a corporation. If the corporation decided to ban users, then they run a chance of getting a vote of unfit to run board of investors. If Google banned you for any reason that could be censorship. Their TOS, among everyone else’s, censors what is and is not allowed in their platform. Given Google is a for profit company, and Gmail is likely significantly more likely to be used as critical software for day to day livelihood, there is likely more action to take. This is also higher impactful censorship as it can deeply worsen your livelihood. But it sucks fixing it. And despite years of such practice of bot suspension, even on YouTube with bogus takedowns, FTC drags its heels. At this point the action isn’t to yell at Google, yell at their next up boss: the US government. Or switch to a platform that doesn’t have this BS on it. But it also sucks since everyone is on Google products, like YouTube, and content isn’t distributed elsewhere as much.

But back on track, Mastadon server admins that are not official entities and corporations or non profits don’t answer to anyone else above them except government law. The FOSS software they are running comes with no warranty or TOS, so they set whatever is fair. As long as they aren’t breaking the law, they have the capability to ban whoever. You could try to lobby the government to better police Mastadon instances, but.. would you really want the government enforcing this kind of thing? Trust the Mastadon server admins, or trust the government to make laws that wouldn’t cripple free speech in the process of making it fair on Mastadon servers?

To reiterate, just because I’m arguing that those have the capability to arbitrarily ban does not imply it’s not censorship, but simply a matter of fact. Our voices on any platform ran by some other entity is at the whim of the entity running it. That entity can be the government, corporation, or just a person. Some of these entities answer to higher powers, like a board or the government. Unless there a rules precedent by answering entities, those running the platform will be free to do as they wish. At some point, you put your trust somewhere in something enforcing rules in a fair way to protect your voice on the platform that is not owned by you: server admin, board of directors, the government. You can try to make change at a higher entity to enforce better protections against lower entities, such as a board overseeing a non profit,

Further, if you are able to join the platform by shifting trust to yourself (self hosting Mastadon) you eliminate a necessary trust dependency which is great. Other cases (Gmail) you can laterally shift trust (ProtonMail). Worst case is no ability to shift trust (stuck in a Country and can’t leave). The ability to shift trust correlates with my perception of the impact of the censorship and ability to circumnavigate it.

Never said it wasn’t.

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This is a long post, but the point isn’t to say censorship can’t be a problem or isn’t a problem in these scenarios. I’m looking at it from a point of view to provide information that is actionable. I’m hoping the takeaways can be used in a threat model to asses how you share information. Being able to speak critically against regimes and what you believe is right is super important, and knowing how you can be silenced can be prepare you for what you need to do to ensure your messages aren’t stifled, or make change to secure that freedom for others. It’s not just whether it’s right or wrong, but rather it can and will happen. What you do when it happens, or before it happens, can make massive differences in your goals.

The debate whether Mastodon drama was right or wrong is not that interesting to me. I have my opinions on it but it’s mostly irrelevant and have chosen not to voice it for that reason.

How we can ensure our voices are heard and modeling to that knowing censorship will happen is what I’m interested in, and what PG is focused on in my opinion.

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Almost all of this is unrelated to what I said. You implied masto servers have implicit “don’t anger admins” rule, I disagree and showed why. I do not care what your definition of a well known term is, nor should you care how I define it, since both actions do not change the actual term.

For my opinion on TFA, I think Mastodon admins doing active censorship of opinions they do not like without following a valid, clearly defined rule based order, makes them as s*** as as other social platforms, and is a valid reason for people ditching the platform for something like Nostr.

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If this is the only thing you are debating, I’ll give a thought experiment.

I spool up a public Mastadon instance. I pay for the server, or we could even say I self host on hardware I own. Users join the instance, and I run a scheduled algorithm that bans 1 user per year with no recourse. Every 5 years I run a job that bans a random moderator.

Is it fair? Absolutely not, it’s a dumb thing to do. But who’s going to stop me? What law have I violated? I don’t answer to a board of trustees, investors, or anyone but the government. And the government says yeah it’s your server, or they say it’s against the law and fine me.

Or a more nuanced thought experiment: let’s say I’m the perfect admin and have upheld feee speech to the highest capability that I’m able to. I lose my job, run out of cash, and without warning the server running the instance dies, and I was irresponsible and took no backups - lost forever. I have now unintentionally censored everyone on my platform. Other than ask me to get it up and running again, or hand money my way, what is a user expected to do without the admin to get the same platform up and running again?

Google has sunset many of their services, and there is some page that has some list of everything they’ve killed. I’ve been on forums where the server admin said “yup I can’t keep the lights on, good luck and god speed”. I’ve also attempted to log onto an older forums to see a 404 and all of my prior peers lost to time. These aren’t unique problems to Mastadon, it’s the inherit problem of software running on someone’s else’s computer.

This is mostly my opinion as well.

The only tangible difference is that there is an option to switch instances and still be a part of the community, and laterally shift trust in server admins on the same platform. Centralized servers you get only one admin to trust. One to one vs one to many of platform to admins to trust. But the amount of drama from this is just multiplied and seems annoying to deal with as a user.

Still, the echo chambers will naturally form on all social media. Algorithms put you in your place, Mastadon administrators decide who you get to talk to. These suck because the power is not in the user to decide who they do and don’t see, whether explicitly by banning or implicitly through algorithms. The analogy of the house here weakens because these are public forums with multiple levels of power structure. It’s more like a Home Owners Association saying which other HOAs you can talk to, which is as stupid as it sounds. (Analogy breaks down as I think you can still read what other instances are up to, so no censored from a read-only standpoint jsut two way comms?). Analogies for federation are just weak, so I give up lol.

But if users have the freedom to choose who they do and don’t see via blocking by their choice, then at least the echo chamber is of their own design and not the powers that be. This is likely what you and I are both trying to get to agree on?

But there will always exist some person in charge of the server that decides what stays and goes by their sole decision alone, even if it was an isolated single instance, as they are the ones who have the SSH keys to the house and admin rights. Only way around this is to be an admin yourself and own your own home. With self hosting this is possible. With centralized services, not possible.

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